The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
Why should I reward that by paying them?
/s
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
Seems awfully convenient.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.
You are absolutely on to something. I think the seemingly random length of ads makes them feel somewhat more jarring to me. I also hate how sometimes the ads are just randomly interjected into a video. I know creators can control this to some degree, but older videos seem to suffer more.
I have had ads on Youtube that were hours long. Obviously, at that length, they can be skipped. I know have some kind of 'trauma response' that when I watch Youtube on a computer while laying down, AFK, I have to have my wireless mouse in close proximity in case one those long ads appears. If I could predict the intervals in which the ads occurred and for how long, then I would probably just let them run and tune them out of my mind.
Regardless, I swear Youtube serves me such long ass ads as a punishment sometimes. Sadly, my suspicion is supported by extremely weak evidence and confirmation bias. I'll just say this... Sometimes when I get served the same ad too many times, I report the ad for something like being offensive, inappropriate, or whatever. The ads seem to never come back, but I swear within a day or two, I start getting longer ads -- even movie-length ads. I have also reported ads if they happen to be something like +30s and unskippable. This makes the ad instantly dismiss (or it used to, at least).
While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.
The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.
In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.
I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.
I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.
I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.
The browser is my agent, just like my screenreader is.
Google is to blame here - and I'm saying that as an author who does advertise there because of marketshare.
I appreciate the fact that you brought up the possibility of paying for ad-free content, but frankly I don't buy this. You can either see 100% of the content for free with some mildly annoying ad content mixed in from time to time, or you can pay them a pretty small amount to not see the annoyances.
Google is a for-profit company trying to sell a product that you find valuable. Not everything they do is squeaky-clean, but this offering couldn't be much fairer, really.
As much as youtube can waste time, I also feel like I’ve been given genuine value by certain people on the site, so I wouldn’t say it’s simply wasting time.
If you don’t like ads pay for the service. You don’t deserve content for free.
If one's patreon did have perks associated with it, then I would be more inclined to 'donate', as well.
It’s crazy how bad and mistargeted it all is.
Google can surely figure this out and still turn a profit on Youtube. Greed stops them from doing this.
They deliver targeted advertising due to the information they have. That's the model. They make literally zero dollars a year selling personal information.
If it's that easy, why has nobody done it?
(Hint: governments don't want to run YouTube, probably shouldn't run YouTube, and nobody else wants or can afford the immense costs that come with running YouTube.)
Not paying for it because it might become bad some time in the future is not a great argument.
Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps
The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly
There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.
So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.
Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...
You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.
Most governments operate a postal service. Why then should governments not provide bare bones email and video services? You have government agencies using Zoom and similar. The analogy would be discontinuing the USPS and sending official government post via a wholly unregulated Fedex. It's absurd.
The problem here is that we're already only having this debate because people refuse to pay, even when what they're paying with is functionally intangible (i.e. their letting an ad play on their PC for 30 seconds.
So any model which relies on people physically paying real actual money* is doomed to fail to begin with because you're not solving the issue.
Why people say this? You can either not use Youtube or pay for premium. Nobody is forcing you to download hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of video?
If they want to sell a service in exchange for payment, then they are free to do so. For legal reasons they are not doing that. The explicit legal definition used by lawyers and politicians is that advertisement supported services are not a payment, but an optional content that the viewer might or might not look at. This optional aspect of advertisement is how laws distinguish between it and a sale. From a legal perspective there is a difference between selling a sample product for 1 cent, compared to giving it away for free. One is a sale, and the other is a free giveaway, and thus they are under different legal definitions.
There are similar legal theory for when a platform should be held legal responsible their products, for their advertisement, and when local laws applies and how. News papers, radio, and TV has each been forced to handle local advertisement laws and regulation, and there is a reason why most had departments to curate which advertisement they could publish. They also get held responsible if they break local law.
Their story reveals that all these people hating on YouTube are actually just selfish children doing mental gymnastics.
Their savior came, disrupted YouTube pretty deeply, then went bankrupt.
I’ve tried cancelling my subscription, thinking it would make me watch less YouTube. I didn’t last 48 hours. The ads were too annoying and I signed back up.
Zoom and email are not natural monopolies.
There's also an issue with the payment model. Creating an account, sharing a bunch of personal info, and subscribing on a recurring basis is entirely different from the USPS model where I walk into the post office and pay a one time fee in cash to get my letter where it needs to go. I suppose an analogous service might charge $/gb/mo paid up front without requiring an account. Like catbox.moe except paid.
These "rules" weren't voted upon by either creators or consumers. Most of them are arbitrary and capricious. Features implemented by YouTube, like showing where people skip to the most, are also an attempt to cut into sponsorship dollars, was that within the "rules"?
Let me be clear: Following the "rules" under these monopolistic circumstances is the philosophy of cowardice in the face of power and doesn't hold as much intellectual merit as you might think.
Of the various streaming platforms I subscribe to, I probably get the most value from YouTube.
