At first I thought you had a point (and for practical purposes, perhaps you do) but I don't think it'd be particularly challenging to inject video frames into a stream without re-encoding the original video.
It’s not that difficult a command compared to what is possible with ffmpeg. But it’s also a pretty common enough task that literally the first result for using DDG with “ffmpeg concatenate without reencoding” gave: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49371422/how-to-merge-tw...
I've long wondered why they don't do this for video ads. If they were served as part of the main video stream it would be almost impossible for ad-blockers to filter them.
(I even think the DASH segmentation would allow them to this without reencoding the original video, but that's just speculation on my part)
I think maybe the problem is that you do need to have a seperate mode for ads, so you can click on them. and as long as that's the case, there are going to be ways to block them
- Embed ads into the video itself, as suggested above
- Stream ad start/end events to the browser, with no duration info
- On sending the start event, lock the user's session such that they can't change their position within the video. lock it server-side, and client-side. Start event will include details of the ad being displayed for any interactivity.
- Unlock the session after the duration of the ad has elapsed, which is only known server-side. Then send the end event to the browser so it can be unlocked client-side.
you could still block that ad, you would just be delaying people. the browser plugin could fake stream the ad before you click play. it still means you have to wait sometimes, but you won't have to actually watch the ad. The big problem with this is that now you're heavily incentivizing people to spoof ad watching to get around it, and then you start having trouble measuring the real numbers, which advertisers won't be happy about
Very probably not. Dynamic ad insertion usually uses separate domains for serving the ad media and it's probably not viable to inject totally unblockable dynamic ads at the media level. And also not breaking YT for some clients on the way.
twitch.tv has started doing this very thing, so it's definitely possible. Twitch and youtube respond to each other's actions so youtube could easily end up doing this too.
Many VCRs had a feature to skip ads when recording, working solely on the (analog) video stream. They worked quite well using only the technology of the time.
I thought it was triggered by audio volume, because ads are typically louder and more consistently loud. Maybe it was a combination. Not so sure how well it ever worked, though.
For UK, it looks for a special mark being used by ITV companies (and Channel 4, which are ultimately controlled by IBA) which is mainly used to signal companies in other regions that they should switch to an advertisement tailored for their region [1]. Since the television channels were controlled by IBA and BBC, this is a for-sure way to skip advertisements.
You can already effectively block all sponsored segment through SponsorBlock. I imagine that if Youtube were to randomly "inline" ads in the stream they're delivering to you, crowd-sourcing would also be an effective way to combat it. Make a "signature" of sorts of the video by pulling data from users and detect the ad bit on on your side using it. Well, that is if the ads come from the same domain as the legit video bits.
Twitch has launched its crusade against ads. Going so far to look into all the adblock exploits being posted and patching them by day basis. Twitch is winning as of now. YouTube will do the same.
It would probably be a good thing for me, since forcing annoying ads will make me stop using YouTube. I insta-close any website which forces me to turn off my ad blocker.
Indiscriminate measures don't provide helpful information. Support videos that have acceptable ads. Don't support ones that don't. Downvote them, comment, and, most importantly, be willing not to watch them, ever. YouTube can learn, much like a dog, as long as the feedback is clear and swift
Nonsense. They have a lot of short and inoffensive ads, and similar delivery methods. They also have a lot of long offensive ones, and we should give them an incentive to favor the former
Oh, they try to get away with some shit. Just gotta be ready for it. They get me occasionally when I'm elbow deep in dishwater. I'm pretty sure they model people who are asleep or afk and hit them with the worst ads
We already support videos that have acceptable ads: not YouTube ads, but in-video ads. The creator is paid directly by the advertiser with no middle-man, the user is not tracked and can easily skip them, and personally I prefer these ads instead of unskippable TV-like commercials .
however Youtube app users are in a lurch as watching videos that way can result with ads even part way through a video and it seems wholly random how much you can watch before an ad pop.
Also, Twitch has been waging a war of sorts against uBlock and others with their forced ads on streams you are not subscribed to. For the most part both youtube and twitch are doing their damn best force ads into all content though for the time being twitch does let subscribers to a channel avoid an ad on that channel
Edit: I need to emphasise that the ads were occasional, and probably YouTube will be more agressive this time. I've also realised that many of you are using some sort of ad-blocker, so you might not felt the changes when it was (silently) rolled out years ago, but this is from my experience using YouTube on devices which I cannot install an ad-blocker (like in some instructional videos for certain robots which some companies decided to use YouTube for). I have put this edit on top because it seems that some HN commenters do not read beyond a few sentence.
Original text: I'm sorry if I seem dismissive, but isn't this the status quo already (like years ago)? I don't necessarily endorse it, but from what I've read on the article and the announcement it seems that it has rewritten the terms to clarify that YouTube/Google can monetise videos outside of YPP programme (and some other changes that are not in scope of the argument), so is this just net zero?
(Also: if a YPP creator has decided to not monetize a video, the video gets less ads which its proceeds goes directly to Google. This has been the status quo at least 2016(?)ish so this might be just to clarify that this indeed happens.)
At present, if you choose not to monetize a video, no ads get shown unless a third part makes a copyright claim on your video.
I'm not quite sure about the situation with ads that show up in the corner of the page - those are unobtrusive enough that I'm used to mentally tuning them out.
Pardon me? I'm pretty sure that there are (occasional) in-video ads for channels not under YPP and explicitly-demonetized YPP videos even before 2020. (and I'm pretty sure that they were in no way claimed by others at all)
For longer videos, YouTube tends to put not just an ad or two at the beginning, but also in the middle of the video. It can be pretty jarring to be listening to a quiet video, and then 10 minutes in, an obnoxiously loud ad starts playing.
No idea if the creators opt in to this “feature” (I bet they don’t; it’s probably either all or nothing with ads), but it definitely exists.
Worse though that on June (or was it July? Regardless, this year) most YPP members' videos were explicitly opted-in again on mid-roll ads despite some of them explicitly turning it off already.
Had this yesterday - watching a "Tangerine Dream LIVE" video and about 3 minutes into the first track got some advert for what I think was some kind of UK grime / street band. The contrast was jarring enough that YouTube got closed.
> No idea if the creators opt in to this “feature” (I bet they don’t; it’s probably either all or nothing with ads), but it definitely exists.
You used to be able to opt-in to mid-roll ads. A few months ago, YouTube switched it to an opt-out system, helpfully enabling them for all then-existing videos that hadn't opted in:
> Starting in late July, videos that are longer than eight minutes will be eligible for mid-roll ads. As part of this change, mid-roll ads will be turned on for all eligible existing videos and future video uploads, including those videos where you may have previously opted out of mid-roll ads. Videos that already have mid-roll ads turned on will not be impacted.
(As I understand it, there is no way to disable the mid-roll ad on all videos, so you'd have to manually flip it for every single video. How kind of YouTube.)
> Edit: I've realised that many of you are using some sort of ad-blocker, so you might not felt the changes when it was (silently) rolled out years ago, but this is from my experience using YouTube on devices which I cannot install an ad-blocker (like in some instructional videos for certain robots which some companies decided to use YouTube for).
I do not have definite proof for this, as I said on the top comment it is rather occasional, but I'm pretty sure that this happened to me on these videos (will update as I remember them):
- Tom Scott (which is definitely in YPP in 2018) has a video titled Stories I Can't Tell [1]. At the time I've watched it for the first time, it has a in-video ad at the tail of the video even though he explicitly said that the video is not monetised (and therefore it might be Google getting the money). Notably, he prepares his videos days or weeks in advance so I'm confident he indeed turn off monetisation on this.
- From time-to-time, I have accessed channels for work purposes. One of them is Fisher Scientific [2], which does have ads occasionally despite the fact that it shouldn't have (and obviously they wouldn't have bothered to submit YPP).
- Similarly, YouTube channels using Google Workspace accounts do serve an ad from time-to-time. Again, it is occasional, but from what my child has experienced, it does happen even with educational accounts (they have since moved to using Google Drive, although it is cumbersome since there are no features such as playlists).
I know there are several content creators (such as Jim Sterling) that have their videos ad-free as a perk for their supporters (since he's supported enough via Patreon). He's pretty angry about this change.
I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any other service of theirs that has monetization.
But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
This isn't a 'Netflix raising their subscription cost' scenario, where users can just cancel their subscription and sign up for a different service. It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
Are there any events over the last decade that leads to believe either of these are true?
1/ if you're paying with money, you won't have to pay with personal information
2/ if you're paying with personal information, you wont later have to pay some other way as well
Monopolies (or near monopolies) like to double-dip. A good example of this is net-neutrality. You already pay to be a customer of your ISP, and for your ISP to provide you with Internet access. Your ISP stands to profit even more if they can charge the rest of the Internet for supplying that access to you.
Easy? Good luck replacing all your accounts and contacts using your @gmail.com email. You'll move to another provider but you'll need to keep the old GMail one around for a long time before you're safe deleting it.
People you actually want to speak with will learn very quickly when their messages don’t get through. Sure, keep your gmail alive whilst you transition yourself, but don’t leave it hanging around too long. The inertia will kill you.
Sure, you just set up forwarding (oh look, forwarding just became a paid feature in Gmail!) and then respond from your new email, and over time it will fix itself and you won't lose emails..
Definitely, the point is you'll have to pay Google whether you want it or not, if they make GMail a premium product. So it's not so easy to leave at all.
Fair.. I've actually been looking at paid email services lately, thinking that perhaps I would rather pay a reasonably yearly fee to have more guarantees and perhaps a bit more control over my email.
Been using a different mail provider for 5 years. Just the other month google deleted my gmail account (had it set up to delete after a year of no-login)
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account
2. forward everything from your gmail account
3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account
4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.
Might I ask what password manager you use? And what do you do when you need to access websites from a machine that isn't yours? Also, did you consider the single-point-of-failure argument? I would like to know your opinion on that.
Not OP. I’ve been using 1Password for about 13 years now. I have the app on my phone and I can view the password and type it manually in a machine I don’t own. It’s inconvenient but it works.
If I need to access accounts from a different machine I use termux and manually type it in.
I'm not worried about it being a single point of failure (Data loss wise), as I have the password store backed up in multiple places. Security wise, I'm trading out my brain as a single point of failure for pass being a single point of failure. I trust pass more.
Used lastpass back then, now Enpass with sync across devices (tablet, phone, PC). Regular backups of the Enpass file into a folder that is synced to my NAS.
Wanted to look into other password managers, preferably open source, but at the time Enpass had the best syncing options combined with a good enough user interface that’s suitable for less tech folks.
Edit: I mainly use all the things on my devices, and don’t try to use things from untrusted devices. The only use cases with untrusted are:
- copy shop -> Sending the file via share drop
- PC of a Family member -> manually typing password from phone.
I went the extra mile and create a random, unique email address for every single service I sign up for, so I know precisely who sells my data to spammers if I ever get any. All the unique addresses redirect to a central one for ease of access.
Often do that as well, but then: What’s the point. Company X leaked my mail, so what? Not much that one can do about it. Now I often group services, e.g. car rentals with car@ and food delivery services with pizza@
It’s awesome for filtering and sorting emails though.
If company X leaks your email, close your account with them and block the address.
Also, it's useful for have i been pwned. One of my few accounts which uses a grouped address is in today's data dump, and it wasn't clear what account it was, because of the grouping.
You can sometimes remedy the problem. I went through a few aliases with Amazon, and finally found the secret option to keep my email private. (By default, they post it on reviews or something stupid.)
