My favorite subscription above netflixs and Amazon Prime. It kills me to think that most people have this all backwards. They think content creators get less with YouTube Red and is bad for all creators. If people only understood how little per view they are paid for. Also people are just married to their Spotify playlist and can't get out to see that Google Play Music is a fabulous service. I have the family plan for my older kids and wife but YouTube Red is the best deal.
"“I can now clearly determine how much Red views are worth vs normal views. If I did my math correctly, since Red started, a Red view is on average worth 20x that of a normal ad view. This calculation is based on taking the total revenue the channel has generated via Red and dividing it by the total number of Red views since Red was first launched, then multiplying that number by 1000 to find the effective CPM of Red.”
I doubt we can get a glimpse into the data. I'm speculating here - but it is likely that the overall attention span is too short, and those who pay for long unskippable ads are not getting their moneys worth, hence the change.
I haven't watched such ad in a long time apart from TV which does not have uBlock available.
I would sign up for youtube red but alas, tis not available to hostile foreign countries such as Canada
I wonder if they are doing this because youtube red is killing it....can't beat netflix in terms of contents but if they gave you access to entire Play movies and tv shows then that would be a game changer...I don't even watch Amazon Prime shows apart from The Grand Tour and Man. I'm quite fond of Netflix's UX and UI.
I wonder how long it will take before there's an actual YouTube competitor (and yea, that's not Vimeo or Vidme). Something quick and easy like imgur for video would be fantastic. That being said, this is an interesting move. Is YouTube profitable yet?
I never see ads cause of YouTube Red, and I have it because I had Google All Music Access which I think is better than all other music services I've tried.
I've only seen info on it not being profitable assuming you actually account for its actual bandwidth, etc. Do you know where you may have seen it's profitable?
> But is YouTube profitable? Google has never said. Nor does it disclose viewership data or other financial metrics beyond a few broad statements.
> “There’s substantial uncertainty, particularly over the profit levels at YouTube, whether it’s break-even or if they're doing modest operating margins," RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney told IBD. “They have a lot of content royalty costs, massive bandwidth costs, storage costs, processing costs.
To be competitive with YouTube, one needs enormous economies of scale.
The only one competitor I could think of here would something like a Twitch.tv spinoff by Amazon with a focus on sharing videos, but since they decided to focus on live streaming, that ship probably sailed.
They probably still have the scale to do it, though, with AWS being what it is.
Do you have any insight as to how Vimeo hosts and serves their videos and what their scale is?
They would have been more tolerable if there were more variety to the ads. For the last few days every YouTube video I've watched has been prefixed with the same unskippable ad, a 30-second spot for Lucky Charms cereal that wants so badly for you to think it's an episode of Adventure Time that you can smell the flop sweat from across the room.
If you're going to force me to watch the same ad over and over, at least make it an ad that doesn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out with a rusty razor blade.
YouTube ads wouldn't bug me nearly as much if there was some more variety. I must have seen the same stupid MileIQ ad a thousand times by now. Surely they have more content available than this?
That's the Spotify strategy as well, at least when they're advertising their own premium service to free-tier users. They intentionally make the audio ads have the worst possible narrators and background music.
It's even worse if you're an expat living in a foreign country (e.g. Hong Kong). Despite being signed in to my Google / YouTube accounts (where Google knows my language preferences) every. single. advertisement. was completely irrelevant to me because it was in Cantonese. Total waste of my time and the advertiser's dollars.
Not long after, I installed uBlock Origin and haven't looked back.
I kind of wish there was a way to unblock specific YouTube users from uBlock. I have a handful of entertainers that I like enough to intentionally support them by watching ads, yet I've found no simple way to do that without manually disabling uBlock for a specific video and re-enabling it afterwards.
You could make it work quite easily with 2 stage script. Load page, grep for channel name, whitelisted = set $wastemytimelikeitwasworth20centsperhour$=1 and force reload . Make ublock check for this variable every time it parses pages.
tldr: whats better, one person donating $1 a month, or 100 people suffering thru 3 minutes of mindless ads? Do you really value your time at $0.2c/hour?
Yeah we should probably whitelist youtube to sponsor the vids there. That's reasonable.
HOWEVER the real assholes are whoever is serving bloat and ads that will do anything to get malware onto your machine and track your every breath. This is really why we're blocking.
