- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
Didn’t they roll out Manifest V3 to counter ad blockers already? The hell happened to that?
In order to fuck with everyone that is using browsers with built in ad blocking like brave and opera and people using firefox with ublock origin and custom clients
Different set of ideas. Plus, manifest V3 only cages chrome users. Firefox users never had to deal with that dumb bullshit
Now here’s a thought - what if the real workaround Google are using here is targeting only non manifest V3 users?
That would reduce the cost of doing this, since chrome users are already forced to swallow ads and could just be served as normal.
Firefox also implements manifest v3, just without the user-hostile restrictions.
Good to know.
It sounds like this would be easy for tools like SponsorBlock to label and skip segments as ads. However, it would be tough on smaller channels where people might not be labeling them as such.
Nah, it would be very hard. Presumably this only works if they can insert ads on the fly so they can cycle ads based on region and time. Static ads on videos would have been easy to do and easy to bypass.
If you don’t know how many ads there are or what they look like or how long they are it becomes very hard to do timeline nonsense to avoid them. It also seems like it’d be expensive to do at the scale Youtube needs it, but maybe they figured it out. That would suck. We’ll see, I suppose.
It’s not that hard at all. Twitch does this already, and they managed to make adblockers for that service.
I think Twitch’s solution is different, isn’t it? I don’t watch enough live to know the details, but I imagine in Youtube’s scenario they’re not surfacing any details about what’s an ad and what isn’t beyond embedding something in the video itself. Otherwise it’s pretty pointless. But hey, I guess I’m rooting for them doing this poorly.
A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference. But if you want to watch on 4k you’d need a connection that is pretty fast (although still in the range of what many people already have). However if they find a way to throttle the max speed on the server side for each client based on the quality there are watching, that would kill this possibility. You could block their cookies and throttling by IP on IPv4 would not be a possibility for them, but when everyone is on IPv6 idk.
But also processing the video on the fly to delete the difference in real time would be heavy, though at least I think it is possible to access the GPU with browser extensions via webGL but I am not sure if for HD and 4k that would be realistic for most people.
This assumes the exact same ads will be injected in the same time markers for every viewer, every time. I doubt any of these will be true.
Edit: I got this backwards…
A less expensive method could be to retrieve the subtitle twice, or the subtitle from a premium account and check where the time offsets are.
Usually ads have a significant volume above the content they sorround (which, by the way, is the thing annoys me the most), so you would only need to check audio for that, which is lot less load than processing the video.
Guessing you’d get a lot of false positives that way, but I like the ingenuity.
My kiddo watches stuff on youtube where the person on screen gets suddenly loud which could really mess with detecting ads by changes in volume. Apprently that is a widespread thing too.
A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference.
I don’t think that would work. It would be trivial for YT to put different ads in different time slots which would leave a differencing engine with no way to tell what was content and what was ad. However that thought gave me another one; the core problem is the ability to differentiate between content and ad. That problem is probably solvable by leveraging the NPU that everyone is so desperate to cram into computers today.
Nearly all of the YT content I watch, and it’s a lot, has predictable elements. As examples the host(s) are commonly in frame and when they’re not their voices are, their equipment is usually in frame somewhere and often features distinctive markings. Even in the cases where those things aren’t true an Ad often stands out because its so different in light, motion, and audio volume.
With those things in mind it should be possible to train software, similar to an LLM, to recognize the difference between content and ad. So an extension could D/L the video, in part or in whole, and then start chewing through it. If you were willing to wait for a whole D/L of the video then it could show you an ad free version, if you wanted to stream and ran out of ad-removed buffer then it could simply stop the stream (or show you something else) until it has more ad-free content to show you.
A great way to improve this would be by sharing the results of the local NPU ad detection. Once an ad is detected and its hash shared then everyone else using the extension can now reliably predict what that ad looks like and remove it from the content stream which would minimize the load on the local NPU. It should also be possible for the YT Premium users to contribute so that the hash of an ad-free stream, perhaps in small time based chunks, could be used to speed up ad identification for everyone else.
It wouldn’t be trivial but it’s not really new territory either. It’s just assembling existing tech in a new way.
sometimes the best move is not to play
How bout a nice game of chess?