It's especially good for apartment searches and job hunting. Companies that try to link buyer and seller are naturally spammy, so you create a new one for each contact. Then when you find one, you delete the others.
It's also makes it dead easy to filter all that information into folders, so you have a neat record of all your interactions with the various companies you're dealing with.
Most importantly: once you find a job / landlord / whatever, you really want a reliable line of communication. This way, your address with them never changes, but all the spam goes into the bit bucket.
I've been doing that through sneakemail.com, but it's a forwarding service and the domains they use routinely get put on lists that claim they're a temporary email service. Then you can't use them to sign up on some sites.
Still, it mostly works. I've got 383 aliases, plus 93 disabled aliases.
Most email providers will let you create aliases, but aliases are an upsell for business plans. Tutanota lets you get more aliases, but they charge you, not kidding, 5 euros a month for 100 aliases. 10 GB of extra storage costs 2.5 euros.
Some of them advertise using address+alias@domain, but that's basically useless.
Fastmail is pretty decent with 600 aliases. That's a definite maybe.
The only one I've found with unlimited aliases is TheXYZ, and they've been around a while.
I did pretty much a similar thing years ago, but went self-hosted. It took a year or so including the transition phase.
1. Set up incoming E-mail forwarding from mydomain.org to Gmail. Exim will do this, probably all popular mail packages support forwarding well.
2. Start sending E-mail (from Gmail's interface) as me@mydomain.org, and tell your friends to use that one.
2.5. (optional) Get your local mail client to work with Gmail's IMAP and SMTP.
3. Take a deep breath and change that MX record.
4. Block out one or two evenings, pour yourself some Scotch, and go through each and every online account you have, changing your E-mail address. A password manager helps with this because it's also the definitive list of every online account you have. While you're at it, you might want to use me+company@mydomain.com so you can tell which E-mails come from which company, and know who is selling your E-mail address around.
5. Wait until people switch over and the vast majority of your E-mail is going to me@mydomain.org instead of your Gmail address. For me this took a year or so.
6. In the mean time set up locally hosted E-mail at mydomain.org. In my case I use exim4+dovecot+spamassassin. Don't forget to set up SPF and DKIM correctly.
7. Pick a time in your life when you don't expect to be getting urgent or important E-mail, like you're not buying a house or applying for jobs. Take a deep breath, and apply the exim config that changes you from forwarding to self-hosting.
8. Ask all your friends to send you some test E-mails, preferably from different providers. Make sure you can at least deliver mail from gmail, yahoo, comcast, verizon, etc. Send mails to them and make sure they're being delivered.
9. Assuming no problems in 7, pat yourself on the back for being part of the solution rather than the problem.
10. Periodically keep your eye out for trouble. Audit your logs every so often to make sure you're not having trouble sending or receiving. I had to change my IPv6 at one point because comcast decided mine belonged to a spammer, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.
11. Decide whether or not to keep your Gmail account. I kept mine, but it pretty much only gets spam now. Maybe once or twice a year I get a legit one there from someone I forgot to tell I changed my address. I keep an eye on my Gmail to find out when there are hot singles in my area or that there's a new sure fire diet pill that sheds fat instantly.
I tried self hosting. And even with SPF and DKIM set up correctly my e-mails to Outlook.com (and assocciated other domains) was just dropped. It didn't go to the spam folder, it was just silently dropped. At the time I heard that this was essentially expected behavior for an IP without a good enough trust record. This even happened when I replied to mail sent from an Outlook.com account. Having my e-mail randomly not reach its intended recipient was and is still unacceptable to me, so I bit the bullet and paid for hosting on my own domain. And while I'm still not happy about paying for hosting that I have sufficient capacity for on my own servers, I have otherwise been happy with it "just working".
If there’s one thing I want an antitrust investigation to focus on, it’s the gradual monopoly that Google/Microsoft/etc have inadvertently built over “clean” IP addresses. It’s now practically impossible for independents and small businesses to run their own mail servers.
I’m not blaming Google/etc for it, but it is a situation that requires a fix.
I switched everything over to protonmail a few years ago.
I’m was never as invested in gmail as a lot of people, but it was my primary email for many years.
It was still a pain to switch, especially since i started fresh (no email / contact transfers). Now they have better tools to transfer email but after some thought, i wanted to start over with everything.
It did feel really good once it was done. It forced me to evaluate what was important vs what wasn’t, and it got me pretty organized.
Not for everyone but its doable. My guess is it took 6 months for me. I do have my gmail account yet just in case but its been a few years since anything important showed up there. I mainly keep it for youtube anyway.
Nah, gmail users are not absolutely next in line. That was hangouts users.
But you do have the right idea. Gmail users are in line, waiting for the spyware to no longer have a free-to-use option. And even after becoming customers, they'll still be the product.
I have free grandfathered Google Business Plan, including Gmail, but on my domain. The moment Google decides that I have to pay for it, even if it's 0,01 € per month, I'll be moving to another paid service.
Why I didn't do it myself, pure laziness, but starting to charge would be a kick in the right direction.
No, you should never entrust your personal data to something free. They keep the customer happy, so if you are not the customer you can't be surprised if they don't keep you happy.
I've been on fast mail for 10 years or so. I'm happy.
Not GP but I've been using FM for about 3 years now. I can probably count the spam that has got through their filter in that time on one hand and the same for the inverse of legitimate mail getting caught in the filter (each time it was admittedly sites on the sketchier side of the net).
I can't speak for search as I've probably only searched a couple of times but I found what I was looking for so it's probably fine?
With GMail I got no spam in my inbox ever (but still lots of junk email from merchants and political campaigns).
With FastMail, I'm getting maybe 1 spam per week that doesn't get filtered properly. (And it's always from the same domain so far so at some point I'll set up a rule.
For search - I am not a power user and only search plain strings without ever clicking on "advanced" to filter on specific attributes. But every search I've run in FM has so far returned what I was looking for.
Well if he has all the hardcore supporters on Patreon and can communicate with them over there already, changing services become much much easier. Don't really understand the fuzz since he is charging for being ad free anyway. I would be more supportive if ad free ia principle hence for all the visitors.
The amount of support he has on Patreon allows him to go ad-free for all his videos, for everyone. It's not just a 'be a Patreon member and get ad-free videos, otherwise you get ads'. YouTube doesn't have any features to allow that.
If let's say that google charges 1$ (or more, adjust yourself) per gb of stored video, or 1$ per 20gb of bandwidth use to opt out of ads, will it be better?
Speaking for myself, I would be willing to pay YouTube to opt out of ads. I post mostly classical music videos, which are totally ruined if video advertisements are inserted in the middle. (Granted, YouTube doesn't seem to do that to classical music videos quite as much as it used to.)
I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.
What I find more concerning is many people will have uploaded videos with the understanding people could just watch them for free and then died. At which point YouTube is essentially monetizing dead people without paying their estates.
Are people going to need to stipulate in their will to delete all uploaded content to stop crap like this?
If you own it sure. However, if you’re suddenly changing contracts after the fact that’s just theft.
What if a backblaze or other backup service just decided it the copyright on all uploaded files after 1 month of non payment and started selling people’s home movies as stock footage?
Ah I see. It's a rules thing. In that case it's fine. The ToS explicitly allow this after all. So you aren't really changing things outside of what's allowed.
This is like when you put into a contract "Party A may withdraw from this contract at any point" and then you withdraw at some point. That's playing by the rules.
You can put anything in a ToS, that’s simply not enough. Again, I would be fine if Google simply stopped hosting videos without consent, but behavior changes like this are different.
The issue is you can’t guess every possible change. Let’s suppose Facebook goes broke in 20 years and the new owners decide to make absolutely everything public. That’s going to make a lot of people upset whatever it’s allowed by the TOS so that’s fine right?
If your alive you fight such things by suing the company, but the dead don’t make such choices.
The estate as the copyright holder (in most cases) can pull down the videos if they like.
YouTube is not obligated to host and serve content for free forever.
As many other big tech companies they have a very strong position in the market (edging into monopoly / duopoly territory), which essentially prevent competitors with different business plans to be successful.
To me this sounds like the market is broken and warrants a critical investigation.
That supposes the estate is even aware of such content. Which is the issue I am talking about. I would be fine if google disabled formerly free videos until someone agreeded to monetizing them, but to just arbitrarily make that change means it’s done without the possibility of consent.
If I had explicitly removed monetization of a video then yes, I would prefer an explicit conformation of the change. If nothing else to avoid confusion.
It's a shame. I really like Nebula as a service and I pay for it, but it's missing some small features that I'm hoping they get to soon. (They're a small team.)
Jim uses an interesting strategy to achieve ad-free status, though. He purposefully includes content from many copyright holders that default to claiming the entire video. Since apparently highlander rules apply, the system just won't play ads on his stuff.
The rules are complicated[0] and they say "If all valid claims monetize the video, revenue is divided by the number of claims except in special cases such as cover revshare and music."
So just having content from multiple copyright holders doesn't necessarily stop ads from playing. However, that policy also says "If one of the assets claiming a video has missing ownership information, the default policy action is Track (owner missing)." which "Allows video to be viewable on YouTube and tracks viewership, but does not serve ads against it."[1]
An alternative might just be to add some content at the end of the video which is not advertiser-friendly, which would demonetise the video while not annoying the viewers too much.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
> I know there are several content creators (such as Jim Sterling) that have their videos ad-free as a perk for their supporters (since he's supported enough via Patreon). He's pretty angry about this change.
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
Perhaps YT should have a tiered paid account system - as a content creator you pay a small monthly fee (relative to the local country) to cover costs... say €1 per month for 10hrs of content? As the channel grows in size (and ideally, viewings), the costs go up.
It would certainly reduce the amount of junk uploaded to the internet.
Yeah should be - but the costs would be in terms of 100s of EUR per month, not 1EUR. This is why none of those creators really go on their own - hosting video is EXPENSIVE.
It's easier to demand YT to host the content for free.
> costs would be in terms of 100s of EUR per month
Personally, I don't consider it a valid point.
It only costs so much to share some data because of massive centralization by the likes of Google and ISPs, and can only be sustained because of t sustained because these "subsidies" from large players. It's not technically hard to distribute some videos efficiently, but the market is less than 1/10000.
Maybe in 5 years it will be near impossible to host a web site without being DDOS-ed, but I won't praise Cloudflare for their now-possibly-not-free service, I will blame them along side ISPs.
These were the prices before YouTube really became big and were still the prices after they became big.
I've worked in video streamin industry in years and I haven't seen YouTube be the fault of the high costs. It mostly comes from the fact that videos are large, they need a lot of CPU power to convert and need a lot of bandwidth to transmit to clients.
Youtubers take a 55% cut of ad revenue, which is about 1.8 cents per view. Youtube takes a 45% cut, but part of that is to subsidize the videos that currently don't have ads, so let's say 20% of current ad revenue is a reasonble price of Youtube removing ads from a single video.
For a video viewed a million times, it would cost a creator $6545 (.018 x 20/55 x 1,000,000) to keep the video ad free. I can't imagine anyone willing to pay that much to keep their videos ad-free.
Or YouTube could provide a way for creators to remove ads. There is a membership program so people can directly support specific channels, but it has no option to remove ads for members.
However, in the same article you'll note this little tidbit:
In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.
> Of course, it is not exactly free. The videos will also be available on YouTube, where Google will make money from any associated ads. It is not clear how the ad revenue will be split, or even if it will be.