That's the actual problem with these ads: bloat, bandwidth usage, javascript, profiling, de-anonymization, tracking, attacks on privacy, sound, unskippable videos, etc.
I will feel no remorse for adblocking until advertisers go back to static, single-request, non-tracking, non-targetting ads.
You're right, and I already paid for it with my ISP. I only get a set amount of data each month, so you can be sure I'm going to block 100% of the ads I can to stop them from wasting my limited bandwidth.
> You're right, and I already paid for it with my ISP.
No, you paid for bandwidth from your ISP to you. Your ISP doesn't pay anyone else for traffic. YouTube also has to pay your ISP and that cost is made up from ads.
I don't see why it's my responsibility to see Youtube makes money. If they didn't want me to consume the content, they would have a model in which you can't view the content without subscribing for a fee. And yet Google knows about adblockers and continues this model, suggesting that they are fine with people skipping the ads. I assume you do not download things you do not want, so I am merely doing the same thing.
But even that is beside the point. I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release. I see no moral problem here, and I will choose what the bandwidth I pay for is spent on.
The supermarket is obviously not cool with you shoplifting beacuse they have security guards that try to stop you from doing it, and they call the police when it happens.
> I don't see why it's my responsibility to see Youtube makes money.
It's not your responsibility to make YouTube profitable but if you enjoy the content, it's in your best interest to contribute to it, whether it be through watching ads or subscribing. The service needs some amount of money just to cover bandwidth and maintenance but more importantly, most of the money from those ads/subscriptions goes to the people who make the content you watch, many of whom can't do so without that money. Those people also can't choose to block adblockers.
> If they didn't want me to consume the content, they would have a model in which you can't view the content without subscribing for a fee.
They do. It's called ads. You can't watch the video until you watch the ads.
> And yet Google knows about adblockers and continues this model, suggesting that they are fine with people skipping the ads.
Or they don't want to get into an arms race just yet.
> I assume you do not download things you do not want, so I am merely doing the same thing.
The download of the thing you don't want here is the payment, not the product. Most of us do pay for things we want.
> I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release.
What's your profession? I believe it's okay for me to promise you payment in exchange for your work then take it without payment.
What I find interesting is that google/youtube doesn't circumvent adblockers, though they easily could, given that they own the whole ad supply chain. For example, they could make the ads indistinguishable from the actual video (in the html), or even splice the videos into one stream. My guess is they don't because a) they are wildly profitable anyway, and b) they don't want to alienate adblock users, especially the techies.
> they could make the ads indistinguishable from the actual video (in the html), or even splice the videos into one stream.
And make ads unsuitable for the most egregious attacks on privacy, simple plain tracking or even as distribution channel for malware. Curiously, this nuclear option will make things better than the current situation.
Ads embedded in the video stream (i.e. "burnt" as one with subtitles) can't be blocked but also can't deliver any active content (JS, Flash, etc) used for tracking or infecting users.
Look, my time is valuable. I decide what media to play based on my preferences. If I don't want to see ads, why would I instruct my browser to play them?
If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.
No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.
Are they giving out free videos? The content creator gets to choose how to monetize, right? The platform does allow for free, and the creator chose to get paid.
For being such a bunch of stingy capitalists, it's always surprising to see people defend businesses without viable models.
If hosting content online for free isn't working for you, maybe that's not a commercial space worth occupying. Not everything deserves to be paid for, "selfish" or not. Users, aka "the market," will decide if your product is usable despite the income generating parts.
Marginally related, if your business isn't profitable enough to pay your employees a livable wage, then maybe your business isn't actually profitable enough to, well, be "in business."
Dunno, what doesn't seem "viable" is serving ads that can be trivially blocked.
We haven't even reached the real arms race yet, and people are already talking like adblockers won.
Let's pick this convo back up at least when ad networks like Adsense let you proxy through your server, ending an entire class of adblocking at once. And that's not the end of the low-hanging fruit.
> No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.
Well, then, don't get upset when people persist in shaming you for trying to have your cake and eat it too. Ad blocking hurts a business model that allows us to have things without paying real money for them. Hopefully it isn't hard to understand why people are upset that you're allowing your personal preferences to jeopardize that.
Clearly your time isn't valuable, as you spend it watching content you value at $0.
If the content you watched and hence the time you spent watching it actually held value to you, you would be happy to pay the meagre $10/mo subscription fee.