Guess I’ll just be blocking YouTube.com on my DNS server and all subsequent Google URLs. I am fed up with their nonsense anyway.
- They don’t care because you aren’t watching ads anyways.
- Where are you going to watch videos now?
Hey Googoo, I ain’t gonna watch YouTube if it got ads
(I think that’s their goal, either ads or no watch)
Shhh. It is a huge “fuck you” to google to not use their bandwidth or servers for free. Not the actual goal of this.
They don’t want you if you’re not watching ads or paying money. They don’t want to give you bandwidth for free.
Damn, this could stop Invidious, Piped and Newpipe from being able to block ads.
It might take a lot more effort, but I don’t think this will be the end. Google is required by law to label ads as such, giving these tools an opportunity to detect and skip them.
What law (and jurisdiction) are you thinking of?
My understanding is that this would be covered with a blanket note on the page if it detects you aren’t running Premium.
In Germany, you can’t just show advertisement in a YouTube video without marking it. Same rules for sponsorship…
At the very least I’d say that UK/Germany would be a good bet. Though the idea of just plastering the note over the whole video might do the trick, considering that’s what some German channels already do if they are sponsored to stay on the safe side.
You still aren’t referencing a law. You are just saying you don’t like it.
I ANAL and am not a lawyer but: There ARE laws about saying if a video contains paid advertisement. That is why basically every single video on youtube has the “contains sponsored content” tag.
There is no law saying that the specific seconds of the video need to be tagged. Which makes sense. It has been a minute since I watched network TV but I don’t recall giant “AD” on my screen any time Hikaru Shida wasn’t.
Germany has the “Medienstaatsvertrag” §8.3, which requires advertisements to be easily recognizable as such and also adequately separated through audio or visual cues.
I do recall a giant “Werbung” screen ahead of all a-blocs on TV.
Is there a loophole where they could delay the ad marking like 5 seconds into a longer ad so you’d have to watch at least 5 seconds before an extension can detect it? Is the law specific about it having to be marked as an ad for the entire duration?
It will be after the inevitable lawsuit happens about 0.0002 seconds after they fully roll this out.
That would mean running an unmarked ad for five seconds, which would create an interesting legal question. But YouTube also buffers content a good chunk of upcoming content, so there’s enough upcoming video material to check.
Lol this would mean that every website running a looped video in the bg will now haved ads play. Nice.
That could also make them okay with those existing, since they’ll now play ads. Third party clients wouldn’t be such a threat anymore to their bottomline, and people can get the privacy benefits of going through those proxies.
people can get the privacy benefits of going through those proxies.
Exactly. This is why it will still be a threat to data hungry Google.
As is, I can’t make it through a 30 sec ad. I will peace out 100% of the time.
I always wondered why they haven’t been doing it from the start, seams like it is not as simple as I imagine.
People will take it, there is no other option and G is working hard not to allow another video platform.
Problem is ads they are playing are awful and loud. We will make way to silent them and black them out, it is not hard.
Bigger problem is content they are pushing is getting bad and is pushing creators into burnout. And I don’t want to see videos companies are creating, but want individual contributions.
They probably had thos ready to go a long time ago. It is just heavier on their servers so it costs more. Likely they had a number in mind about how many users would have to be using ad-blockers before rolling this out, to balance costs.
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching. Except on extremely rare occasions. I don’t need it badly enough to deal with that.
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching.
…
Except on extremely rare occasions.
I’m sorry, I just find it funny that you walked back the “I’m done with Youtube” claim in the very next sentence.
Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.
I don’t think it can be completely avoided, but it can definitely be trimmed down a hell of a lot. As an example, if you watch YouTube for an hour a day and they make a change like this and you start watching it for 10 minutes a week, that’s a serious reduction.
Same.
I’m excited for YouTube to end my YouTube addiction lol.
Please, Google. Do it. Dare ya.
I genuinely spend too much time on that site, but I haven’t seen an ad in years. If that changes, then I guess I’ll have to change, too.
I went to watch a diy video at work with chrome and was like WTF is this shit, the ads were so bad I walked back across the shop to get my phone and pull up the same video and started watching it before the video even started on the computer. Who in the hell can actually watch shit like that? It’s insane.