The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
> The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
The article from 2008 doesn't mention that butterflys might be appearing across the video randomly either. How is what they didn't specifically say (or imply) relevant? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
I thought the messages from that far back was interesting, which hedged toward this eventual practice.
"...and pretty much have their entire business on there..."
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
If their skill is to create popular videos, they did not had much choice. It is not like there would be other popular video services that would compete.
Is this really true? I mean, there are hundreds of video hosting sites, is YT really the only way of making any money?
This is like saying that the only way to make your business sustainable is to get a reserved place on NY Times Square... are you really entitled to it?
Typical users aren't relevant here. We're talking about Patreon supporters, people who gave money to a single creator and want an ad free video. They can click a link to vimeo.
But they need to know first. Who looks for something new on viemo? Sure if someone points you to them you will look, but do you go there just to see if there is anything interesting when you are bored?
> This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income.
More importantly, they also then decided to scam their source of income by getting money from other sources (e.g. Patreon) and are now acting surprised when their own data host isn't happy about not getting their cut of the revenue.
Reminds of a scam that cinemas attempted in my state - because the distributor wanted a % cut from movie tickets, they sold cheap tickets and then charged rent for 3D glasses required for a movie (e.g. 2EUR for ticket and 12EUR for the glasses). The distributors took their distribution rights because of that at all.
Trying to scam your most important source of revenue is just a really bad business decision.
The YT deal is that they take a cut of (ad) revenue to fund storage, cpu, bandwidth costs and profit in exchange for hosting the content.
Many of these content providers disabled the feature effectively making YT operate at a loss to host their video while continuing to use the platform.
I already have shown you other examples of these types of attempts which also didn't fly. You can't sell a TV in Walmart for 0.99$ and then have a hidden checque for 900$ in the box so you avoid giving Walmart their margin for the sale.
This explanation makes sense. I would only call it a scam if its against their TOS. Are these youtubers not checking the "paid content" checkbox? Or does that only apply to paid advertisement of the actual subject of the video?
The explanation I've heard from many of the Youtube "creators" I'm subscribed to is that Youtube have taken a larger and larger slice of the revenue cake on views over the years that creators have been forced to look to other income streams like Patreon, because they're just barely making any money on the platform anymore.
It would be great if YouTube let creators pay for hosting directly (just like other web hosts) if they wanted to maintain the ad-free experience for their viewers.
The problem being that "the YT deal" keeps being unilaterally changed by Google/YouTube.
First they adjusted the cut.
Then came the copyright strike system which stops the creator being paid and diverts all and revenue to the claimant automatically.
Followed by the adpocalypse whe your video will be demonitised for reasons only known to YT for being "advertiser unfriendly" with recourse taking so long you've missed the most profitable time for views (the first few days).
Then came the algorithm changes that decimated discovery which negates the huge benefit of publishing on YT (exposure).
Let's not forget just straight up not showing subscribers your channels videos (Remember to like and subscribe, and smash the notification bell!)
And each time YT reply with "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
I can't think why creators would look to monetize their content with external sources.
I totally agree, but there simply isn't a good competitor to YouTube, so they're stuck. I know LTT (Linus Tech Tips) have tried to divest their content so its available on multiple platforms, but the one they used that was paid and ad free shutdown cause it wasn't profitable. They've now set up their own I think which other tech YouTubers also use.
So some are trying to get away from YouTubes monopoly but many cant.
The channels do seem to split into other services on groups. Educational/explainer creators went to nebula (not sure who led that one), comedy/entertainment went to dropout.tv (from CollegeHumor), tech went to floatplane (from ltt), etc. There will be more of those and I can't wait to see who embraces/monetizes p2p first.
What are the alternatives that actually offer a better experience? Vimeo, floatplane? Serious question. Because I would love to start spending some time at one.
Generally I think many YT creators have multiple sources of income (ads, Patreon, merch, sponsored vids)--as such they have many "customers". It's their distribution channel that's locked up.
This sounds like a pretty straightforward cause & effect here. Creators went for direct monetization outside of youtube instead of ads, and youtube responded by keeping their net income the same by just showing ads anyway.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I worry that Youtube's effective monopoly means that there just aren't other hosting platforms with the same kind of user base and discoverability.
Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.
I'd agree if and only if this was some drastic shift in policy, but it really isn't. The headline here is basically ad-supported platform shows ads. Ads have been super common on YouTube for years and years, so this isn't really a big change in overall expectations & experience. It's not an ad-free platform goes ad-supported situation where it was subsidized to kill off others before showing ads. More a small loophole was closed, and only if you were large enough to even have the loophole available to you in the first place.
I think what we're saying is compatible. Youtube isn't really doing anything new, just putting out more ads. They're able get away with it because they have a monopoly.
In my opinion, they don't really have a monopoly. They have plenty of competitors. In fact, the largest user generated video servers are under facebook control.
They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.
You're totally right, they want more money. I agree they don't have a perfect monopoly either. There are lots of other options.
The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.
This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.
You yourself admit that Youtube is a platform that provides you with great user base and discoverability. That's also the exact reason what every other platform uses to charge 30% (Steam, Apple Store, etc). So why is it expected here for Youtube to give away all that for free, and allow you to completely turn off all the ads making them zero dollar, while you are having your content hosted for free and making money externally?
You're right, they shouldn't give all of that away for free. They deserve to make money for their service. I don't really have an opinion on the business model, or whether it's right or wrong to force ads on all videos.
I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.
> I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits
But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.
> Creators went for direct monetization outside of youtube instead of ads, and youtube responded by keeping their net income the same by just showing ads anyway.
It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.
The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.
That depends on the amount of content you post. 1000 people watching a reasonable length video might only be $1-2 per video, but 10-15 videos a month would be $10-30. That can be more than 3 patrons.
Most people I know using Patreon post weekly, with maybe 2-3 posts a week. That includes 2nd-tier content like WIP and polls. Patreon requires a substantially smaller commitment, but it's more difficult to find patrons than viewers.
Yeah - but you dont need to post weekly content with patreons, you can get by with monthly given the subscription, and tbqh you can probably do bi-monthly with many types of subscribers - supporting instead of expecting content.
Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.
Creators not only moved their ads out, many have been using and advertising other platforms for a while now. Dropout.tv, floatplane, nebula, patreon, etc. have been getting ad-free, paid users for lower price than the current yt.
"Creators" went for direct monetisation because de-monetisation can happen on youtube for almost any arbitrary reason and there is almost no way to contact a human (as far as I am aware) to remedy such a situation.
Yeah, and I think this drives the point home even further. You really want a risk mitigation strategy for YouTube's hostile actions against creators. It's been a slow but steady creep. So, if your business is built off the back of something like Facebook, or YouTube, or Instagram, you probably want a backup plan.
I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
Can creators self-host videos on their personal website and push that video to Youtube for their subscribers? That way, they can direct users who don't want ads to their website. Then they are not completely dependent on YT, FB, etc.
That means the link can support less than 100 viewers at once on a video with 10 Mbps bitrate. Often a large portion of views comes in the first few days of a video being posted. You could probably handle the spike of views from a video that receives a couple of thousand views total (maybe even 10k), but more than that seems difficult.
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
I think it's actually asterisked. Iirc you get flagged over a certain amount of traffic, but I can't remember if they cut you off or just force you to pay more. I think it was several TB last time I looked.
I've got experience for US hosting and they dont have great package prices like you're describing after the initial cap ime. 20 TB as some of the biggest caps then your bill is nearly doubled for 20 more. After that your bill would skyrocket to >$1000 in the increased networking fees and you dont even want to know how much unmetered 1+Gbps will get you. This will vary of course because short of being a hosting or tech company of size its not worth the cost, paperwork, biometrics, and time it takes.
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
Self-hosting video content is either not very simple, or not very featureful.
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
Meanwhile there is nothing that matches the efficiency of torrents. I got some nice feedback from putting a magnet under the embed. People said: 1) I wanted to keep the video. 2) I seed it to support it as an upvote. 3) My computer is to shit to play embedded videos. 4) I bookmark your videos (and website) in my torrent client.
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums, which are a pain to keep healthy & don't generate much revenue, is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
> Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, having an archive of old posts really doesn't have much of a purpose.
If they used Twitter or some other platform then they are still reliant on an externally funded system they have no control over. It's not really a backup plan at that point.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
> Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
Twitter and Google and Facebook often cut a person at the same time. So it's like backuping up your photos to another drive on the same computer. Better than nothing but not ideal.
I don't know. They have already had "not advertiser friendly" caveat which is a way of just disqualifying anyone they like.
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.
It would be cool of creators such as Jim could start hosting their vids on Peertube or something similar. They could still post on Youtube--just also link to the other option for an ad-free experience.
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
Hosting this video requires a lot of storage and bandwidth. I would not be surprised to learn YouTube alone requires $50,000,000 to $75,000,000 in hard drive purchases per year. Sure, they make a lot more than that in advertising, but I imagine every year those hosting and storage costs go up.
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
If only it were that cheap. The cost in the US is $12/month which is ridiculously high considering their “premium” content is garbage as is YouTube Music which is forcibly bundled in.
I prefer the Patreon model where I decide where the money goes. Content creators pay for everything else, why not video hosting too? Then it is up to them what ads if any they run.
I hear Floatplane is pretty good these days and really should check it out as the initial creators were more technical than average YouTube (Linus Media Group aka LTT). I have YT premium so won't see any changes but it's not something I'd advocate signing up for at this point. I'm locked into like 2013 pricing and am not touching YT Music.
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
>So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
I don't really understand bringing up the "hosting video is so expensive; poor poor Youtube being exploited by nasty creators" angle.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.
Without content creators who refuse to allow ads in exchange for free hosting, is it nothing? Probably not, most creators do enjoy making money, and most of the ones putting out content for free, but without ads, will struggle to find a competitor who will indefinitely provide free hosting.
>4-5 billion dollars per quarter
In revenue, not profit. Very, very important distinction.
I mean... you take the good with the bad to get the breadth and depth in your platform. You make a shitload of money on PewDiePie and nothing on Mieleman (sorry; I forget the name of the German guy who posts videos of washing machine cycles), and balance the two. It's not difficult.
~~Okay then, 15 billion in profits last year. I'm no businessman but to me that's pretty damn good profits with those revenue numbers.~~
Edit: Alright, Google search failed me. Searching for profits gave me revenue. Sorry about that. Profits are still secret, it seems. But the hosting costs won't eat the lion's share of that, I can assure you.
Well according to this $8.5 billion of that is given to creators. Leaving 6.5 billion for hosting costs, development, and all the management that goes with a platform of that size. About 2.8 billion hours were spent watching youtube in 2019.
> They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
>This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?
It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.
I simply stated that this isn't about covering necessary expenses that wouldn't have been able to be covered otherwise, which is how you initially framed it.
YouTube made it big encouraging that wide range of creators to come to their platform, then once they've established their monopoly they turn around and kick off the ones that are inconvenient for them. That feels immoral.
Are you sure? Google has been on a kick for some time now to try and ensure each product area is independently profitable. Up until a few years ago the status quo was that search/content ads made all the money, and every other product burned it in a giant furnace of endless massive losses. Seems they're now trying to get a grip on that as they're realising even search ads can't keep growing revenue forever.
It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.
> If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
just sucks & is such a Lucy pulling out the football move, that YouTube helps everyone & especially the very small folk, rises to meteoric heights/total monolopy, then won't let some small fry newcomers enjoy either an unbelievably modest revenue or give away an ad-free experience to their new watchers.
> The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either.
100% a video monopoly. youtube has us, has us all.