> I assume you spend most of your income of water, right? After all, it's the most indispensable element of out lives.
Water is a commodity, it doesn't require you to contribute for it to be available, it's ubiquitous and cheap. I pay less than I value it at, yes, as a price has been set and there's no method or reason to pay more for it.
YouTube content however is not a commodity and the amount of money that goes into it affects the quality and quantity of content available. Throw $10m at water, you get nothing meaningfully better. Throw $10m at YouTube creators, you get a new major original series or a few small ones.
> Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
And they can pay for it with ads.
The price for the content has been set. You can choose to pay for it or you can choose to essentially steal it.
The problem is people can be an "asshole" with no repercussions and completely no way Google can stop them. Almost all business models rely on receiving payment before delivering product, simply because of the fact we can all revert to being assholes quite easily.
So Google and other companies that largely depend on online ads just have to accept the fact that some people are going to disable them. They have complete ability to do so and simply no way it can be stopped. It's inevitable.
If ad blocking becomes so rampant that businesses start to collapse, we'll likely see the internet really ramp up subscription models.
My phone has unlimited data (only plan advertised by T-Mobile) but it's possible for my home internet not to be (restriction removed on the gigabit plan, which I have).
Nothing's stopping Google from simply charging people to access Youtube. The reason they don't do it is because YT offers network effects and user lock-in that have significant economic benefits. I trust that a large corporation with some of the smartest minds in the world working there would have changed the YT business model if they were worried about their bandwidth costs.
Youtube has a totally reasonable subscription which hides all ads.
If you want to run adblockers on random news sites, whatever, I'm not going to argue, but there's really no excuse on youtube except "I'm a cheap shit"
I literally can't buy Youtube Red. I would have done and I'd probably never have moved to Spotify if I could, but I can't so I'll just block their ads because they're awful. One day they might let me pay them, but unless their originals become competitive with Netflix I probably can't be bothered now.
I.... What? You're happy to _watch_ the pirated material for free, but you refuse to pay for it? (Not even challenging the fact they do aggressively take down copyrighted material)
This is the most pathetic tortured excuse I have yet seen.
That'd be nice if I could actually buy their subscription. In the mean time... I'm well within my moral and legal rights to filter what content actually plays on my computer.
Everyone here is well aware of ad-blocking technology, but MANY people in the world either don't know how much difference it makes, or think it would be too difficult to set up. Helping an unsavvy person set up an ad-blocker may make a substantial positive difference in their life.
Crossfit might kill you, but as a user there's no practical downside to ad blocking. Faster web? Less chance of malware? Less annoyance? Heck, a product marketed as doing all of those things could probably be sold all on its own if not for the meta-irony of an ad for an ad blocker.
Seriously though, this is a good thing. Everybody needs to know about and install one. It should be considered a part of basic internet literacy.
The downside: all content starts becoming premium or paid content. Or it disappears behind all together. Without ads, YouTube would not exist in its current form. Though something like vimeo make take over, not everyone wants to pay to host their content.
You should try adding ad-blocking to your crossfit routine. My old trainer, Brandon, recommended using AdBlock Plus, but my new trainer, Duncan, got me to try uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Ghostery, and my clicking finger is so pumped. I can't even pick my nose with it any more!~
Worse is when ad technology is prioritized and is set up more stably/reliably than the content itself. It’s one thing to sit through an ad before successfully watching something but quite another to put up with that and then see some obscure error code instead of the content you “paid” for with your ad eyeballs. I’ve had things fail 2 or 3 times, each time replaying the same ENTIRE ad without a hitch but then failing to deliver.
This is why people cry no tears when ad companies complain. If you want to stick crap in my way, the experience had better be flawless.
This is one thing that youtube does really well though - on some other sketchy video player you never know whether the video will play even if the ad will (the worst is when don't let you know you're geo-blocked until after playing their ad) but on youtube the video always plays just as well as the ads for me.
That's because Youtube natively integrates the pre-roll into its video player, while it's far easier for ad servers to just wrap the entire video player itself and (temporarily) replace it with their ad content.
Not saying it's right, but it's just the status quo of the moment.