As we learned from the reddit app changes, the ending of Netflix account sharing, etc etc the people who will take this action are few enough not to matter. Regretfully.
Each of these exoduses moves the bar a little bit. We only lose if we give up. Eventually the bad decisions will catch up to them, as long as we keep pushing.
It does matter because it inspires newer platforms that aren’t as shitty like Lemmy, PixelFed, Mbin, and PeerTube.
We’re about to have a great big shattering of the internet and I’m all for it. Collating the pieces will be a pain in the ass for a couple years but some handful of nerds out there blessed by the spirit of Ritchie will create a tool for it, and what’s left of our world will be a better place for it.
This one’s on my bingo card.
Question, if a square on your bingo card is titled, “collapse of society,” can I still use it for this?
I’ve been just recommending Lemmy out there as the new internet, which us what this feels like to me, IS like the old internet again!
I don’t know about you, but what I learned is we’ll build our own Youtube with blackjack and hookers.
Here is the thing though. Those of us that are willing to try advanced projects and talk about them, we’re the real influencers.
YT has chosen to pander to the children and adolescent of mind, likely because those in charge are of a similar depth. The platform will be like cable television eventually; totally irrelevant.
I’d like to believe that to be true
That doesn’t matter to me. When a company does shit like this, I won’t use it and will actively avoid it. People can do what they want and if they want to be abused constantly that’s on them. I don’t really care. I make my choice and I stick with it. Change will never happen with companies, they don’t care unless they actually get charged more then the money they make from their abuse and we all know that will never happen .
People will accept anything to not be inconvenienced in a purely consumer society.
It’s Idiocracy
Bruh, in Idiocracy, they at least wanted to do the right thing, even if they were too dumb to do so.
How sad is it that Idiocracy overestimated people?
Well I don’t know about the Reddit stuff not mattering—I occasionally still check on it for a couple of niche communities and the Reddit I used to enjoy has basically died, it’s like the place is filled with angry idiots now. Those people were always there before but usually buried under a load of downvotes where you could mostly ignore them; they now seem to be a majority of those left contributing over there.
They killed the golden goose in scaring off enough of the people contributing most interesting posts and comments (who were doing it entirely for free!) that the lunatics have taken over and shat on everything
Everyone I’ve spoken to about it has noted that it’s become a very different place. I’ll still use it for reviews and getting tips for serious things like privacy and some basic DIY. But a lot of that advice will be obsolete in a couple years and very few people are replenishing it. Who’s going to give a shit about the best home theater setups of 2023 in two years?
Ngl, I’m torn on this because I’m honestly not sure I could stop using YouTube.
I hate ads with a burning passion, though, so we’ll see which wolf wins out there.
If i can’t get around this using something like SponsorBlock, I feel like I’ll probably just set up some kind of pipeline to download videos and remove the ads myself (maybe using AI if it’s that bad) and just serve them over Jellyfin or something. Gonna be a pain, though.
I wouldn’t particularly like it, that’s for sure. But I would ultimately just bite the bullet and do it. At some point, you’re just pushed too far and it’s just not worth dealing with.
Hope folks will actually stick to claims such as this when the time comes
Don’t get why they don’t just embed them in the middle like a few growing and actually good channels I watch do with their content.
I just fast-forward but they’re embedded in the content so there’s not really a way to “block” them but I don’t mind skipping if im not interested like 45-60 secs.
Ads are the worst at the start and more tolerable in the middle, altho that is reversed for music where the content needs to maintain continuity
Ads are the worst regardless of where they are. I have never once given a shit about whatever garbage they try to push. I don’t give a rats ass about them, their ads or anything they do. Provide a service and thats it. I actively avoid companies that try to shove ads in my face. I basically buy NOTHING anymore because of it and my bank account is SOOOO much better off these days. Constantly saving tons of money because of my fuck you companies attitude.
I am experiencinf this. The ads are unskippable, and they replace the video until they end
OK, can I be real about this for a second?
I’m torn about Youtube ad stuff. Genuinely.