I imagine creators like Jim Sterling would be even more outraged if YouTube asked for a percentage of their Patreon revenue or whatever they make from external sponsors.
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
Fortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
LBRY's main stream page for new users, right now, is a mix of racism, conspiracy theories, and FTC-rules-violating infomercials. Why would I want to dip my toe in there?
> it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money.
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
Easy fix, Google can charge the youtube channel owner for hosting their videos or just show adverts.
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
I was going to say, Vimeo directly targets the people that want video hosting, want to keep most of their rights and are willing to pay and have a more discerning or targetted audience. Just move to that.
Bait and switch. This is what big companies do. They buy products that are a threat to them, or allow them to address the threat of another company. Then they offer the bought company's services for free for a period. Then it ends.
The point is to kill competition so they can settle in and collect rent.
> Then they offer the bought company's services for free for a period. Then it ends.
It ends because there is an expectation of continuous growth. Eventually the predatory company starts corrupting the free model to increase revenue incrementally (all the while, internal development costs start to rise with bureaucracy) until the revenue growth is outstripped by development cost or market demand falls to equal/below a measurable amount.
Usually before, but at various times, some smaller startup with funding to stay alive or a novel business model grows with more agile process and lower cost expectations while the old predator tries to flail about (reducing ads or subscription costs) shedding users who invested, all the way down while maintaining all the bloat.
Please use newpipe if you are on android. Your watching ads of your favourite small youtuber wont get them paid anyways because of this so make your experience a bit cleaner. Use newpipe.
Also, start looking into peertube. While its still long ways from a competing software, its going strong and the more people join it, the better will be the network effect.
Not sure why this is downvoted but this kind of thing is a good example for why I'm glad things like peertube exist.
Youtube was down for a few hours a couple days ago and thats when I realized that just about every video on the internet is now exclusively hosted on Youtube.
Even visiting the homepage of some sites, they'll have a Youtube "Here's what our product is"-type video that was no longer working.
Dependency hell is used in coding but it can just as easily be used for google/YouTube.
Peertube already is becoming a good floss competitor software that can be selfhosted. You make the rules, you put advertising if you want.
My reasoning for saying use newpipe with this new rule. Earlier the idea was like you are not watching ads and taking money from creators if only that was 50% of revenue. Now they are not getting nothing so why bother watching obnoxious ads.
I went premium earlier this year to avoid the ads while getting my favourite channels a little revenue. If they ever start showing ads for YouTube Premium users I'm out of there
I've been a Red/Premium subscriber for years, and I'm out the second there's a single ad. I'm annoyed at the increasing number of creators jamming sponsorships into their content. I don't know what my threshold is on that before I just stop following YouTube content altogether, but I'm getting close.
SponsorBlock. Auto-skips that garbage. The overlay over the playback bar is helpful too. If I see that half of it highlighted as a sponsor segment, then I know it's a trash video that isn't worth my time.
I only watch YouTube on my PS4 using Google's app, so I don't think SponsorBlock is an option there. I was really happy with Red/Premium in the early days because I felt like I was getting a great deal for the price. Apparently there aren't enough subscribers, or Google doesn't share enough revenue with creators, or some combination of that and other things--but the experience is getting worse every week. I guess it was good while it lasted.
Reminder that https://lbry.com/ probably has lots of your favorite youtubers on it anyway and if you're a creator it's very easy to have it sync with your channel.
Most of the creators I watch are switching to a combination of Patreon and in-video advertising "reads" (have you heard about Kiwi Co?!?) both of which cut Google out of the equation so it's not too surprising to me Google is cranking up the dial on their own advertisements.
Why is it shady, should Youtube host your video for free? Youtube is an insane free service, there's nothing that comes close to the video and stream quality.
To be honest I'm surprised so many video's have been hosted without ads while the creators cash in outside of Google.
Yes, because I am making content for them for free. It is unpaid labor on my part in exchange for free hosting. Now it is unpaid labor that makes them money.
Could someone explain the downvotes? I do not believe this is such a radical opinion. Prior to this change you were still producing content for the YouTube ecosystem for free until you hit 4k view hours. Then you could begin to make a meager amount of money. It is not such a great deal for content creators and now it is even worse.
They should give creators an option to pay for hosting or to do revenue share with different ad providers. What a Google does is anti competitive and should be illegal.
I wonder how long YT will tolerate those in-video ads when YT Premium is supposed to allow for an ad-free experience.
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
"The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over"
Lots of the advertisements ask you to visit a custom URL or use a discount code which the advertisers can use as lower bound on how effective an advertisement is.
You can argue the custom code is enough, but you're still missing out on a lot of metrics, most importantly when the decision was made (in which part of which video).
In my mind, there are two large categories of advertisements. The first and more common on traditional media is exposure-type ads which are just about getting the brand name embedded in your head so choose that product over another next time you're shopping.
The second is the type in these sponsor ads. They have calls to action and are still interested to a small degree in brand awareness, but it's not the main focus.
All that's to say, the latter type of ads is about how many people follow the link and less so about whether the ad landed on all the eyeballs.
At least that's my layperson's view, devoid of having ever studied advertising.
I’m curious why it’s not a feature of YT Premium to just auto-skip over the parts videos marked as being sponsored content (which the video creator has always needed to annotate the video with for legal reasons — it’s currently shown as a yellow-shaded area on the video timeline bar.)
Heck, I’m surprised and confused that YT hasn’t just required these embedded ads to be separated out into their own video streams, which YT then would embed back into the video seamlessly in the regular case, but would be able to drop out in the YT Premium case. (And could also swap out for other ads at a certain frequency — 30%, say?)
Maybe that’s a region dependent feature, but my YT only marks YT-supplied ads in yellow on the timeline. Videos with a sponsored segment (as in, “this video was sponsored by ... checkout this amazing product of theirs”) only show a small banner at the start “contains sponsored content” or something similar.
Having just recently bought a Smart TV, I was shocked by the amount of ads that played. I pretty much stopped using it at this point.
There is just too many ads. I dont even know how they can cram more ads into videos at this point.
I had the same experience using the native Youtube app on iOS.
In my browsers (including on mobile), I always have adblock enabled but playing the video in the native Youtube app crams so many ads into a video it's ridiculous. They deliver ads on videos as short as 2 minutes long. Move onto the next video after watching an ad + 2 minute video == another ad.
I've stopped using the native app and have now switched to the mobile-browser version now (I use Adguard as an ad-blocker for mobile Safari which blocks YT ads in browser)..
In the last year (or so?) the amount of ads I see when using the iOS/tvOS YouTube native apps has steadily increased, where now I basically have to sit through 2 x 15s ads at the start of almost any video I want to watch.
And only after the second or third video I watch am I finally given the "skip" button, and then after a few more videos, it's back to unskippable for a while, etc..
Not to mention the constant push for YT Premium, it's every 3rd or 4th time I launch the app now that I have to tap past a full-screen interstitial asking me to subscribe.
Google is already steadily increasing the amount of ads they are making people sit through on YouTube, and so a move like this just feels like more steps down the same path they've already been on for quite a while.
Even if you don't pay for Premium, just using a VPN in a smaller country helps a lot. Make sure you have all the personalized ads turned off in privacy settings.
There's already several articles about Google on the front page. I'm curious why they would be making moves to avoid an anti-trust lawsuit on the one hand with its scaling back of using AMP; while on the other hand, they seem to be actively using their monopoly with YT to generate ad revenue by forcing it on the content creators.
This puts a lot of people in a bad situation. There's no real recourse because the platform has so many users dependent on it, and its not easy to simply yank all of your content and go to another platform. The logistics of doing so are cumbersome and time consuming.
I don't know what the long term solution is, but this just seems very unreasonable. When you're business becomes so reliant on Google, you don't have any alternative but to just take what they do to you as a part of doing business with them.
Both are different cases. Monopoly (dominant position) isn't bad abusing monopoly in one segment to gain market in another is. So AMP is bad, as they are abusing monopoly in search/news to enter hosting/content platform business. Youtube monetization is not independent of Youtube, so they are free to build upon it.
That isn't using the monopoly to generate ad revenue it is using their traffic to generate revenue. If anything running YT division at a loss is way worse for antitrust than milking it hard for ads.
I understand they want to be _profitable_ by forcing users to pay those $9.99/month, but this aggressive campaign against free users is really really bad.
I get why people are mad that something that exists is changing, though at this point I've stopped being surprised when something that was free either stops being free or has the free offering diminished. This particularly was a very weird setup where if you didn't want a share of ad revenue, you got to use the service completely for free. While Google offers ad free YouTube to users, it'd be nice if they offered a way for creators to pay for YouTube hosting so they can continue to offer their channels ad free, with maybe a small discount based on the percentage of your user base with YouTube Premium.
Yep. You don't own Youtube, and you don't really have much control over content you wish to upload, or content you wish the view. And, this content can be removed or modified (by inserting ads) at any time.
I think services are generally bad for consumers. (they can be quite good for businesses, though) If a consumer relies on a service, then they are beholden to any change made in that service. In other words, it's fine to enjoy Youtube, but just know that your enjoyment could be temporary, videos could be lost, and you could be shut out from the service.
Completely agree the imbalance of the power dynamic has really gotten worse since the Reagan era.
We really need stronger consumer advocacy.
An aside- it's really jaded me that with the advent of the internet so many of us had these wonderful dreams of the things we could build and share the world over, and how it would change the world and be this revolutionary force. Well it was, just not for good. Every single good thing gets twisted and perverted in the hunt for the Almighty Profit.
I remember my father complaining when I was young about money being the root of all evil, never be greedy, love your fellow man. But some time around his late 40s he became a republican, tax became theft, people he didn't know personally could fuck right off. This all coincided with his opening his business and got worse as it became more successful.
The man who hated Reagan and Bush and my rich half of my family with a passion became a staunch Trump supporter.
We no longer speak for other reasons but I use it as a reminder of what not to be. It's worked well for me, I'm not an abusive alcoholic, hopefully I wont become a selfish old curmudgeon over money either.
You're singing my song. I really believed that information wanted to be free, and once people were exposed to it, they would become more free. But the information pool is being muddied, and that process is enriching technology companies. They were supposed to lead the charge to FREEDOM!
But power corrupts. And honestly, it all sounds so idealistic now. It has become painfully obvious that the companies will not self-regulate. We've got to do something.
> you don't really have much control over content you wish to upload
Well, if it's your creative output, or public domain content, you are very much in control over what you do with it.
You are not in control over the available channels to distribute content, though, and that's the big challenge.
YouTube was a game changer because it allowed you to upload and share video for free... in an era where bandwidth and storage were prohibitively expensive. Combine that with every digital device having a camera and a mic, and you see how that led to an explosion of audiovisual content over the past 15 years.
However... bandwidth and storage are still prohibitively expensive. If you'd put up an MP4 in HD quality on shared hosting or a VPS, and amassed a couple of tens of thousands of views over several hours, your host would be really quick to either shut you down, and/or invoice you for the bandwidth you used.
Of course, there's no free lunch. Someone needs to pay. Showing ads to viewers is YouTube's strategy to recoup the expenses. Sadly, that diminishes the value of the content and it makes me less and less interested in opening up YouTube and clicking through a couple of short clips.
Personally, I feel that it's up to content creators to pay for the privilege of getting hosted. In that regard, Vimeo's offering is interesting. [1] No advertising and more features depending on your plan.
Of course, doing that will impact your audience. In that regard, Vimeo isn't a social platform like it started, it's now more a B2B video platform, used by professional videographers or businesses who create professional video content.