True, but Youtube suffers from its own class of usability issues around ads/video. Eg. the other day I was watching a YT video and noticed that the top-voted comment was a particularly weird/creepy comment - so I absent-mindedly clicked the "thumbs down" next to it. Suddenly I was whisked away to a login page with no warning, interrupting the video. I immediately clicked "back" - and was forced to re-watch the entire ad before resuming my video. Stuff like this infuriates users - I'm trying to actively engage, and being punished for it?!
It happens, but I've also experienced the stream playing flawlessly for the first 30s and then severe buffering for the remainder of the video, or the ad buffering and the video not. Network conditions change and buffering happens, but i haven't seen a consistent trend where the content is worse than the ad, like i have on so many other video players.
I am on a network with absolutely terrible latency. 500ms at its best and almost 7 sec at its worst. You tube videos will actually load and buffer... his "unskippable ad", will not.
Sometimes I have to wait 5 minutes to get through a 30 second commercial.
That depends on the platform. The youtube app on xbox is prone to screwing up after a mid-video ad. Not only will it fail to restart the video, it will make that specific video unplayable until youtube is killed and restarted.
My experience even on YouTube has been that ads buffer completely at full resolution, playing flawlessly, while videos are buffered minimally (pausing at the start and leaving to grab a sandwich does not result in the whole video loading) and often drop to lower resolution based on bandwidth.
This is why I can't/won't watch most videos on news sites. Not only is the "article" just a transcript of the video, but I frequently encounter what you're describing.
The funniest thing about their ads is watching my daughter learn to tap the button again and again until they are gone.
It's hard to imagine how Google or TV will convince the world to accept let alone want their ads for much longer when a generation is growing up with ad blocking and Netflix.
Youtube resorting to interruption ads in the first place was equivalent to Tesla deciding to ship each car with a small internal combustion engine bolted on.
Considering the strides Amazon and Netflix have made with original content, I think Youtube should be viewed as having missed the boat in a pretty big way. All of the promising platform innovations that seemed worth waiting for now seem to have been put on hold in favor of prioritizing Google's ad revenue maximization.
The biggest of these are "autoplay" and the silly way that it chooses content to play next.
There seems to be some notion that consumers want to sit in front of youtube and gaze at it while it plays some bizarre mix of low quality user generated content and videos that consumers have watched before, while interspersing annoying ads that encourage the user to tap/click to dismiss the ad.
It's hard to imagine an experience that creates more annoyance. It's as if a fly is released into the room at the start of each video that lands on your ear, and you must either put up with it or exert effort to get rid of it.
Regular TV commercials should be viewed simply as a result a near monopoly for years, with viewers having no choice but to suffer through ads, and advertisers having no choice but to overpay for them.
I actively avoid watching youtube for these reasons, and consider it (as a product) a lot like SourceForge -- someone just trying to milk every ad dollar possible with no concern for the quality of the experience.
I hope this article means that there has been an inflection point and YouTube cannot continue to increase revenue by emulating the dated paradigm of broadacast TV.
Facebook, it seems, has already eaten Google's lunch on live video.
You know, I really wish I could buy Youtube Red for my friends more easily. It drives me up the wall when one of them is watching youtube and some obnoxious ad plays at 2x the volume of anything else they've been doing. I already pay for Youtube Red myself primarily because I hate video / audio advertising with a passion, but I can't control what anyone else in the room does with their money I guess.
Advertising is the sole reason I stopped watching television. It's unbelievably distracting when I enter someone else's house and they have their TV playing all the time. How do you not get sucked in? I guess I was desensitized to it earlier in life, but now I'll gladly pay subscription fees to distance myself from that racket.
I have literally never heard of Youtube Red before reading this commend. Granted, I live in Ireland, where it's seemingly unavailable but... why isn't this promoted more widely?
You seem to have answered your own question, but you live in Ireland, where it's unavailable: if you live in a place where it is available, it is difficult to not know about it, because YouTube tries to up-sell you on it with house ads.
Because Google today is Microsoft from the late 90s-mid 2000s; a million projects in every single possible market, with little to no unification across the commmon platform. Android OS alone has no less than 3 Google-made messaging apps: Hangouts, Allo and Duo.
Too late, I've already given up on watching anything on YouTube unless I'm desperate. Yeah, I know there's YouTube Red. But at $120/year, well, that's a Netflix-level subscription, and I don't get even a tenth of the value I get out of Netflix from YouTube.
In other news, campaignlive.co.uk still has full-screen pop-up ads.