On the one hand the ads suck, we have a good way to bypass them and I certainly don’t want to watch Youtube videos if the ads are unskippable.
On the other hand, if I’m being honest I watch more Youtube than Netflix or Amazon Prime and I sure give those guys money for a subscription. If I counted the cost per watched minute, Youtube Premium would make way more sense than a bunch of subs I do pay.
But I also don’t want to watch a Youtube that is a paid service. That was never the point. The reason I engage with it so much is it’s supposed to be UGC, not TV.
So yeah, torn. Youtube is very weird and the relationship we all have with it is super dysfunctional, creators and viewers alike. We made a very strange future and now we have to deal with it.
The deciding factor for me is how little of the money goes to creators, and how arbitrarily Google twiddles the content guidelines. If I’m going to pay a subscription for the category of content on YouTube, I’ll pay for Nebula and Dropout so that I know my money is actually making it to the people I like.
I feel really bad for smaller creators because they spend so much of their time on the algorithm treadmill just trying to get more views. There’s a channel size threshold where you really have to work more than you get out and I see a lot of people getting burned out trying to make a living from yt.
Then clearly it’s not a smart choice to make videos and have them uploaded to a scummy place like YouTube.
Their issues are not my problem. I have my own stresses at work, you don’t see me bitching about it to strangers online.
Don’t like your job or the terms your forced to adhere too, quit.
So… because you had a bad they should not even attempt to pursue their dreams and make art/“art”?
Also… I really hope your job is a perfect wonderland with no ethical or moral complications. Otherwise, it is your fault for working there instead of somewhere else, obviously.
We live in a late stage capitalistic hellscape and still snipe each other constantly. Everybody would rather fuck over everyone else than show any degree of solidarity.
Not once did I say they shouldn’t persue anything…if I’m presented with a contract from work which I don’t agree with,I’m looking for a new job…
Also… I really hope your job is a perfect wonderland with no ethical or moral complications. Otherwise, it is your fault for working there instead of somewhere else, obviously.
It would be my fault for staying somewhere that is objectively bad for me…yes…it’s not your problem, it’s mine…
Why is it the customers responsibility to fix the companies problem for the employees…explain.
The ads google shows have been consistently proven to still often contain malware or scams, to the point the federal government recommends you use an adblocker to protect yourself. Google refuses to do anything to stop this. Don’t bitch about how hard artists have it when they demand you support criminal enterprise and subject yourself to online stalking or identity theft in order to prop up their hopes and dreams. That ain’t solidarity, you numbfuck, that’s capitalist exploitation of the masses.
That’s why we should kill it
I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.
YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free
Because Google chokes the market. There could be plenty of other competitors if Google charged for it like other companies would. Google subsidized YouTube with the rest of their company’s profits, not to provide us a free platform because they’re so nice, but to prevent competition. As long as YouTube was free, no other companies would be able to keep up with the costs, therefore no one else would enter the market.
If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.
If google “charged for it like other companies would” then youtube would not exist. The ONLY companies that can handle that volume of data are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft: The three big cloud service providers. And Microsoft noped the fuck out and Amazon have some strong purges on most streams.
And… there were other sites that tried to compete with youtube. Those of us who are old enough will remember subscribing to Rooster Teeth or Giant Bomb but watching the videos on youtube because “the site player is shit”. Let alone all the general purpose video sites that either became dirtier than a truck stop lizard who barebacks constantly or became liveleak and was all about Faces of Death and revenge porn… and then went out of business.
Videos is INCREDIBLY expensive. That is why the current rise of sites like Nebula and Gun Jesus’s site and Corridor Crew’s site all paywall watching anything. Because free video would cost way too much.
If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.
So… you actively dislike a model where you can choose to watch videos in exchange for watching an ad and instead insist upon paying to watch anything. AND still don’t want to pay to watch anything because Youtube Premium lets you do that anyway.
Even if it’s a good product, you shouldn’t support the monopolist.
I used to whitelist yt on my ad block because a I know portion of it goes to the creators. Then yt took advantage of me by adding more and more intrusive ads. Now I support creators directly whenever I can.
That’s a fair point, I do pay for subs in some smaller sites. A lot of the time I still watch the Youtube version because… well, that way the creators get paid twice and I’m probably already on YT, but still.