Though I wish there was an option to get it for less without YouTube Muisc, that didn’t also lead to ads on YouTube itself. I was excited when I saw Lite announced, then I read the details and my excitement quickly faded and turned into disappointment.
Seriously, go see what happened to them.
Turns out everyone complaining about YouTube, when given the option to jump to a new fresh user focused service, still blocks ads and refuses subscriptions.
This thread, and the hundreds like it, are why people nope the fuck out when considering creating a YT competitor.
Nebula might have a shot at breaking the stranglehold, and I support them, but it remains to be seen if they can do it. A lot of content creators would have to move there, and there's a lot of random stuff (recorded lectures, video instructions, music, etc) that probably never will because it doesn't fit their premium original content model.
Most users are regular non-tech folks who are (unknowingly perhaps) well tracked and profiled. They (like my family members) get normal big name ads like you see on TV.
I'll wait.
Because US citizens would benefit? Preventing outsiders from incidentally benefiting isn't a constitutional mandate (yet).
Would you oppose an anti-pollution measure even though it would also provide cleaner air to neighbouring countries?
At the very least they could guarentee that YouTube Premium tracking doesn't get used for profiling later. I think that would be a very acceptable solution but they don't offer it.
You pay but you're still snooped on.
Nebula has no shot. It has a <1% conversion rate. Creators make almost nothing from it compared to their yt channel.
My point is that the fundamental problem with the Internet and Internet services is the users entitlement to free things. The Internet would be a dramatically better place if it worked for users and not for advertisers. Vid.me was dramatically better, but it died learning that 99% of people in threads like this is full of shit and actually just entitled.
I find it hard to justify paying for 2 music streaming services, so I cancelled Apple Music, because I'm paying for YouTube Music through Premium. However, I don't like it, so I'm back to manually managing a local music library in Apple's Music app. This is probably a better long-term approach than renting access to a music library on a monthly basis.
I’m receptive to various arguments here that invoke power differentials, pragmatism, even deliberately breaking the terms of a service to help affect change, etc. I’m not necessarily someone who always follows the rules, and even though I do pay for YouTube I don’t view it as a real moral failing to use the free service with an ad blocker turned on
The comment I responded to didn’t have any of that, it just boiled down to “I can do it and they can’t stop me, so they can suck a dick”. Maybe not the end of the world when it’s directed towards Alphabet, but I hope that mindset doesn’t extend to everyone they interact with
Also remember that legitimate creators keep being demonetised for no reason because AI moderation has a brainfart and no human is in charge.
And then there's the clusterfuck around malicious copyright strikes made for bad faith reasons by non-owners.
With public infrastructure there's at least some nominal possibility of democratic accountability - not so much in the US, large parts of which are pathologically delusional about public infrastructure as a concept, but it should be an option in countries with saner and more reality-based policies.
I’m just glad others feel this way.
Why the hell can’t I have my own spam free email account from the post office? Because the ads, the precious ads.
You only use this argument for Youtube content creators because it's trivial to avoid payment and then backsplain it with unique moral justifications.
The whole "YouTube music free!" is just marketing and a music focused app wrapped on YouTube.
YouTube premium without YouTube music would be pretty much the same cost.
> Read up on vid.me, which broke YouTube's "monopoly" back in 2016-2017
Okay, sounds interesting.
> May 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google has persuaded a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from video platform Rumble (RUM.O), opens new tab accusing the technology giant of illegally monopolizing the online video-sharing market.
I see what I expected: that google cheated and got away with it. Where is the betrayal?
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-defeats-rumb...
USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).
You see the content you choose to click on. Should my premium membership mean that Youtube blocks me from viewing Superbowl commercials the day after? Or movie trailers? Premium is simply paying Youtube so that Youtube will not show you Youtube's ads.
I've been thinking about it for a long time (years). I don't really have the right words for my thoughts, and I think charity is probably closest.
But yes, at this point, I think that many "free" services should be charities to prevent them from being corrupted by rugpulls.
This also reminds me of the Idle Detection API they tried adding in Chrome. [1]
[0] https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/a...
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/idle...
even if I did pay for a subscription, they would find a way to jack up the price or insert new ads while collecting my data. The landscape isn't competitive enough. People like this idea that "if you don't pay for the product, you are the product" but it's not complete. Just because you pay for a product doesn't mean you're not the product. We used to pay for cable TV, only to still get ads. We used to pay for windows licenses, now with ads!
I will continue to waste their bandwidth while blocking ads until they hopefully go bankrupt and get replaced by some bittorrent-like p2p solution.
WHAT?? This (and similar anecdote in parent comments) is completely shocking, I had no idea this was a thing. All ads I get on YouTube are blue chip companies or (big budget) movie trailers...seeing a porn still in an ad on YouTube would floor me
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...
> Per user, creators usually get a LOT more from premium than ads. If I divide my monthly views by my monthly unique viewers, I get about 1.9 cents per viewer.
> The way premium works is, first youtube takes a cut--I believe it's 45%. The remaining amount is divided among all the creators you watch based on how much you watch them. I believe that's based on view time.
