Most people do not seem to like pay to play, pay to “win”, etc and this falls either very close or in that category.
The long term economics seem questionable to me. Google can always turn up the heat a bit more with ads, charge more for the ads, play more of them, etc when they need to be more profitable. The only way they make more from premium subscribers is charging more and they will lose people each time they do. I guess technically they could make more if premium watchers viewed less content but there’s a pretty hard floor and I suspect the economics of it are much like soda fountains.
I’m afraid ultimately if premium becomes too large of a user base Google would need to turn it into an “ad-lite” experience to increase profits. Then we’re in an even worse place.
I'd pay for YT premium in a heartbeat if they let me tune the platform to my needs: disable all recommends, disable all comments, allow only a whitelisted set of channels. That would be a "take my money" moment.
Where did you get the impression that it's controversial to pay for YT Premium? Most threads I've seen on this topic are composed of roughly half of the comments endorsing YT Premium, while the other half endorse adblocking from a privacy/autonomy perspective similar to the opening paragraph of the uBlock Origin manifesto [1].
What minor controversy I have seen is a small minority that argue either 1. You shouldn't pay for YT Premium because it enables user-hostile business practices or 2. You shouldn't use ad-block because it's effectively "stealing."
Quite a few of those threads have a sizable contingent of people who say they would pay for YT Premium if it removed all ads but since it only removes ads that YouTube puts in the videos they will still see any endorsements or promotions of sponsor's products that were put in by the content creator it doesn't really work.
Many people I know are not technical enough to know about ad blockers, and refuse to admit to themselves how much YT they watch—eg that they would get value from either blocking ads or paying—when I mention the options
>Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk
Is this a prediction about what might happen or a claim about what's happening right now? Also, there's plenty of reasons to object to government/adtech surveillance, but "youtube ads are going to help ICE deport people" is probably the worse examples that I can think of.
Seems like the opposite? You can choose to either have ads or a paid subscription service. If you don't choose premium then you are implicitly supporting the "ad surveillance"
I would be happy to pay even more for an experience without AI slop masquerading as something else, and obviously fake or misleading news sources.
If Youtube or Meta spent a fraction of the effort identifying credibility as they do predicting user likes, they could do a passable job. I would especially like credible sources that express coherent viewpoints less correlated with mine.
Perhaps even a quality setting or settings so i could set my own thresholds of credible information and non-trivial entertainment.
Premium Quality Tier. Ad and Shit Free.
Like a beautiful statue in a simple block of marble, it is in there.
Because Google does not build a platform that is beneficial to the creators who make actually good and productive and positive content.
I don't want give Google money for building a Mr Beast platform. I want the stuff Nebula does.
So I pay for Nebula.
Paying an advertising company to not show you ads doesn't make that company not an advertising company, and the problem is being an advertising company. It's corrosive to society and people.
I also pay for Nebula. I wish more content creators moved to that platform. It's so annoying to deal with YouTube's homepage to find the videos of the creators that are not in Nebula
So you get ads still! Whether or not they are from YouTube or the video creator is irrelevant. I thought paying was supposed to supplant needing to advertise to me during the actual video.
Alas, tubers feel the need to add sponsorships these days through either greed or reduced google revenue. Premiums "skip frequently skipped section" is about as easy as it can be to skip over them without blocking them entirely, short of using sponsorblock.
I'm not sure where the legality lies with them being able to skip it automatically if you're a premium user, I'd imagine their uploaders wouldn't be happy though.
You think explicitly highlighting that you're in the market segment that's happy to pay for online services will mean you will never see paid ads for online services again?
I happily pay for YTP, but the monthly cost is actually getting a tad rich for me, and I'm honestly considering just not using yt any more.
The terrible UX, the constant pushing of shorts, the baked in shilling, even from my favourite creators, the absolute abortion that is yt music and their attempt to merge my music listening profile and my video watching profile (I don't want fucking music videos in my video feed ffs).
There are some creators that I really like, but I won't die without their content. Maybe I need to go to something like Floatplane or whatever, pay for the content I actually consume and start pirating music again.
YouTube does not respect its users, their preferences, or improving their platform. If it did, their website would function a lot like SmartTube, made by a solo dev. Instead, they're on a slow march of enshittification with shorts in every nook and cranny. Even just recently they made changes to the subscriptions page so it wasn't chronological for some users.
Ragebait comment for sure, but not everyone lives in some bubble where $14/months is spare change and anyway the fact that even a philosophical wall of text on why paying for something so fundamental like not getting spammed with retarded unksippable ads on a 20 second video, (or even worse getting one in the middle of a concerto movement) would not convince, makes further engagement unworthy. It's pretty appalling to note that not a single comment so far brought up the affordability issue.