The last option is paying for YouTube Premium. But do I really want to pay 11.99$ a month for a massive library of relatively short clips of inconsistent quality produced by third parties the majority of whom don't receive a worthwhile reimbursement through monetization? In that regard, YouTube isn't Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime or DisneyPlus because of this huge quality problem.
Finally, the original proposition of YouTube - being able to share video without restrictions - is what made it attractive for both content creators and consumers in the first place. Much like many other outlets that first appeared on the Web in the early 00's and followed that basic principle: offering information for free.
> I think services are generally bad for consumers.
Ultimately, the bigger issue is that hosting content never was free to begin with. Either you set up your own hardware and hook it to the network, or you lease it from someone else in some form (Serverless, VPS, shared hosting,...).
The notion of "posting" content online has completely abstracted that away. The proposition of being able post and share content for "free" is what made billions flock to the Web. Of course, that's entirely unsustainable.
Putting up paywalls everywhere and trying to sell monthly subscriptions does have its limits. Between Spotify, Backblaze, Netflix, VPS hosting, Dropbox, several newspapers,... there are only so many subscriptions that one can conceivable deduct from a monthy paycheck.
In that regard, a reckoning might be due once the limits of these business models are reached.
Honestly I'm quite surprised that it happened not sooner, considering how may gigabytes of video are uploaded each day, of which only a fraction makes YouTube money.
I had to try a little math to put into perspective..
$ bc -l
365*24
about 8760 hours in a year. so year years worth of videos are uploaded in a hour. I think I'm falling further and further behind.. Much like my music consumptions and reading.
This sort of thing needs to attract anti-competitive scrutiny at some point. Give away something for free, drive your competitors away, then raise prices is a text book anti-competitive move.
It's 'anti competitive' usually only in the context of international trade rules, when government subsidies business units to 'dump' on other countries.
Changing your price over time for whatever reasons you want is generally fine unless you're price fixing or doing some kind of illegal type of price discrimination.
The competitive bit comes in more due to the fact that G runs chrome and search and therefore will favour their own products, that's much worse.
>it'd be nice if they offered a way for creators to pay for YouTube hosting so they can continue to offer their channels ad free
This.
I work with a small art organization, and we've started to put our artists videos online (we couldn't have an event this year). Youtube makes it easy. but like flickr they put ads in and there is no way to get rid of them. If we could pay for the service we probably would. I'm not sure how much it would be worth though.
This is like being on Play Store vs distributing the app yourself. You're paying a cut for the eyeballs and distribution Youtube provides.
The alternative would be for you to pay Google their share of money they would've made if they had ads enabled on your channel, which would be proportional to how many views your video gets. It makes sense since these channels have their own in-video ads which they make money from, and Youtube isn't getting a cut of that, it's similar to how app stores don't allow apps to have their own monetization which bypasses theirs.
That being said, having the creator payback Youtube depending on the number of views creates very weird incentives...
If they were harsher, they would've disallowed in-video ads completely and force channels to use Youtube ads.
Why not pay for Youtube Premium? We're often talking about how we would gladly pay to keep a sustainable product going on but people are outraged that a _free_ service is increasing monetization through ads.
I think Youtube is great, it's where I find a lot of content, I use it a lot and not seeing ads makes a huge difference. Plus, Youtube Music is great value for the price.
As a YouTube Premium subscriber - I still think this move is janky as hell. If my views weren’t worth more to the channels I care about (last I heard, a “red” subscriber is worth an order of magnitude or more than ad view), I’d be out of there out of a sheer distaste for Google’s actions.
I used to pay for YouTube premium. But I left and switched to adblocking after it kept getting worse (YouTube is one of the few sites that I use an adblocker on).
- YouTube Music is awful, not a halfway decent product to replace the good Play Music.
- Stopped sending emails for video uploads (I know, I'm weird)
- "Premier" videos started to be shown in the RSS feeds. So now I am notified of stuff I can't even watch yet.
- Half the time videos just play at 360p even though I have never had a second of buffering on my 500Mpbs connection.
I think there were a couple of other things that were bugging me. But when they dropped the email notifications and the RSS feeds were terrible it was the last straw for me.
I would gladly pay if I felt that they were providing a good service and it was getting better.
> Half the time videos just play at 360p even though I have never had a second of buffering on my 500Mpbs connection.
Weird. I have a 50Mbps connection and get 1080p minimum on everything I watch. I like to use YT Music for discovery but not a full listening experience. Over all, YTP has really improved content discovery for me. Ad free makes it easy to find out which videos are BS.
I'm 99% sure it isn't my ISP. I get a very good connection to everything consistently including Google services. And switching to 4k works nearly instantly and never has hiccups.
For some reason their detection algorithm is bugged out.
I have a hard time justifying the price. It costs as much as Netflix, Crave, Hulu, etc.
These are platforms selling super polished content from professional production teams. Sure some of the content on YouTube meets that standard but most doesn’t.
I’m not interested in a bundled music service. I use Spotify and don’t wish to switch.
I don't understand why people are up in arms about this. It's as if people want their cake and eat it, too. Yes, I'm aware of questionable practices that YouTube does, such as monitizing off of dead people, but I'm still astounded that people are upset about this change. Specifically, I'm referring to the expectation that one can upload a video - for free - and allow it be distributed with millions of views to the world - for free - and without ads. Google's revenue model as always been ads so this change shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. And judging from Google's latest quarterly financial results on YouTube's ads success, I'm personally confused why this wasn't done sooner.
People are (fairly) annoyed because that was the deal Google offered when they were uploading videos.
And if the change shouldn't shock users, then it certainly shouldn't be shocking to Google... In which case maybe they shouldn't have presented it as an option in the first place if they knew they would have to renege on the deal.
Just tired of companies baiting users with free stuff to build market dominance and then dialing up profit extraction once they've killed off all possible competition. That's also your answer to why it wasn't done sooner.
This is not surprising at all, but not much you can do about it even if you see it coming, because other people don't see it coming or don't care. What are you gonna do about it as a user - all the creators are on YouTube. And as a creator - all the users are on YouTube. By design.
People expecting something that was free to remain that way forever were a bit naive. Getting upset that someone doing something for you for free is now "charging" is unreasonably entitled.
However. Ads are a blight. Sure, there's something to be said for brand awareness, but if I think back on my ad experience for the last 10 years (which is pretty easy because I haven't seen that many ads in that time) then I can safely say that my conversion rate is approximately zero for video ads. And there's several services/goods that I specifically avoid because their ads offended me.
Youtube thinking that they can fix their financial issues by summoning the ad fairy is just as naive and entitled as people who think that youtube should just be free and ad-less forever.
I'm sure it will work short term. But unless they've really thought out how this transition is going to work as well as how they're going to make sure the ads provide significant value to creators/viewers/advertisers, then I expect a slow decline.
With all of the cloud infrastructure providers out there, it's never been a better time to try launching your own video service. Setup some experimental payment options where the whole thing is paid for by an inventive combination of content creators, viewers, and ads. All tailored by the desires of all three. Want your video to be watched? You can pay to make that happen. Want to watch a video. Same deal. Don't want to pay (on either side). Well we can work out deals with advertisers.
I'm sure youtube can work something out to maintain market dominance. But they have to be paying attention to what they're doing and the announcement makes me wonder if they are.
It looks to me that they are ramping up YT ads because they performed well in their quarterly earnings. I think Google is more self-aware then you are giving them credit.
... I said that. Didnt I? <re-reads own post> Yeah. "I'm sure it will work out short term." That's equivalent to "performed well in their quarterly earnings" right?
YouTube has had a strangle hold on video content for over a decade. I'm sure this change will work out short term ... excuse me ... I'm sure this change will make their quarterly earnings look better temporarily.
Long term, however, I expect this direction to provide a foothold for competitors to take a bigger slice of the video hosting pie.
Google is using their vast profits from an unrelated market, tracking-based advertising, in order to subsidize their product in this market, that of video-streaming services. This is a textbook antitrust violation [1].
It is against the law to price a product below your costs in order to kill off your competitors and then jack up the prices later. This is what they have done by making it ad free for years, only to now force ads on everyone and upsell us to premium.
These laws exist to protect you, the consumer, by ensuring there is proper market competition for your goods and services. You should be up in arms about it because Google has illegally destroyed this market. This is why there are no competitors to YouTube.
Funny that everyone here is talking about small creators when an even larger impact will be on large companies using YouTube for content and for product instructionals. If I'm a brand, and I'm reaching you organically through branded content. I do not want another ad play before my content.
Or they could use Vimeo but the issue is people search for stuff on YouTube.
For example, when I'm interested in a product (synths, videogames, etc) I go directly to YouTube to watch demos and reviews. If it's not there I won't see it.
At least with TV, ads were scheduled and expected. The thing I hate the most about Youtube ads is how the intermission happens randomly and unexpectedly. It really spoils the whole experience of watching videos.
The ads are everywhere and in everything, and it has basically stopped me from being able to enjoy much of media. But consuming media is a poor use of my time anyway, so it seems like a benefit for me.
I think you're looking for Overton Window, actually [1]. Also, I'm waiting for the the last shoe to drop: showing ads even to users that have YouTube Red; it's only a matter of time.
I feel like YouTube as we knew it before is probably going to come to an end soon. Between youtube ads, ad reads, sponsors, patreon plugs and merch ads, it is either going to wind up looking like cable tv or it is going to die and make way for some paid service.
I saw a video with a sponsor, a separate THREE MINUTE ad read for some stupid mobile game AND 2 youtube ads. The video was 10 minutes.
I understand video creators need to make money but at this point i’d rather just have some patreon service where I can subscribe to channels individually for a dollar or two a month.
It seems like the fate of all streaming services is to end up like cable.
I feel like YouTube as we knew it before is probably going to come to an end soon. Between youtube ads, ad reads, sponsors, patreon plugs and merch ads, it is either going to wind up looking like cable tv or it is going to die and make way for some paid service.
And would that really be a bad thing?
Social media sites and content hosting services like YouTube have become like the old book publishers and record labels. They provide a largely fungible middleman service to the creators who generate the real value by creating new material, yet somehow for a long time they've wound up keeping the lion's share of the financial benefits.
It's natural that creators will push back, whether through things like sponsored placements or through other revenue schemes like Patreon. But even if it's just providing storage, distribution and possibly discoverability to the creators, the host service still has bills to pay and needs to make enough revenue somewhere to be a viable business.
The ideal outcome, IMHO, would be to separate the hosting/distribution from the discoverability, have hosting services that charge real money for providing a real service and effectively compete for the best content creators, and have the equivalent of search engines or recommendation systems to help people find the content, whoever is hosting it. The latter could still operate on some sort of ad-based scheme, without interfering with delivery of the main content itself. In short, I'd like to see a return to a more decentralised system, where the content creators are the driving force, and the intermediaries have to provide their fungible services in a competitive market without becoming the de facto controlling entities for the whole system. See also: self-published writing, music, etc.
Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is "pretty long"...
I'm not so sure.
I'm only a casual viewer of YouTube. I don't engage in any of the account-based stuff, just watch the occasional video hosted there. But even in the content I've seen, it's clear that the semi-pro creators -- the kind of people using schemes like Patreon these days, and maybe placements as they get more successful -- are very aware of how they come across.
In particular, they might already be hosting their content on multiple services, particularly those who livestream events of whatever kind, where they might stream on Twitch one day and YT the next. Those who are successful enough to make significant money from their videos are well aware of anything affecting their video quality, audience numbers, and ultimately revenue.