> So if the YT premium price is $13.99, the creators get 55% or $7.69. You would have to watch 405 different creators for each one to get 1.9 cents.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/16c80eb/how_do_you...
My computer is my property, it will do what I ask it to just like my refrigerator, my tv, and my paper and pencil. I will remove corporate logos from my belongings, and entirely fail to look at the advertising that comes in my mail box. And if google tries to tell my computer to show me advertising, I am _entirely_ within my rights to tell my computer not to.
Metrocop: She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)#The_B...
“What goes around comes around,” shouldn’t be surprising.”
Maybe YouTube puts us into different ad groups, or something like that.
So, from my perspective, YouTube ads have an opposite effect... when I see something advertised on YouTube, I automatically suspect that it is some kind of scam.
YouTube premium would not be any cheaper without YouTube music. It's a marketing gimmick.
I don't know if you are confused, but Vid.me was a totally different platform than whatever Rumble is...
The fact is free YouTube is only possible with ads, and potentially only with the extremely detested ads we're talking about here. The other major UGC video platform (Twitch) is not profitable.
Broadcast TV and even cable or fixed content library streaming is A LOT cheaper to run than something like YouTube. I don't mean purely machine-wise, I also mean in terms of salaries, and those do matter to keep the service up and running, not to mention growing
Being unable to accept critical comments and just brush them off with "just don't watch" is just really not appropriate. You can also just not reply to comments on HN when you don't have anything that contributes the conversation, but yet you chose not to do that yourself.
The whole point of Nebula is NOT to become another YT, it's meant to be curated source of media.
American courts have had no difficulty in holding that TOS are binding IF done correctly. It wouldn't be prudent to imagine that YouTube's lawyers don't know how to do that.
Santa Clara Law professor Eric Goldman knows approximately everything about this subject. He posts frequent updates on his blog.
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/category/licensingcont...
I also let the hour long ads play when I'm holding my phone (just to mess with the algorithm) so maybe that is just my experience.
You can always pay for it and not have any ads .
There shouldn’t be an expectation that a free service should confirm to any standards ? Why should a service be free and of high quality in its free variant ?
If Google refuses to offer a paid version or made it unaffordable then it would be different , but the paid version is pretty affordable with lower pricing in countries with less purchasing power
But at the same time, these yt creators are relying on google ads . Which are intrusive, doesn't acknowledge and care about privacy. If you turn on ad privacy, you see gambling, scams ,crypto ads. How is that responsible? You as a creator is ok with getting money and ok with indirectly making people addicted, fall for scams? That's not right.
I am ok with sponser ads and am against sponsorblock. They are not tracking me, violating my privacy and telling me about new products .
youtube subscription doesn't stop youtube for collecting you data and use it for ads during other google service .
Google already makes untold amounts of money from spying on me. Yesterday I started seeing new recommended videos related to a show I watched on my private jellyfin server.
Google spies on me everywhere, tracks me across the open internet and my local network, then sells this data to whoever for God knows how much money and you want to tell me I owe Google even more money?
Buddy you need some perspective.
For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly.
Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.
We're already halfway there with ad blocker blockers anyway; once the sum of "lost revenue due to collateral damage of blocked users on old/non-DRM-supporting browser versions" and "increased revenue due to finally defeating ad blockers" is positive, it'll happen.
> if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.
Because it's cheaper to do so. They can't offer a competitive rate because USPS is eating the cost in that case. To be clear I don't think that's a bad thing it just needs to be pointed out that if USPS didn't exist Fedex (or whoever) would deliver but would charge a much higher price to the person shipping the package.
You are the one who brought up natural monopolies and I'm not sure why. Private couriers exist yet the government still finds it worthwhile to run a public one. I asked why the same should not be true of digital communication platforms for email and video. Recall that the context of my original reply was a government operated youtube.
But what's with the weirdly aggressive second part of your message?
I have paid but I still see ads.
You can have only so many channels, so they has to be acceptable to plurality of people over whom you are transmitting and therefore needs content(and ad) moderation and acceptable standards.
YouTube is not a shared public good, does not have a technical limitation for another provider with different flavor to compete.
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More comparable is Cable TV. No content restrictions apply to Cable TV, this is why HBO doesn't have to censor by blurring/bleeping even common swear words as CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox do, or follow regulations around what kind of content can be shown on prime time versus late night or allocate time for just news.
There are plenty of low quality cable channels and they make money(i.e. enough people want them) like reality TV, pure telemarketing channels, televangelists or porn or anything in between, there are no standards that they need to comply whatsoever.
While the confusion is understandable, few people actually get their TV over airwaves, for most consumers it looks like it is all cable or IP these days, the comparison is not valid.
Expecting standards in a shared public limited good does not compare against expecting it from YouTube.
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[1] Meaning AM/FM stations. Modern Radio (i.e. Podcasts) or Satellite services (SiriusFM etc) can do whatever they want.