The problem is that the patreon model inherently only supports the big creators. Many of whom only BECAME big because they had alternative funding sources for so long.
For example: Giant Bomb more or less imploded a few years back. Nextlander (Alex, Brad, and Vinny), Remap (Formerly Waypoint but Patrick Klepek, Rob Zachny, Cado Contreras) , and Jeff Gerstmann (hmmm? I wonder who that could be) and even Giant Bomb (Fandom) are doing great. But people like Abby Russel or Renata Price very much immediately fell into that “Well, I like her but she is one person and I am already blowing 20 or 30 bucks a month on patreons…” hole.
And we see that on youtube/twitch. Creators will mostly not care and then suddenly do a year long subathon because they understand… they are in that threshold where they make just enough off of ad and sponsor revenue that they can just keep their resume updated but are fucked if Youtube/twitch change ANYTHING. They need to get to that threshold where people will subscribe to a patreon.
And the “Well, I will just subscribe to the creators I think are worth it” inherently fucks them over.
I’ll add on that, for all his many flaws, Ludwig Ahlgren (?) has done a lot of good discussion on this topic. Because as twitch and youtube stop giving streamers giant signing bonuses, it gets harder and harder for the next crop of big streamers to come into existence. Because if there isn’t money to get people out of that O(100) concurrents mid-tier… yeah.
100% agree. I follow a few content creators who include a Cash App or Paypal information in the description box. They don’t demand cash** because they do it for the love of what they do, and don’t demand subscriptions or anything else. If I have an extra dollar, I send it. I’m guessing this either isn’t their only revenue stream or do well enough that it is. If everyone who is appreciative would do a dollar or few donations, maybe it is a livble wage, with or without youtube’s payment?
It’s worth paying for but not if it includes DRM, proprietary software and preferably not giving money to Don’t Be Evil company.
The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don’t want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.
People make up this fantaasy land where art should be done with no compensation to be pure. Which ignores that the vast majority of art in human history was either made by the independently wealthy or as a “patron” system where… an independently wealthy person paid an artist to make them look good.
And that even extends to the modern day. People get angry about “nepo babies” but… it takes a lot of time and money to refine your music to a meaningful degree. The garage bands that get discovered playing at a local bar are VERY much the exception and almost everyone universally considers their best albums to be the first couple after they got signed by a label and could drill down and refine it.
Youtube and the like are basically the first time that “the everyperson” could make art for a living. Unfortunately… that means they need to get paid. Ads are of very questionable use. Youtube Premium is almost universally praised by any creator who is willing to talk about it. But we need some way of paying those mid tier creators who are popular enough to do it for a living but not popular enough to get 120 bucks a year from their fans to upload MAYBE one video (looking at you Michael Reeves).
Early youtube with the drywall backgrounds in skits or just random bits of life were what made it fun. The fact that the majority of the content now means it is just another streaming service with an expected income for someone instead of being something they did in their spare time. The switch from amateur to professional content ruined youtube.
The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don’t want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.
That’s why I don’t use Sponsorblock: it hurts the wrong people.
But I’ll still block the ads because to hell with Google and their monopoly. I’m only interested in supporting the artists directly, Google can get fucked.
I think Google created a model that is unsustainable from the get go, because they have infinite money glitches and used this to monopolize the market and lure in creators.
It could be sustainable for non-premium users if the amount of ads was similar to what it was, idk, 10 years ago, 14 years ago. However back then they were not making nearly enough to cover their costs and pay creators handsomely.
I like to support creators but I also liked youtube better when it was mostly common people doing their thing however the fuck they wanted, instead of this hyper-profissionalized tv-wannabe corporate channels that grow to be mammoths.
Problem is, we accepted the weird assumption that successful content creators on the internet are entitled to be millionaires, or to make a lot more money per month than say, a successful person in a common profession. If content creators got into youtube with the mindset that at best they’d live a life that is middle class instead of trying to become rich, then youtube would need a lot less money than it needs today, and content would go back to being more relaxed not mega professional and extremely polished videos from channels that employ dozens of people.
