this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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We are just one step away from YouTube being a paid only service.
I think that would be the death of the platform
I'm even wondering how people can use it as it is without ad blockers or clients like newpipe
Every time I use it on not-my-device I'm losing my nerves, because I have to watch at least 2 ads for a 1min video, when I want to show someone something
It would be a tragedy if youtube collapsed. There are so many useful and important videos on there. I passed the second year of my engineering bachelor almost exclusively by studying from youtube (the lectures at my college are useless), the vast breadth of content available on that platform simply does not exist anywhere else, and archiving all of it would be a monumental task. With youtube being a net loss for google for multiple years in a row, it's not outside the realm of possibility that if they can't make it profitable, they might just... shut it down like they did with Plus.
When they first started ramping up ads and demonetising more videos for being insufficiently advertiser-friendly, they probably still had enough goodwill from users that if they'd immediately launched YouTube Premium and presented it as a way to both remove ads, and support video creators that couldn't rely on ad revenue, it would have been decently successful. A good number of YouTubers who had to switch to sponsorships and Patreon could have been pushing for people to subscribe to Premium instead of play Raid: Shadow Legends, which presumably would have boosted subscriber counts, and might have been enough to make YouTube profitable and much more pleasant for both free and premium users than it is today. Instead, they burned through a large amount of goodwill before implementing Premium, so people were already more reluctant, and for a long while it only shared revenue with a select few channels who were already raking in ad money, and was unaffected by view counts, so early Premium subscribers were paying Logan Paul even if they never watched that kind of video, but weren't paying the channels they actually watched.
Maybe we should start mirroring to a federated service
Just some time ago, I was thinking about some P2P Video service, where everyone would provide the data they have - so like a BitTorrent YouTube
But I'm not sure if that would be viable
It's called PeerTube. It uses activitypub, the same federation protocol as lemmy. Large creators could certainly afford to host their own videos. Some federation/self-hosting/free software creators already do. Can we have large free-to-use instances where individuals can upload their videos, like we do with Lemmy? I would like to hope so.
But just standing up and copying all of youtube's content? Like I said, it's a MONUMENTAL task. There are around 14e9 videos on there. That's almost two videos for every person on planet earth. And I'm not even sure how useful mirroring would be. It's important for archival purposes, sure, but it's not forward-thinking. For a lot of pieces of content, the value comes mainly from the community surrounding it, not the content itself. Mirroring cuts the community out of the content. I believe that If archiving/mirroring efforts are to succeed at anything beyond occupying disk space, they must be focused on a specific type of content, and headed by people who are genuinely passionate about the content they are archiving, not disintrested data hoarders.
PeerTube is really P2P?
Ok, I could have figured because of the name. Now I feel like an idiot...
Yes, it even uses BitTorrent to distribute videos.
The same way people watched cable TV for decades. The slow ramp up of ads has a portion of the population prepped to be slightly frustrated, but willing to deal with it.
But yeah having been spoiled with no ads for years now, I have to mute my parents TV every time I go over. Even muted, there's still something about lots of ads that draws my eye more than whatever the actual show is. Drives me nuts.
Just to be clear, ads free cable TV was a thing on a very small minority of cable channels for less than 10 years (from 81 up until 87 if I recall the research I did on the subject correctly), the only reason people keep talking about it is because they didn't live it. At first the vast majority of cable channels were just regular channels from regions too far away to get a signal for with antennas and cable only channels mostly had ads as well, there were something like four of them that didn't.
I wasn't really referring to the free years, but the many years where people put up with increasingly loud and lengthy commercial breaks which became so invasive that shows would literally design their beats around being interrupted
I tend to use my TV and don't have a PiHole. I usually watch 20-45 minute long videos and, for some reason, YouTube actually puts fewer ads on longer videos. Get like maybe two, 30 second ad blocks in a ~25 minute video. But then I'll get three, 90 second unskippable ad blocks in a 1:30 video. 🤦♂️
IDK why they don't just have it only show an ad every X minutes, regardless of it being the same video or not. Or what about ads on Shorts? I haven't seen a single ad the few times I've been binging shorts.
There are also videos and entire channels that aren't monetized at all that never get ads on them. Like when people put a pirated film on there it doesn't get taken down, it just has no ads.
Probably because shorter videos get more views
But I'm only guessing...
This seems likely to me. The goal is to get it in front of as many eyes as possible, and ppl looking for a quick dopamine hit aren't typically pulling up videos over 5 mins long. Probably looks better in their stats when they charge absurd prices to advertisers too
Some of the shorts are ads themselves
I blocked YT ads on my Samsung tv using TizenTube. It's fucking great.
There's still the step where Youtube has Spotify level ads. Whatever the visual equivalent of
bait-and-switch-fav-song/LISTENTOMYPODCAST/oh-god-are-those-sirens-behind-meis.