I think a good place for ads would be at the end of the video. I know many people will say that then many ads would never be seen. But I think you should consider the emotion associated with your product when your ad is at the beginning:
If I click on a funny 1-minute cat video, a front-loaded ad first of all makes Youtube act like it's broken. I clicked a link to play a certain video, and it didn't play. Instead something else played. For a brief moment, there is a feeling of brokenness. Then there is a feeling of frustration: you tried to accomplish something, and you were blocked (though temporarily).
The second reason it is so irritating is that it seldom has something to do with you: it's advertising something you don't want. It's like someone who strikes up a conversation with you about something that they find interesting, but they didn't bother to consider whether it interests you. (Google's AdSense doesn't seem to work well in Youtube.)
The third reason it is so irritating is a sense of proportion. An hour-long documentary could do with a 30-second commercial. A 30-second Youtube video seems overburdeded with even a 5-second ad.
If you put your ad at the end, I am in a good mood, because I just finished my cat video. Also, I'm thinking of what to watch next. So an ad playing in the background doesn't bother me as much. Maybe it's even subliminal, since I'm not really concentrating on it. That's just what the advertisers want! ;)
I think ads at the end would also be more in the same spirit as the text-only ads on Google Search, that it would be better to have an ad go unnoticed than have an ad that is interfering. Actually I think the genius is that text-only ads fit in better with text-only search results. The user is already in careful-reading mode. So in fact I think they are more likely to run across the text-only ad than some flashing image, which they would have quickly learned to ignore.
I finally signed up for Youtube Red, despite my pennypinchingness. I think I'll stick with it. It includes also all the free music I want, on Google Play. Through that I found a new album by an obscure band that I always liked. It's only $10 a month, and if you can buy a family plan for $15.
I've had YouTube show me ads at the end of videos. It certainly beats ads during the middle, but it's also often more jarring than ads at the start. Say you put some soft music playing and tab away, then it ends and suddenly you get a loud, fast-paced ad - I usually respond by closing the tab immediately.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadEDIT: Mobile Benefits for YouTube Red
- Playback with the screen turned off
- Download videos
- YouTube Music No Ads
-YouTube Gaming
"“I can now clearly determine how much Red views are worth vs normal views. If I did my math correctly, since Red started, a Red view is on average worth 20x that of a normal ad view. This calculation is based on taking the total revenue the channel has generated via Red and dividing it by the total number of Red views since Red was first launched, then multiplying that number by 1000 to find the effective CPM of Red.”
http://lipanitechnologies.com/2017/01/03/youtube-red-helping...
There's actually a service that allows you to move your playlists: https://freeyourmusic.com/
I would sign up for youtube red but alas, tis not available to hostile foreign countries such as Canada
I wonder if they are doing this because youtube red is killing it....can't beat netflix in terms of contents but if they gave you access to entire Play movies and tv shows then that would be a game changer...I don't even watch Amazon Prime shows apart from The Grand Tour and Man. I'm quite fond of Netflix's UX and UI.
IIRC it has been for years.
http://www.investors.com/news/technology/youtube-valuation-s...
> But is YouTube profitable? Google has never said. Nor does it disclose viewership data or other financial metrics beyond a few broad statements.
> “There’s substantial uncertainty, particularly over the profit levels at YouTube, whether it’s break-even or if they're doing modest operating margins," RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney told IBD. “They have a lot of content royalty costs, massive bandwidth costs, storage costs, processing costs.
The only one competitor I could think of here would something like a Twitch.tv spinoff by Amazon with a focus on sharing videos, but since they decided to focus on live streaming, that ship probably sailed.
They probably still have the scale to do it, though, with AWS being what it is.
Do you have any insight as to how Vimeo hosts and serves their videos and what their scale is?
If you're going to force me to watch the same ad over and over, at least make it an ad that doesn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out with a rusty razor blade.
FTFY!
Not long after, I installed uBlock Origin and haven't looked back.
but why would you?
tldr: whats better, one person donating $1 a month, or 100 people suffering thru 3 minutes of mindless ads? Do you really value your time at $0.2c/hour?
uBlock Origin will continue to serve me well.
Don't be an asshole.
HOWEVER the real assholes are whoever is serving bloat and ads that will do anything to get malware onto your machine and track your every breath. This is really why we're blocking.