I pay for YT premium, but it’s less because of the ads, and more because of the stupid restriction of not being allowed background play if my phone is locked.
They really are unbearable: I use Duck Player primarily to view Youtube, connected via city wifi and every so often, I receive a message saying that youtube thinks I am a bot presumably because they are not getting ad revenue. Of course I have a workaround for this but annoying nonetheless.
Does anyone have a good study as to how much advertising is too much advertising? There are some content creators on YouTube I enjoy watching but it's an ad every five minutes and it just ruins it all. For some, I've reached the point where I don't bother watching anymore because the ads are just too much. I sympathize with creators wishing to make money, but ... it's just becoming relentless. I'd love to see a study or even better YouTube internal analysis of how much viewers are willing to take before they just say enough.
Note that this is talking about ads when you watch via their TV app, not when you watch on your computer in an ordinary browser.
The ad experience in the browser is interesting. I've watched several videos today withnoadblocking and have only seen a couple of ads which were skippable after 5 seconds.
For the last year I've doing this on YouTube.
• I start the day with ad blocking turned off.
• As long as all the ads I get are skippable after 5 seconds, and any ads that are not pre-roll ads are not too close to the previous ad, I just skip and my annoyance level stays low. I get annoyed if the ads during the content are not well spread out.
• If they put in a non-skippable ad but it is close to 5 seconds (6 seconds and 15 seconds seem to be the two shortest lengths for non-skippable ads) and it is not followed immediately by another ad I treat it like a 5 second skippable ad.
• If a 6 second non-skippable ad is followed immediately by a skippable after 5 seconds ad, my annoyance level rises some. If they only do this a couple times in a day I'll probably let it slide.
• Any 15 second or more non-skippable ad raises my annoyance level a lot.
• If my annoyance level gets too high, by either (1) a 15+ second non-skippable ad or (2) too many of those things that are annoying but not as annoying then ad blocking gets turned on any open YouTube tabs get refreshed so it will apply to them.
• Any ad they show me that is actually relevant and useful is not counted when evaluating annoyance level. This only happens rarely.
I haven't kept stats but it definitely feels like over the first couple of months of doing this they changed the ad lengths, intervals, and how often they show me non-skippable ads in a way that avoids annoying me enough to turn on ad blocking. I now sometimes go over a week without turning on the ad blocker.
google is seeing an uptick in viewing with a smartTV, so they think that means family time in the livingroom, thus 70s style TV is the model of the day.
have they considered home office, phones are just too small, and studios where you watch the screen and perform the "how too" from across the room are getting to be a thing [mancaves, shesheds].
i would definately have a curated, edited feed of YTz to a group viewing location, rather than a raw stream.
Since 1999 we've had the DVR and commercials have been effectively skippable if you want to avoid them. This is worse than that. Not having the freedom and control to seek through the video stream ("unskippable") was innovated by the streaming takeover.
back in the place between 70s-80s we used to identify commercials with an audio compression detector, blank frame detector, generally a device that detects artifacts of the ad process. then we could record on a VCR without ads as we went about our day.
it was a cat and mouse game eventually with programs being salted to spoof ad detection, regulations requireing a broadcaster to have some demarcation between ad and program, and on...
streaming has one fatal flaw, that decides final ownership, and that is eventually, the content is in the clear, in a space accessible to a technichal user, that can be replicated, and fitted with the requirements for a persistent file, and thus "pwnd".
at this point the ad can be snipped out, and is gone.
its a bad model, ads should be part of the content, depictions of product usage, and consumption, as part of the content seemed like an unobtrusive, actually pleasant association, every time ive seen it done, vs some screaming loud volume, shocking switch of subject and mood associated with a product that you dont need, and will subconsciously avoid as a result of the operant conditioning.
On our TV, using the official YT app, it just rapid cycles through the first few seconds of each ad. As far as I can tell, this is part of a Google-operated display fraud scheme.
I wonder how the new standards will impact our user experience.
Will they just halve the length of time each video is run and charge for twice as many impressions? They could also just run the ads in the background (with the video displayed over it + ad audio muted).
Readit News
So I never see any ads and I feel like I get enough value for what I pay. It even helps me skip in-content ads with a single click.
Most people do not seem to like pay to play, pay to “win”, etc and this falls either very close or in that category.
The long term economics seem questionable to me. Google can always turn up the heat a bit more with ads, charge more for the ads, play more of them, etc when they need to be more profitable. The only way they make more from premium subscribers is charging more and they will lose people each time they do. I guess technically they could make more if premium watchers viewed less content but there’s a pretty hard floor and I suspect the economics of it are much like soda fountains.
I’m afraid ultimately if premium becomes too large of a user base Google would need to turn it into an “ad-lite” experience to increase profits. Then we’re in an even worse place.