I doubt many of them will have any great loyalty to YT if it becomes too awkward or expensive, and I'm sure many of them already have accounts on other services and the bulk of their followers would know where else to find them if YT shut down their accounts overnight.
I hope they let creators decide where the ads go. Because otherwise, this is going to destroy ASMR videos. I can see it now. Person with insomnia listening to someone softly picking a mic with a q-tip about to drift off when all of a sudden HI LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CAR INSURANCE.
From looking casually into the community, those channels have a lot of videos with millions and sometimes tens of millions of views. All of that is going to potentially migrate to somewhere else.
It drives me bananas that the ads are always so much louder than the content. There's a law against that for broadcast television, but it doesn't apply to internet content. (It may not apply to cable/netflix either? I dunno.)
I don't watch youtube on my phone anymore. IMHO this is profoundly bad for Google. The last time I bought a phone, having a bigger screen was one of the considerations. I don't remember how much it was, but I spent like $800 on it. Not anymore. My last phone was $350. I use for a lot less stuff. Mostly just texting and discord. So Google has lost out twice- once for just less watching of youtube, but also less mobile device usage, which likely earns Google quite a bit more from that the ads.
782 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] thread(Edit: my children comments are right)
[a]: This is assuming you know the magic incantation to get ffmpeg to do it
(I even think the DASH segmentation would allow them to this without reencoding the original video, but that's just speculation on my part)
- Stream ad start/end events to the browser, with no duration info
- On sending the start event, lock the user's session such that they can't change their position within the video. lock it server-side, and client-side. Start event will include details of the ad being displayed for any interactivity.
- Unlock the session after the duration of the ad has elapsed, which is only known server-side. Then send the end event to the browser so it can be unlocked client-side.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark#Cue_dots_in_televisio...
Indiscriminate measures don't provide helpful information. Support videos that have acceptable ads. Don't support ones that don't. Downvote them, comment, and, most importantly, be willing not to watch them, ever. YouTube can learn, much like a dog, as long as the feedback is clear and swift
To be fair, the ads themselves were interesting, I just didn't have time to watch all of them.
It's a pretty good back around not having a Costco account.
Also, Twitch has been waging a war of sorts against uBlock and others with their forced ads on streams you are not subscribed to. For the most part both youtube and twitch are doing their damn best force ads into all content though for the time being twitch does let subscribers to a channel avoid an ad on that channel
Original text: I'm sorry if I seem dismissive, but isn't this the status quo already (like years ago)? I don't necessarily endorse it, but from what I've read on the article and the announcement it seems that it has rewritten the terms to clarify that YouTube/Google can monetise videos outside of YPP programme (and some other changes that are not in scope of the argument), so is this just net zero?
(Also: if a YPP creator has decided to not monetize a video, the video gets less ads which its proceeds goes directly to Google. This has been the status quo at least 2016(?)ish so this might be just to clarify that this indeed happens.)
At present, if you choose not to monetize a video, no ads get shown unless a third part makes a copyright claim on your video.
I'm not quite sure about the situation with ads that show up in the corner of the page - those are unobtrusive enough that I'm used to mentally tuning them out.
Pardon me? I'm pretty sure that there are (occasional) in-video ads for channels not under YPP and explicitly-demonetized YPP videos even before 2020. (and I'm pretty sure that they were in no way claimed by others at all)
No idea if the creators opt in to this “feature” (I bet they don’t; it’s probably either all or nothing with ads), but it definitely exists.
You used to be able to opt-in to mid-roll ads. A few months ago, YouTube switched it to an opt-out system, helpfully enabling them for all then-existing videos that hadn't opted in:
> Starting in late July, videos that are longer than eight minutes will be eligible for mid-roll ads. As part of this change, mid-roll ads will be turned on for all eligible existing videos and future video uploads, including those videos where you may have previously opted out of mid-roll ads. Videos that already have mid-roll ads turned on will not be impacted.
(As I understand it, there is no way to disable the mid-roll ad on all videos, so you'd have to manually flip it for every single video. How kind of YouTube.)
I do not have definite proof for this, as I said on the top comment it is rather occasional, but I'm pretty sure that this happened to me on these videos (will update as I remember them):
- Tom Scott (which is definitely in YPP in 2018) has a video titled Stories I Can't Tell [1]. At the time I've watched it for the first time, it has a in-video ad at the tail of the video even though he explicitly said that the video is not monetised (and therefore it might be Google getting the money). Notably, he prepares his videos days or weeks in advance so I'm confident he indeed turn off monetisation on this.
- From time-to-time, I have accessed channels for work purposes. One of them is Fisher Scientific [2], which does have ads occasionally despite the fact that it shouldn't have (and obviously they wouldn't have bothered to submit YPP).
- Similarly, YouTube channels using Google Workspace accounts do serve an ad from time-to-time. Again, it is occasional, but from what my child has experienced, it does happen even with educational accounts (they have since moved to using Google Drive, although it is cumbersome since there are no features such as playlists).
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjl9CpAirtE
2: https://www.youtube.com/user/FisherScientificUK/
I pulled up a private browser session to make sure I was not logged in, and the video was served ad free.
I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any other service of theirs that has monetization.
But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
This isn't a 'Netflix raising their subscription cost' scenario, where users can just cancel their subscription and sign up for a different service. It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
gmail subscriptions are next, just wait and see.
1/ if you're paying with money, you won't have to pay with personal information
2/ if you're paying with personal information, you wont later have to pay some other way as well
Monopolies (or near monopolies) like to double-dip. A good example of this is net-neutrality. You already pay to be a customer of your ISP, and for your ISP to provide you with Internet access. Your ISP stands to profit even more if they can charge the rest of the Internet for supplying that access to you.
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account 2. forward everything from your gmail account 3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account 4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.
If I need to access accounts from a different machine I use termux and manually type it in.
I'm not worried about it being a single point of failure (Data loss wise), as I have the password store backed up in multiple places. Security wise, I'm trading out my brain as a single point of failure for pass being a single point of failure. I trust pass more.
Wanted to look into other password managers, preferably open source, but at the time Enpass had the best syncing options combined with a good enough user interface that’s suitable for less tech folks.
Edit: I mainly use all the things on my devices, and don’t try to use things from untrusted devices. The only use cases with untrusted are:
- copy shop -> Sending the file via share drop
- PC of a Family member -> manually typing password from phone.
It’s awesome for filtering and sorting emails though.
Report them under GDPR?
Also, it's useful for have i been pwned. One of my few accounts which uses a grouped address is in today's data dump, and it wasn't clear what account it was, because of the grouping.
It's especially good for apartment searches and job hunting. Companies that try to link buyer and seller are naturally spammy, so you create a new one for each contact. Then when you find one, you delete the others.
It's also makes it dead easy to filter all that information into folders, so you have a neat record of all your interactions with the various companies you're dealing with.
Most importantly: once you find a job / landlord / whatever, you really want a reliable line of communication. This way, your address with them never changes, but all the spam goes into the bit bucket.
Still, it mostly works. I've got 383 aliases, plus 93 disabled aliases.
Most email providers will let you create aliases, but aliases are an upsell for business plans. Tutanota lets you get more aliases, but they charge you, not kidding, 5 euros a month for 100 aliases. 10 GB of extra storage costs 2.5 euros.
Some of them advertise using address+alias@domain, but that's basically useless.
Fastmail is pretty decent with 600 aliases. That's a definite maybe.
The only one I've found with unlimited aliases is TheXYZ, and they've been around a while.
1. Set up incoming E-mail forwarding from mydomain.org to Gmail. Exim will do this, probably all popular mail packages support forwarding well.
2. Start sending E-mail (from Gmail's interface) as me@mydomain.org, and tell your friends to use that one.
2.5. (optional) Get your local mail client to work with Gmail's IMAP and SMTP.
3. Take a deep breath and change that MX record.
4. Block out one or two evenings, pour yourself some Scotch, and go through each and every online account you have, changing your E-mail address. A password manager helps with this because it's also the definitive list of every online account you have. While you're at it, you might want to use me+company@mydomain.com so you can tell which E-mails come from which company, and know who is selling your E-mail address around.
5. Wait until people switch over and the vast majority of your E-mail is going to me@mydomain.org instead of your Gmail address. For me this took a year or so.
6. In the mean time set up locally hosted E-mail at mydomain.org. In my case I use exim4+dovecot+spamassassin. Don't forget to set up SPF and DKIM correctly.
7. Pick a time in your life when you don't expect to be getting urgent or important E-mail, like you're not buying a house or applying for jobs. Take a deep breath, and apply the exim config that changes you from forwarding to self-hosting.
8. Ask all your friends to send you some test E-mails, preferably from different providers. Make sure you can at least deliver mail from gmail, yahoo, comcast, verizon, etc. Send mails to them and make sure they're being delivered.
9. Assuming no problems in 7, pat yourself on the back for being part of the solution rather than the problem.
10. Periodically keep your eye out for trouble. Audit your logs every so often to make sure you're not having trouble sending or receiving. I had to change my IPv6 at one point because comcast decided mine belonged to a spammer, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.
11. Decide whether or not to keep your Gmail account. I kept mine, but it pretty much only gets spam now. Maybe once or twice a year I get a legit one there from someone I forgot to tell I changed my address. I keep an eye on my Gmail to find out when there are hot singles in my area or that there's a new sure fire diet pill that sheds fat instantly.
If there’s one thing I want an antitrust investigation to focus on, it’s the gradual monopoly that Google/Microsoft/etc have inadvertently built over “clean” IP addresses. It’s now practically impossible for independents and small businesses to run their own mail servers.
I’m not blaming Google/etc for it, but it is a situation that requires a fix.
I’m was never as invested in gmail as a lot of people, but it was my primary email for many years.
It was still a pain to switch, especially since i started fresh (no email / contact transfers). Now they have better tools to transfer email but after some thought, i wanted to start over with everything.
It did feel really good once it was done. It forced me to evaluate what was important vs what wasn’t, and it got me pretty organized.
Not for everyone but its doable. My guess is it took 6 months for me. I do have my gmail account yet just in case but its been a few years since anything important showed up there. I mainly keep it for youtube anyway.
But search is the thing that is essentially free advertising space for them. So it's likely to stay free...
But you do have the right idea. Gmail users are in line, waiting for the spyware to no longer have a free-to-use option. And even after becoming customers, they'll still be the product.
Why I didn't do it myself, pure laziness, but starting to charge would be a kick in the right direction.
I've been on fast mail for 10 years or so. I'm happy.
I can't speak for search as I've probably only searched a couple of times but I found what I was looking for so it's probably fine?
With GMail I got no spam in my inbox ever (but still lots of junk email from merchants and political campaigns).
With FastMail, I'm getting maybe 1 spam per week that doesn't get filtered properly. (And it's always from the same domain so far so at some point I'll set up a rule.
For search - I am not a power user and only search plain strings without ever clicking on "advanced" to filter on specific attributes. But every search I've run in FM has so far returned what I was looking for.
> Which other free email provider are you considering?
I think you're talking past each other?
I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.
Are people going to need to stipulate in their will to delete all uploaded content to stop crap like this?
What if a backblaze or other backup service just decided it the copyright on all uploaded files after 1 month of non payment and started selling people’s home movies as stock footage?
This is like when you put into a contract "Party A may withdraw from this contract at any point" and then you withdraw at some point. That's playing by the rules.
If you want to make changes to your assets after you die, write a will and hire an executor.
The living aren't obligated to negotiate with the dead.
If your alive you fight such things by suing the company, but the dead don’t make such choices.