I will feel no remorse for adblocking until advertisers go back to static, single-request, non-tracking, non-targetting ads.
Huh, that's about right. It feels like it was released after that.
Having to block ads in the first place makes the ad creators and deliverers assholes, but not the user, as explained in other comments.
You're right, and I already paid for it with my ISP. I only get a set amount of data each month, so you can be sure I'm going to block 100% of the ads I can to stop them from wasting my limited bandwidth.
No, you paid for bandwidth from your ISP to you. Your ISP doesn't pay anyone else for traffic. YouTube also has to pay your ISP and that cost is made up from ads.
But even that is beside the point. I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release. I see no moral problem here, and I will choose what the bandwidth I pay for is spent on.
It's not your responsibility to make YouTube profitable but if you enjoy the content, it's in your best interest to contribute to it, whether it be through watching ads or subscribing. The service needs some amount of money just to cover bandwidth and maintenance but more importantly, most of the money from those ads/subscriptions goes to the people who make the content you watch, many of whom can't do so without that money. Those people also can't choose to block adblockers.
> If they didn't want me to consume the content, they would have a model in which you can't view the content without subscribing for a fee.
They do. It's called ads. You can't watch the video until you watch the ads.
> And yet Google knows about adblockers and continues this model, suggesting that they are fine with people skipping the ads.
Or they don't want to get into an arms race just yet.
> I assume you do not download things you do not want, so I am merely doing the same thing.
The download of the thing you don't want here is the payment, not the product. Most of us do pay for things we want.
> I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release.
What's your profession? I believe it's okay for me to promise you payment in exchange for your work then take it without payment.
And make ads unsuitable for the most egregious attacks on privacy, simple plain tracking or even as distribution channel for malware. Curiously, this nuclear option will make things better than the current situation.
Ads embedded in the video stream (i.e. "burnt" as one with subtitles) can't be blocked but also can't deliver any active content (JS, Flash, etc) used for tracking or infecting users.
If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.
No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.
Are they giving out free videos? The content creator gets to choose how to monetize, right? The platform does allow for free, and the creator chose to get paid.
If hosting content online for free isn't working for you, maybe that's not a commercial space worth occupying. Not everything deserves to be paid for, "selfish" or not. Users, aka "the market," will decide if your product is usable despite the income generating parts.
Marginally related, if your business isn't profitable enough to pay your employees a livable wage, then maybe your business isn't actually profitable enough to, well, be "in business."
We haven't even reached the real arms race yet, and people are already talking like adblockers won.
Let's pick this convo back up at least when ad networks like Adsense let you proxy through your server, ending an entire class of adblocking at once. And that's not the end of the low-hanging fruit.
Perhaps I don't do it personally because I'm a Communist.
Well, then, don't get upset when people persist in shaming you for trying to have your cake and eat it too. Ad blocking hurts a business model that allows us to have things without paying real money for them. Hopefully it isn't hard to understand why people are upset that you're allowing your personal preferences to jeopardize that.
It would improve quite a lot of the internet, although on some magazines you'd be left with only the ads.
Clearly your time isn't valuable, as you spend it watching content you value at $0.
If the content you watched and hence the time you spent watching it actually held value to you, you would be happy to pay the meagre $10/mo subscription fee.
Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
Water is a commodity, it doesn't require you to contribute for it to be available, it's ubiquitous and cheap. I pay less than I value it at, yes, as a price has been set and there's no method or reason to pay more for it.
YouTube content however is not a commodity and the amount of money that goes into it affects the quality and quantity of content available. Throw $10m at water, you get nothing meaningfully better. Throw $10m at YouTube creators, you get a new major original series or a few small ones.
> Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
And they can pay for it with ads.
The price for the content has been set. You can choose to pay for it or you can choose to essentially steal it.
So Google and other companies that largely depend on online ads just have to accept the fact that some people are going to disable them. They have complete ability to do so and simply no way it can be stopped. It's inevitable.
If ad blocking becomes so rampant that businesses start to collapse, we'll likely see the internet really ramp up subscription models.
For the user too, do you think people have unlimited data plans? I'm not paying to see ads.
> Don't be an asshole.
Because insults are going to rally people to your cause?
So that's a weird excuse.
My phone has unlimited data (only plan advertised by T-Mobile) but it's possible for my home internet not to be (restriction removed on the gigabit plan, which I have).
