YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads

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I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.

The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! ... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.

Ads will probably stop me from watching YouTube completely. The huge surge of ads at some point was what stopped me from using Instagram.

Unstoppable ads are what stopped m from using twitch.

The occasional times I need to use Twitch I either VPN to Romania or use S0undTV.

The majority of of people using it will most definitely take it lying down as they're most likely not tech savvy enough to install a browser extension on a laptop if the only thing on the page was a large red install button.

That's why I specified the community, as in the more tech savy folks that would care about this, because I know that the wider public is surprisingly tech illiterate

And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.

I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.

Oh, bundling. I thought societies were pleased to get rid of cable bundling, why is it coming back?

Because Netflix didn't dismantle the capitalism machine.

Capitalism can never fully disrupt itself. It's always cyclical. If bundling eventually made it more money, then it will eventually return. If the response to that is to innovate something that gets around that form of bundling, then that "disrupts" the market, in the short term, only for the market to settle back to bundles.

Because as long as the idea makes more money in a capitalistic society, it will never die.

But you can listen to YouTube music for free too, no?

I think so, but with ads just like the free tier of Spotify.

Does Ublock Origin not work for it anymore? And for phones, there are alternative apps - I use InnerTune.

I use ublock on my phone as well. I set it up to play through FF and never access the YouTube app. Did it for my gf when she complained of ads, and then did it for my self it was so easy.

I don't remember the last time I saw an ad between us.

I don't watch YT from phone much, but I find Newpipe for videos to be a better experience than browser (it is also much lighter). And similarly Innertune for music.

You're not paying to not see ads. You're paying for the content on the platform. You can pay either by watching ads or by paying for premium.

Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.

You’re not paying for the content, you’re paying for and-free access to the content.

This is not true, creators get paid for Premium user views.

Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.

This is not true. If you're a free user they're getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you're a premium user they're getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.

Source

Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There's a good reason Lemmy doesn't have videos.

It is expensive, but it's hard to quantify that expense for a cloud provider like Google. They're liable to use their market prices for cloud services to justify the "cost" when they want to make it look more expensive than it is. They're already building a cdn for all their other services as well, so YouTube's cost is baked into that.

Reddit, by comparison actually pays for cloud hosting for all it's video services and so pays out the ass.

TIL I should be posting hundreds of AI-generated long form video essays to reddit.

Serving the videos is where they really get hit, not necessarily storing them.

There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.

peertube exists. it's activitypub. lemmy is the reddit-like interface to activitypub. but the fediverse definitely has video. it even has live streaming through OwnCast (though i think peertube has livestreaming scheduled to be implemented as well)

edit: hey i just found a movie station!

https://movies.ctbperth.net.au/

I'm not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.

peertube uses webtorrents to share bandwidth among users: if you're watching a video, you share the data to other users at the same time.

despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.

In general, yes, when comparing images/video of the same resolution. But if I compare an 8k image to a low quality video with low FPS, I can easily get a few minutes worth of video compared to that one picture.

As you said, it definitely costs money to keep these services running. What's also important is how well they are able to compress the video/images into a smaller size without losing out on too much quality.

Additionally, with the way ML models have made their way into frame generation (such as DLSS) I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing a new compressed format that removes frames from a video (if they haven't started doing it already).

I don’t care. I don’t wanna watch ads, ever. The point is, YouTube will never be able to stop ad blockers. They can try, and the only ones who get hurt on the content creators.

Edit: and whining, “boo-hoo for the trillion dollar megacorp!” Isn’t going to elicit any sympathies

They get money from premium views. I believe they get significantly more per premium views than an add view.

This is true, no matter what ElevethHour and their downvote brigade want you to believe.

They get the most money by just donating trivial amounts to their Patreon. That should be the standard. I assure you $5 one time to a creator is more than they'd ever make off you with Ad revenue.