YouTube is not obligated to host and serve content for free forever.
As many other big tech companies they have a very strong position in the market (edging into monopoly / duopoly territory), which essentially prevent competitors with different business plans to be successful.
To me this sounds like the market is broken and warrants a critical investigation.
That seems worse? All these videos that I uploaded become inaccessible just because I'm not around to approve monetization?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
If they can coordinate their efforts of course. It is a big if.
[0] standard.tv
The content is great, though.
So just having content from multiple copyright holders doesn't necessarily stop ads from playing. However, that policy also says "If one of the assets claiming a video has missing ownership information, the default policy action is Track (owner missing)." which "Allows video to be viewable on YouTube and tracks viewership, but does not serve ads against it."[1]
An alternative might just be to add some content at the end of the video which is not advertiser-friendly, which would demonetise the video while not annoying the viewers too much.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6300781?hl=en
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6085494?hl=en
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
It would certainly reduce the amount of junk uploaded to the internet.
It's easier to demand YT to host the content for free.
Personally, I don't consider it a valid point.
It only costs so much to share some data because of massive centralization by the likes of Google and ISPs, and can only be sustained because of t sustained because these "subsidies" from large players. It's not technically hard to distribute some videos efficiently, but the market is less than 1/10000.
Maybe in 5 years it will be near impossible to host a web site without being DDOS-ed, but I won't praise Cloudflare for their now-possibly-not-free service, I will blame them along side ISPs.
These were the prices before YouTube really became big and were still the prices after they became big.
I've worked in video streamin industry in years and I haven't seen YouTube be the fault of the high costs. It mostly comes from the fact that videos are large, they need a lot of CPU power to convert and need a lot of bandwidth to transmit to clients.
As for CPU, storage - I don't think 10+ different formats at extreme compression are a hard requirement.
Youtube ads are good, as people will have incentive to use peertube and similar.
¹ You need some seeds, but they don't need Tbps pipes.
And a willingness to steal...
It's illegal and if everyone did it, movies would not exist.
If everyone that wouldn't have paid pirates a movie then nothing bad happens and people enjoy things.
Arguing one of those facts while ignoring the other one is a mark of a bad argument.
You can't just assume that people that don't use your service would be paying customers if a specific alternative wasn't there.
For a video viewed a million times, it would cost a creator $6545 (.018 x 20/55 x 1,000,000) to keep the video ad free. I can't imagine anyone willing to pay that much to keep their videos ad-free.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7544492?hl=en
Youtube has been promoting that you can do that since 2008 - https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/12/youtube-the-platform/ - so maybe "entitled" isn't the word. It's expected because the capability has been promoted.
However, in the same article you'll note this little tidbit:
In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.
The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
The article from 2008 doesn't mention that butterflys might be appearing across the video randomly either. How is what they didn't specifically say (or imply) relevant? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
I thought the messages from that far back was interesting, which hedged toward this eventual practice.
I must have misunderstood.
“Free” means he doesn’t need to pay for hosting, and he doesn’t.
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
For many of them, it is youtube or nothing.
Is this really true? I mean, there are hundreds of video hosting sites, is YT really the only way of making any money?
This is like saying that the only way to make your business sustainable is to get a reserved place on NY Times Square... are you really entitled to it?
I am pretty representative for typical user. Typical user turns on yoitube and only things in there exists.
More importantly, they also then decided to scam their source of income by getting money from other sources (e.g. Patreon) and are now acting surprised when their own data host isn't happy about not getting their cut of the revenue.
Reminds of a scam that cinemas attempted in my state - because the distributor wanted a % cut from movie tickets, they sold cheap tickets and then charged rent for 3D glasses required for a movie (e.g. 2EUR for ticket and 12EUR for the glasses). The distributors took their distribution rights because of that at all.
Trying to scam your most important source of revenue is just a really bad business decision.
Many of these content providers disabled the feature effectively making YT operate at a loss to host their video while continuing to use the platform.
I already have shown you other examples of these types of attempts which also didn't fly. You can't sell a TV in Walmart for 0.99$ and then have a hidden checque for 900$ in the box so you avoid giving Walmart their margin for the sale.
(YouTube monetizes directly with its viewers too: https://www.youtube.com/premium )
First they adjusted the cut.
Then came the copyright strike system which stops the creator being paid and diverts all and revenue to the claimant automatically.
Followed by the adpocalypse whe your video will be demonitised for reasons only known to YT for being "advertiser unfriendly" with recourse taking so long you've missed the most profitable time for views (the first few days).
Then came the algorithm changes that decimated discovery which negates the huge benefit of publishing on YT (exposure).
Let's not forget just straight up not showing subscribers your channels videos (Remember to like and subscribe, and smash the notification bell!)
And each time YT reply with "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
I can't think why creators would look to monetize their content with external sources.
So some are trying to get away from YouTubes monopoly but many cant.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.
They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.
The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.
This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.
I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.
But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.
It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.
The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.
Not sure how many small creators both can't manage that but can manage external monetization?
Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.
I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?
Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.
Does peertube do that?
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.
Without content creators who refuse to allow ads in exchange for free hosting, is it nothing? Probably not, most creators do enjoy making money, and most of the ones putting out content for free, but without ads, will struggle to find a competitor who will indefinitely provide free hosting.
>4-5 billion dollars per quarter
In revenue, not profit. Very, very important distinction.
~~Okay then, 15 billion in profits last year. I'm no businessman but to me that's pretty damn good profits with those revenue numbers.~~
Edit: Alright, Google search failed me. Searching for profits gave me revenue. Sorry about that. Profits are still secret, it seems. But the hosting costs won't eat the lion's share of that, I can assure you.
Well according to this $8.5 billion of that is given to creators. Leaving 6.5 billion for hosting costs, development, and all the management that goes with a platform of that size. About 2.8 billion hours were spent watching youtube in 2019.
This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?
It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.
Isn't Youtube still not making a profit?
It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.
just sucks & is such a Lucy pulling out the football move, that YouTube helps everyone & especially the very small folk, rises to meteoric heights/total monolopy, then won't let some small fry newcomers enjoy either an unbelievably modest revenue or give away an ad-free experience to their new watchers.
> The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either.
100% a video monopoly. youtube has us, has us all.
Fortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
I think this is now referring to in-video ads.
The point is to kill competition so they can settle in and collect rent.
It ends because there is an expectation of continuous growth. Eventually the predatory company starts corrupting the free model to increase revenue incrementally (all the while, internal development costs start to rise with bureaucracy) until the revenue growth is outstripped by development cost or market demand falls to equal/below a measurable amount.
Usually before, but at various times, some smaller startup with funding to stay alive or a novel business model grows with more agile process and lower cost expectations while the old predator tries to flail about (reducing ads or subscription costs) shedding users who invested, all the way down while maintaining all the bloat.
This is what happened to Yahoo, I think.
Also, start looking into peertube. While its still long ways from a competing software, its going strong and the more people join it, the better will be the network effect.
Youtube was down for a few hours a couple days ago and thats when I realized that just about every video on the internet is now exclusively hosted on Youtube.
Even visiting the homepage of some sites, they'll have a Youtube "Here's what our product is"-type video that was no longer working.
Peertube already is becoming a good floss competitor software that can be selfhosted. You make the rules, you put advertising if you want.
My reasoning for saying use newpipe with this new rule. Earlier the idea was like you are not watching ads and taking money from creators if only that was 50% of revenue. Now they are not getting nothing so why bother watching obnoxious ads.
To be honest I'm surprised so many video's have been hosted without ads while the creators cash in outside of Google.
That has been the service since release, so yes.
Yes, because I am making content for them for free. It is unpaid labor on my part in exchange for free hosting. Now it is unpaid labor that makes them money.
YouTube is a business.
Hosting and serving your content costs them money.
If your content provides no means to recoup those costs, you’re not doing them a favor, they’re doing you a favor.
But you did ask youtube to host for free.
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
Lots of the advertisements ask you to visit a custom URL or use a discount code which the advertisers can use as lower bound on how effective an advertisement is.
The second is the type in these sponsor ads. They have calls to action and are still interested to a small degree in brand awareness, but it's not the main focus.
All that's to say, the latter type of ads is about how many people follow the link and less so about whether the ad landed on all the eyeballs.
At least that's my layperson's view, devoid of having ever studied advertising.
Heck, I’m surprised and confused that YT hasn’t just required these embedded ads to be separated out into their own video streams, which YT then would embed back into the video seamlessly in the regular case, but would be able to drop out in the YT Premium case. (And could also swap out for other ads at a certain frequency — 30%, say?)
In my browsers (including on mobile), I always have adblock enabled but playing the video in the native Youtube app crams so many ads into a video it's ridiculous. They deliver ads on videos as short as 2 minutes long. Move onto the next video after watching an ad + 2 minute video == another ad.
I've stopped using the native app and have now switched to the mobile-browser version now (I use Adguard as an ad-blocker for mobile Safari which blocks YT ads in browser)..
And only after the second or third video I watch am I finally given the "skip" button, and then after a few more videos, it's back to unskippable for a while, etc..
Not to mention the constant push for YT Premium, it's every 3rd or 4th time I launch the app now that I have to tap past a full-screen interstitial asking me to subscribe.
Google is already steadily increasing the amount of ads they are making people sit through on YouTube, and so a move like this just feels like more steps down the same path they've already been on for quite a while.
If i notice a 15 sec ad before the video starts I just restart it and hope for a shorter one.
If there is two ads at the start of the video, you can close the video and relaunch it after the first ad is finished to skip the second one.
If the video has midroll ads you can scroll the video to the end and press restart from the beginning. That will remove the midroll ads.
This puts a lot of people in a bad situation. There's no real recourse because the platform has so many users dependent on it, and its not easy to simply yank all of your content and go to another platform. The logistics of doing so are cumbersome and time consuming.
I don't know what the long term solution is, but this just seems very unreasonable. When you're business becomes so reliant on Google, you don't have any alternative but to just take what they do to you as a part of doing business with them.
I understand they want to be _profitable_ by forcing users to pay those $9.99/month, but this aggressive campaign against free users is really really bad.
I think services are generally bad for consumers. (they can be quite good for businesses, though) If a consumer relies on a service, then they are beholden to any change made in that service. In other words, it's fine to enjoy Youtube, but just know that your enjoyment could be temporary, videos could be lost, and you could be shut out from the service.
We really need stronger consumer advocacy.
An aside- it's really jaded me that with the advent of the internet so many of us had these wonderful dreams of the things we could build and share the world over, and how it would change the world and be this revolutionary force. Well it was, just not for good. Every single good thing gets twisted and perverted in the hunt for the Almighty Profit.
I remember my father complaining when I was young about money being the root of all evil, never be greedy, love your fellow man. But some time around his late 40s he became a republican, tax became theft, people he didn't know personally could fuck right off. This all coincided with his opening his business and got worse as it became more successful.
The man who hated Reagan and Bush and my rich half of my family with a passion became a staunch Trump supporter.
We no longer speak for other reasons but I use it as a reminder of what not to be. It's worked well for me, I'm not an abusive alcoholic, hopefully I wont become a selfish old curmudgeon over money either.
But power corrupts. And honestly, it all sounds so idealistic now. It has become painfully obvious that the companies will not self-regulate. We've got to do something.
Well, if it's your creative output, or public domain content, you are very much in control over what you do with it.
You are not in control over the available channels to distribute content, though, and that's the big challenge.