But alas, I guess successful video creators on youtube are supposed to be rich and deserve to earn more money than a doctor, and youtube is supposed to be a viable source of income for mega corporations that used to be mainly TV and other traditional media but then freaked out about losing people to the internet.
That’s what I thought at first but who am I kidding, if content creators got paid less youtube would still be very popular and google would still do whatever the fuck they want and shove more ads in it anyways. And also, paying top creators so much money is another way to prevent competition, creators won’t choose another platform if they can’t match the pay.
I pay for YouTube Premium. I get a lot of value from it, and streaming video isn’t cheap. I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to think they should provide it for free.
Yeeeah, but my issue with that is they generated the expectation that it’d be free by using their investment money to muscle out smaller competitors. There was a time where Youtube was the biggest of a set of UGC video sites and some of the others were competitive. Now it’s the only real alternative.
So from that perspective they made their bed, now they sleep in it.
Yeeeah, but my issue with that is they generated the expectation that it’d be free by using their investment money to muscle out smaller competitors.
All of YouTube’s competitors were doing the same thing, use ads to subsidize free video hosting. It just happened to be that YouTube was the survivor. If there was competition, it would likely have the same business model that YouTube has. Spotify may be building a YouTube competitor based on the same model.
Yep, that’s also fair. Google is the leftovers from the “let them fight” approach to venture capital. Now we have a monopoly on many areas and nobody’s left to do anything when Godzilla comes to visit.
Oh sure servers do cost money but Google wants to have their cake and eat it to with the creators that make people actually want to use the site despite all their bullshit. Changing standards of what is and isn’t not acceptable coming from the top has made every creator dance and squirm to escape the very real eventuality of having weeks of work mean nothing. Google doesn’t respect the people making the product they are selling so I refuse to respect the bill they try to send me
I don’t give a shit if it’s reasonable anymore.
Google has done enough shit over the years, ruined enough services, some of them paid services, and continually harmed content creators with their trash algorithm, all the while hosting hate on their platform, that I don’t give a damn what’s fair to them anymore.
They won’t get a penny from me ever again. I’ll continue to find every way of accessing any content on that platform that I choose, without ads, and without paying them, and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or reason. It is entirely, 100%, because fuck Google.
And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.
I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.
So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.
If needed, I would spend 40 times the time and effort to watch one of their videos without a single ad than it would take to just watch their ads with the video I want to see sprinkled in.
If you’re not actively blocking connections to their servers (by any number of means) it doesn’t matter whether you consciously give them money or not.
There is so much third party tracking in apps and websites that it’s really got to be at the network level. They make bank by tracking you and selling that data for profit.
I’ve been Google-free for months now and so far the only inconvenience has been ReCAPTCHAs not loading, but that’s limited to just a handful of websites that I don’t care enough to use in the first place.
Sponsor block has entered the chat
Problem is the ads are not widely rolled out so user timestemps would be off depending if there’s an ad OE not
I don’t get why so many people begrudge YouTube for trying make money. They serve up 5TB of video data every second. Somebody’s got to pay for all of that. They know ads suck, that’s why they sell no ad subscriptions.
YouTube makes 8 billion per quarter selling ads. I think they will be able to eat tonight.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the numbers. This is correct, they make 9.2 billion per quarter from ads and 10.7 billion from subscriptions. I can’t find expenses per-segment, but in 2023 their total “Cost of revenues” was 37 billion. I doubt everything other than youtube costs less than 17 billion, so they’re definitely making a profit.
Source: https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf
Google used investor funding to create youtube at a loss for years to crush any competition, so we should be mad that there isn’t an easy option to just switch to a comparable alternative.
Ok, but equally any competition would need to be profitable earlier, you can’t complain you got a service operating at a loss which is now operating at a profit when that’s exactly what any alternative you’d feasibly switch to would do
Google used investor funding to create youtube at a loss for years to crush any competition
There is a difference between needing to operate at a loss when first starting a business because it is necessary and using funding to prop yourself up so much that is undermines all of the competition. Like the difference between being a very successful business and abusing a monopoly.
Their ads not just suck. They are oftentimes sexist, fraudulent, disgusting and a huge privacy concern.