So if the company only cares about the US then...
"Hahaha yyolo rigt?!1!" - some exec
If you want to run adblockers on random news sites, whatever, I'm not going to argue, but there's really no excuse on youtube except "I'm a cheap shit"
or perhaps the slightly more valid excuse of "i don't live in australia, mexico, korea, new zealand, or the united states"
ymmv
This is the most pathetic tortured excuse I have yet seen.
Seriously though, this is a good thing. Everybody needs to know about and install one. It should be considered a part of basic internet literacy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/5ua042/youtub...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/295
This is why people cry no tears when ad companies complain. If you want to stick crap in my way, the experience had better be flawless.
Not saying it's right, but it's just the status quo of the moment.
Sometimes I have to wait 5 minutes to get through a 30 second commercial.
Edit: Just figured it out. Blocking this with an adbock rule fixes it at as a logged-in user, in the US, using Chrome.
It's hard to imagine how Google or TV will convince the world to accept let alone want their ads for much longer when a generation is growing up with ad blocking and Netflix.
Considering the strides Amazon and Netflix have made with original content, I think Youtube should be viewed as having missed the boat in a pretty big way. All of the promising platform innovations that seemed worth waiting for now seem to have been put on hold in favor of prioritizing Google's ad revenue maximization.
The biggest of these are "autoplay" and the silly way that it chooses content to play next.
There seems to be some notion that consumers want to sit in front of youtube and gaze at it while it plays some bizarre mix of low quality user generated content and videos that consumers have watched before, while interspersing annoying ads that encourage the user to tap/click to dismiss the ad.
It's hard to imagine an experience that creates more annoyance. It's as if a fly is released into the room at the start of each video that lands on your ear, and you must either put up with it or exert effort to get rid of it.
Regular TV commercials should be viewed simply as a result a near monopoly for years, with viewers having no choice but to suffer through ads, and advertisers having no choice but to overpay for them.
I actively avoid watching youtube for these reasons, and consider it (as a product) a lot like SourceForge -- someone just trying to milk every ad dollar possible with no concern for the quality of the experience.
I hope this article means that there has been an inflection point and YouTube cannot continue to increase revenue by emulating the dated paradigm of broadacast TV.
Facebook, it seems, has already eaten Google's lunch on live video.
Advertising is the sole reason I stopped watching television. It's unbelievably distracting when I enter someone else's house and they have their TV playing all the time. How do you not get sucked in? I guess I was desensitized to it earlier in life, but now I'll gladly pay subscription fees to distance myself from that racket.
This is the first time I've seen the service mentioned on HN, which seems surprising in itself.
I think a good place for ads would be at the end of the video. I know many people will say that then many ads would never be seen. But I think you should consider the emotion associated with your product when your ad is at the beginning:
If I click on a funny 1-minute cat video, a front-loaded ad first of all makes Youtube act like it's broken. I clicked a link to play a certain video, and it didn't play. Instead something else played. For a brief moment, there is a feeling of brokenness. Then there is a feeling of frustration: you tried to accomplish something, and you were blocked (though temporarily).
The second reason it is so irritating is that it seldom has something to do with you: it's advertising something you don't want. It's like someone who strikes up a conversation with you about something that they find interesting, but they didn't bother to consider whether it interests you. (Google's AdSense doesn't seem to work well in Youtube.)
The third reason it is so irritating is a sense of proportion. An hour-long documentary could do with a 30-second commercial. A 30-second Youtube video seems overburdeded with even a 5-second ad.
If you put your ad at the end, I am in a good mood, because I just finished my cat video. Also, I'm thinking of what to watch next. So an ad playing in the background doesn't bother me as much. Maybe it's even subliminal, since I'm not really concentrating on it. That's just what the advertisers want! ;)
I think ads at the end would also be more in the same spirit as the text-only ads on Google Search, that it would be better to have an ad go unnoticed than have an ad that is interfering. Actually I think the genius is that text-only ads fit in better with text-only search results. The user is already in careful-reading mode. So in fact I think they are more likely to run across the text-only ad than some flashing image, which they would have quickly learned to ignore.
I finally signed up for Youtube Red, despite my pennypinchingness. I think I'll stick with it. It includes also all the free music I want, on Google Play. Through that I found a new album by an obscure band that I always liked. It's only $10 a month, and if you can buy a family plan for $15.