I wouldn't hesitate to cancel my subscription and stop using the platform at that point. Life can go on without YouTube.
What minor controversy I have seen is a small minority that argue either 1. You shouldn't pay for YT Premium because it enables user-hostile business practices or 2. You shouldn't use ad-block because it's effectively "stealing."
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/MANIFESTO.md
Is this a prediction about what might happen or a claim about what's happening right now? Also, there's plenty of reasons to object to government/adtech surveillance, but "youtube ads are going to help ICE deport people" is probably the worse examples that I can think of.
You might have unaware handed more your personal info them than you know
I would be happy to pay even more for an experience without AI slop masquerading as something else, and obviously fake or misleading news sources.
If Youtube or Meta spent a fraction of the effort identifying credibility as they do predicting user likes, they could do a passable job. I would especially like credible sources that express coherent viewpoints less correlated with mine.
Perhaps even a quality setting or settings so i could set my own thresholds of credible information and non-trivial entertainment.
Premium Quality Tier. Ad and Shit Free.
Like a beautiful statue in a simple block of marble, it is in there.
I don't want give Google money for building a Mr Beast platform. I want the stuff Nebula does.
So I pay for Nebula.
Paying an advertising company to not show you ads doesn't make that company not an advertising company, and the problem is being an advertising company. It's corrosive to society and people.
> helps me skip in-content ads
So you get ads still! Whether or not they are from YouTube or the video creator is irrelevant. I thought paying was supposed to supplant needing to advertise to me during the actual video.
I'm not sure where the legality lies with them being able to skip it automatically if you're a premium user, I'd imagine their uploaders wouldn't be happy though.
The terrible UX, the constant pushing of shorts, the baked in shilling, even from my favourite creators, the absolute abortion that is yt music and their attempt to merge my music listening profile and my video watching profile (I don't want fucking music videos in my video feed ffs).
There are some creators that I really like, but I won't die without their content. Maybe I need to go to something like Floatplane or whatever, pay for the content I actually consume and start pirating music again.
(In a sense, this is getting too close to paying a bully to stop harassing you).
Ads are a toxic weight on everyone who views them.
I use ad-blocking as much as possible, along with things like SponsorBlock to skip such content within the video itself.
The ad experience in the browser is interesting. I've watched several videos today with no ad blocking and have only seen a couple of ads which were skippable after 5 seconds.
For the last year I've doing this on YouTube.
• I start the day with ad blocking turned off.
• As long as all the ads I get are skippable after 5 seconds, and any ads that are not pre-roll ads are not too close to the previous ad, I just skip and my annoyance level stays low. I get annoyed if the ads during the content are not well spread out.
• If they put in a non-skippable ad but it is close to 5 seconds (6 seconds and 15 seconds seem to be the two shortest lengths for non-skippable ads) and it is not followed immediately by another ad I treat it like a 5 second skippable ad.
• If a 6 second non-skippable ad is followed immediately by a skippable after 5 seconds ad, my annoyance level rises some. If they only do this a couple times in a day I'll probably let it slide.
• Any 15 second or more non-skippable ad raises my annoyance level a lot.
• If my annoyance level gets too high, by either (1) a 15+ second non-skippable ad or (2) too many of those things that are annoying but not as annoying then ad blocking gets turned on any open YouTube tabs get refreshed so it will apply to them.
• Any ad they show me that is actually relevant and useful is not counted when evaluating annoyance level. This only happens rarely.
I haven't kept stats but it definitely feels like over the first couple of months of doing this they changed the ad lengths, intervals, and how often they show me non-skippable ads in a way that avoids annoying me enough to turn on ad blocking. I now sometimes go over a week without turning on the ad blocker.
have they considered home office, phones are just too small, and studios where you watch the screen and perform the "how too" from across the room are getting to be a thing [mancaves, shesheds].
i would definately have a curated, edited feed of YTz to a group viewing location, rather than a raw stream.
it was a cat and mouse game eventually with programs being salted to spoof ad detection, regulations requireing a broadcaster to have some demarcation between ad and program, and on...
streaming has one fatal flaw, that decides final ownership, and that is eventually, the content is in the clear, in a space accessible to a technichal user, that can be replicated, and fitted with the requirements for a persistent file, and thus "pwnd".
at this point the ad can be snipped out, and is gone.
its a bad model, ads should be part of the content, depictions of product usage, and consumption, as part of the content seemed like an unobtrusive, actually pleasant association, every time ive seen it done, vs some screaming loud volume, shocking switch of subject and mood associated with a product that you dont need, and will subconsciously avoid as a result of the operant conditioning.
I wonder how the new standards will impact our user experience.
Will they just halve the length of time each video is run and charge for twice as many impressions? They could also just run the ads in the background (with the video displayed over it + ad audio muted).