YouTube was a game changer because it allowed you to upload and share video for free... in an era where bandwidth and storage were prohibitively expensive. Combine that with every digital device having a camera and a mic, and you see how that led to an explosion of audiovisual content over the past 15 years.
However... bandwidth and storage are still prohibitively expensive. If you'd put up an MP4 in HD quality on shared hosting or a VPS, and amassed a couple of tens of thousands of views over several hours, your host would be really quick to either shut you down, and/or invoice you for the bandwidth you used.
Of course, there's no free lunch. Someone needs to pay. Showing ads to viewers is YouTube's strategy to recoup the expenses. Sadly, that diminishes the value of the content and it makes me less and less interested in opening up YouTube and clicking through a couple of short clips.
Personally, I feel that it's up to content creators to pay for the privilege of getting hosted. In that regard, Vimeo's offering is interesting. [1] No advertising and more features depending on your plan.
[1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade
Of course, doing that will impact your audience. In that regard, Vimeo isn't a social platform like it started, it's now more a B2B video platform, used by professional videographers or businesses who create professional video content.
The last option is paying for YouTube Premium. But do I really want to pay 11.99$ a month for a massive library of relatively short clips of inconsistent quality produced by third parties the majority of whom don't receive a worthwhile reimbursement through monetization? In that regard, YouTube isn't Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime or DisneyPlus because of this huge quality problem.
Finally, the original proposition of YouTube - being able to share video without restrictions - is what made it attractive for both content creators and consumers in the first place. Much like many other outlets that first appeared on the Web in the early 00's and followed that basic principle: offering information for free.
> I think services are generally bad for consumers.
Ultimately, the bigger issue is that hosting content never was free to begin with. Either you set up your own hardware and hook it to the network, or you lease it from someone else in some form (Serverless, VPS, shared hosting,...).
The notion of "posting" content online has completely abstracted that away. The proposition of being able post and share content for "free" is what made billions flock to the Web. Of course, that's entirely unsustainable.
Putting up paywalls everywhere and trying to sell monthly subscriptions does have its limits. Between Spotify, Backblaze, Netflix, VPS hosting, Dropbox, several newspapers,... there are only so many subscriptions that one can conceivable deduct from a monthy paycheck.
In that regard, a reckoning might be due once the limits of these business models are reached.
$ bc -l 365*24
about 8760 hours in a year. so year years worth of videos are uploaded in a hour. I think I'm falling further and further behind.. Much like my music consumptions and reading.
Discounting is fine, it's done everywhere.
It's 'anti competitive' usually only in the context of international trade rules, when government subsidies business units to 'dump' on other countries.
Changing your price over time for whatever reasons you want is generally fine unless you're price fixing or doing some kind of illegal type of price discrimination.
The competitive bit comes in more due to the fact that G runs chrome and search and therefore will favour their own products, that's much worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp
The amount of narrative promoting here on HN is distressing.
Google does some nice things, some not so much nice things.
Because they adjust their advertising policy doesn't make them either illegal actors or pariahs.
There's no evidence indication that this is 'predatory pricing'.
Again - if there is an issue, it's with their ownership of Search, Mobile towards prioritizing other products.
This.
I work with a small art organization, and we've started to put our artists videos online (we couldn't have an event this year). Youtube makes it easy. but like flickr they put ads in and there is no way to get rid of them. If we could pay for the service we probably would. I'm not sure how much it would be worth though.
YouTube has the advantage of organic traffic and discovery, though.
Nothing stopping you from uploading the video to both services for the best of both worlds.
The alternative would be for you to pay Google their share of money they would've made if they had ads enabled on your channel, which would be proportional to how many views your video gets. It makes sense since these channels have their own in-video ads which they make money from, and Youtube isn't getting a cut of that, it's similar to how app stores don't allow apps to have their own monetization which bypasses theirs.
That being said, having the creator payback Youtube depending on the number of views creates very weird incentives...
If they were harsher, they would've disallowed in-video ads completely and force channels to use Youtube ads.
So now all these smaller creators will just start their video with "hey cunts, how you doing today?"
* “Hey kids, here’s how the oil lobby caused climate change and screwed over your generation.” - Bam! No SUV ads.
YT seems to be increasingly prioritizing being ad delivery network over being a content delivery network.
I think Youtube is great, it's where I find a lot of content, I use it a lot and not seeing ads makes a huge difference. Plus, Youtube Music is great value for the price.
- YouTube Music is awful, not a halfway decent product to replace the good Play Music.
- Stopped sending emails for video uploads (I know, I'm weird)
- "Premier" videos started to be shown in the RSS feeds. So now I am notified of stuff I can't even watch yet.
- Half the time videos just play at 360p even though I have never had a second of buffering on my 500Mpbs connection.
I think there were a couple of other things that were bugging me. But when they dropped the email notifications and the RSS feeds were terrible it was the last straw for me.
I would gladly pay if I felt that they were providing a good service and it was getting better.
Weird. I have a 50Mbps connection and get 1080p minimum on everything I watch. I like to use YT Music for discovery but not a full listening experience. Over all, YTP has really improved content discovery for me. Ad free makes it easy to find out which videos are BS.
This is your ISP's fault for having bad peering.
For some reason their detection algorithm is bugged out.
These are platforms selling super polished content from professional production teams. Sure some of the content on YouTube meets that standard but most doesn’t.
I’m not interested in a bundled music service. I use Spotify and don’t wish to switch.
And if the change shouldn't shock users, then it certainly shouldn't be shocking to Google... In which case maybe they shouldn't have presented it as an option in the first place if they knew they would have to renege on the deal.
This is not surprising at all, but not much you can do about it even if you see it coming, because other people don't see it coming or don't care. What are you gonna do about it as a user - all the creators are on YouTube. And as a creator - all the users are on YouTube. By design.
However. Ads are a blight. Sure, there's something to be said for brand awareness, but if I think back on my ad experience for the last 10 years (which is pretty easy because I haven't seen that many ads in that time) then I can safely say that my conversion rate is approximately zero for video ads. And there's several services/goods that I specifically avoid because their ads offended me.
Youtube thinking that they can fix their financial issues by summoning the ad fairy is just as naive and entitled as people who think that youtube should just be free and ad-less forever.
I'm sure it will work short term. But unless they've really thought out how this transition is going to work as well as how they're going to make sure the ads provide significant value to creators/viewers/advertisers, then I expect a slow decline.
With all of the cloud infrastructure providers out there, it's never been a better time to try launching your own video service. Setup some experimental payment options where the whole thing is paid for by an inventive combination of content creators, viewers, and ads. All tailored by the desires of all three. Want your video to be watched? You can pay to make that happen. Want to watch a video. Same deal. Don't want to pay (on either side). Well we can work out deals with advertisers.
I'm sure youtube can work something out to maintain market dominance. But they have to be paying attention to what they're doing and the announcement makes me wonder if they are.
YouTube has had a strangle hold on video content for over a decade. I'm sure this change will work out short term ... excuse me ... I'm sure this change will make their quarterly earnings look better temporarily.
Long term, however, I expect this direction to provide a foothold for competitors to take a bigger slice of the video hosting pie.
It wasn't done sooner as it was extinguishing all competition first. Its a reason we have a few big tech companies and not much else.
Google is using their vast profits from an unrelated market, tracking-based advertising, in order to subsidize their product in this market, that of video-streaming services. This is a textbook antitrust violation [1].
It is against the law to price a product below your costs in order to kill off your competitors and then jack up the prices later. This is what they have done by making it ad free for years, only to now force ads on everyone and upsell us to premium.
These laws exist to protect you, the consumer, by ensuring there is proper market competition for your goods and services. You should be up in arms about it because Google has illegally destroyed this market. This is why there are no competitors to YouTube.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
(edit: replaced link to "Dumping" with "Predatory pricing" since that's probably a better description of the law being broken)
Which now makes me wonder if YouTube will launch a paid hosting offering sometime in the future that guarantees ad-free viewing.
For example, when I'm interested in a product (synths, videogames, etc) I go directly to YouTube to watch demos and reviews. If it's not there I won't see it.
So at least, since they are forced to show ads, the ads can be at the right place?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCLFut6pAa8
The ads are everywhere and in everything, and it has basically stopped me from being able to enjoy much of media. But consuming media is a poor use of my time anyway, so it seems like a benefit for me.
- One Ad per video that the creator chooses to elect
- Each Ad can be skipped after 5 seconds
- Two Ads now but the first can still be skipped the second cannot
- The first Ad's skip time increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds
- Videos get Ads regardless of creator consent
I'm noticing a trend, and it sucks for those that like to use YouTube in app form since you're kind of stuck w/o the use of Ad Blockers.
- Videos get 30 second to 3 hour long ads
- Videos have several sets of two ads within the video.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
I saw a video with a sponsor, a separate THREE MINUTE ad read for some stupid mobile game AND 2 youtube ads. The video was 10 minutes.
I understand video creators need to make money but at this point i’d rather just have some patreon service where I can subscribe to channels individually for a dollar or two a month.
It seems like the fate of all streaming services is to end up like cable.
And would that really be a bad thing?
Social media sites and content hosting services like YouTube have become like the old book publishers and record labels. They provide a largely fungible middleman service to the creators who generate the real value by creating new material, yet somehow for a long time they've wound up keeping the lion's share of the financial benefits.
It's natural that creators will push back, whether through things like sponsored placements or through other revenue schemes like Patreon. But even if it's just providing storage, distribution and possibly discoverability to the creators, the host service still has bills to pay and needs to make enough revenue somewhere to be a viable business.
The ideal outcome, IMHO, would be to separate the hosting/distribution from the discoverability, have hosting services that charge real money for providing a real service and effectively compete for the best content creators, and have the equivalent of search engines or recommendation systems to help people find the content, whoever is hosting it. The latter could still operate on some sort of ad-based scheme, without interfering with delivery of the main content itself. In short, I'd like to see a return to a more decentralised system, where the content creators are the driving force, and the intermediaries have to provide their fungible services in a competitive market without becoming the de facto controlling entities for the whole system. See also: self-published writing, music, etc.
I really wonder how much further they can push this without either driving users to using ad blockers or creators to upload to other platforms.
Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is "pretty long"...
I'm not so sure.
I'm only a casual viewer of YouTube. I don't engage in any of the account-based stuff, just watch the occasional video hosted there. But even in the content I've seen, it's clear that the semi-pro creators -- the kind of people using schemes like Patreon these days, and maybe placements as they get more successful -- are very aware of how they come across.
In particular, they might already be hosting their content on multiple services, particularly those who livestream events of whatever kind, where they might stream on Twitch one day and YT the next. Those who are successful enough to make significant money from their videos are well aware of anything affecting their video quality, audience numbers, and ultimately revenue.
I doubt many of them will have any great loyalty to YT if it becomes too awkward or expensive, and I'm sure many of them already have accounts on other services and the bulk of their followers would know where else to find them if YT shut down their accounts overnight.
From looking casually into the community, those channels have a lot of videos with millions and sometimes tens of millions of views. All of that is going to potentially migrate to somewhere else.
I don't watch youtube on my phone anymore. IMHO this is profoundly bad for Google. The last time I bought a phone, having a bigger screen was one of the considerations. I don't remember how much it was, but I spent like $800 on it. Not anymore. My last phone was $350. I use for a lot less stuff. Mostly just texting and discord. So Google has lost out twice- once for just less watching of youtube, but also less mobile device usage, which likely earns Google quite a bit more from that the ads.
Honestly, it too too long. Should have been sooner, before other YouTube competitors slided into irrelevance.
"Dumping", anyone?