So they should just provide you a totally free service the costs them money because…? Are they still going to pay creators or do you want everyone to work for free to entertain you?
Petition the government to make a nationally owned and run video sharing site if that’s what you want, don’t be surprised when a capitalist company doesn’t give you everything you want for free
People are generally okay with some ads. It’s the quantity and aggressiveness and propensity for making the content worse by how they inject them into the videos that people don’t like. Yes, their infrastructure costs money to run. But their service is only possible because of the people who make videos for them and the people who watch them. It’s always been a give and take relationship. They’ve just been gradually deciding over the years to take more and more as their monopoly over a certain category of digital media has solidified and people have responded in the way people always do.
Agreed. However I still can’t make a good faith argument as to why YouTube should be free. I too prefer not to pay but I never expected that to last forever and we’ve had a good run. I basically got a 15 year free trial and now they want me to pay for it - fair enough (I don’t yet thought)
JW do you know how much money google actually makes off of your data?
I tried searching it and didn’t find anything.
“Selling my data should be enough money to cover video bandwidth” is a common argument in this thread and was wondering if anyone actually had numbers to back that up.
Even that’s misleading, because Google doesn’t actually sell anyone’s data. It’s not like advertisers buy user data from Google. They have a product they want to advertise to a specific audience, and by choosing to advertise on YouTube, they can tell Google to only show these ads to their specific target audience, which YouTube can do, because they know who you are and what you’re interested in.
Every single piece of apologism here casually pushes the idea that YouTube isn’t profitable and their poor staff are starving.
In 2020, YouTube gleefully declared they were generating $5 billion in ad revenue every 3 months.
Even after their bandwidth, storage and incredibly well paid engineers, there’s no way they’re burning that much money on expenses. That’s a billion dollars – 1000 million – per data center, per quarter. Enough to buy half of the CPUs leaving Intel’s factories
They’re not attacking ad blockers because they’re struggling to make ends meet as they hack away in their garage.
They’re doing it because there is no amount of money that can quench the greed of their shareholders.
Naw dog, just wanted to point out your one sentence reply didn’t do what you thought it did, because it was using an assumption made under a status quo to argue against the status quo, with no further details.
You’ve definitely got me curious though - do you have actual numbers for operating expenses?
Here’s where I’m coming from - in my experience, it’s not uncommon for someone barely breaking 6 figures in salary to cost the company 300-500k. Take into account senior staff, and imo we can just say each full time staff costs the company 500k. And that’s just for companies I’ve had experience with, which has benefits and compensation nowhere near as nice as googles.
I casually looked around the internet and saw the that YouTube had roughly 2000 full time engineers, so the numbers come out to, with my shitty assumptions, 833 million a month.
I’m going to say that’s the minimum, because as I said earlier, YouTube employee compensation and benefits are leaps and bounds better than mines, and we’re not taking into account the additional cost of bandwidth and hardware.
I gotta go head out so that’s as much sleuthing as I can do - care to do some number crunching for the bandwidth end of costs, so your revenue statistic can be reasoned with alongside two lemmings shitty estimate of operating costs?
I am so tired of seeing this argument. I do not care about ads. That is not the problem. The problem is that YouTube thinks it is entitled to suck up every little bit of information about me and everyone within speaking distance of me just because I use their service. Do you want to run ads? Go for it. Do you want to get a little bit of basic information about your audience? Such as State or city? Honestly, that is fine. We need to establish a line, but I am not wholesale against any sort of information coming in. But that is not what they are doing. They give us these opaque TOS’s that allow them to take so much information and even sell it to third parties. It is out of control and we have no sense of what our data is worth or who is getting it. That is not OK.
If you want to do an on air read, I’m not going to skip it. If YouTube to run the occasional ad, I’ll watch it. But I will never, ever take down my VPN and ublock origin. I will never apologize for obfuscating my data a little bit. That is my right, and I will exercise it every time.
There is also one other very simple problem with this argument: you don’t have to run ads and steal all my data in order to make money. There are tons of other revenue models out there.
Vast majority of content won’t fucking lose them money either, you hairless ape. They show ads even on unmonetizable content, i.e. they’re using voluntary labor to make money.
The ads are just out of control. Back when it was one, maybe two, ads that were 10-20s long combined, I was willing to sit through it. Now there are almost always multiple ads concurrent, ads in the middle of the video, ads at the end of the video if it plays all thr way through, then ads again before the next video plays.
Bring it back to a single ad at the beginning of the video and give me a variety of ads so it isn’t the same 3 over and over, and I’ll sit and watch it.
You could build a successful service that brought in $1 million a month from happy users treated ethically, but there will always be an insatiable psycopath whispering “if we sold our user data, we could make a extra $100k each month”.
So one ad becomes two. Users are tracked and the information sold. Algorithms are created to make services as addictive as possible, because “one more video” turns into “4 more ads”.
However many apologists may post about poor, destitute Google being unable to feed their children because people aren’t watching enough ads, we’re absolutely correct to oppose that endless creeping.
There is always another sleazy way to manipulate people out of money. Companies need to learn to accept that their tens of millions of dollars profit are enough.
You’re joking, right? Creators make the whole video, Youtube only has to serve it. Also, not all creators get money from ads, so Youtube gets to STEAL from the little guys.
Difference is those other networks actually make content thats arguably seen as worth paying for. YouTube recycles user content and barely pays those users for it. Yes you can say that they deserve your money for servers and whatnot, but you can’t compare YouTube with those other services you mentioned and expect people to cry big crocodile tears…
They’re not recycling anything though. They’re hosting it. For 90% of therm they’re not even charging the person to host it.
That’s only possible because of ads, because it’s not out of the kindness of their hearts. If there was not just value but negative value in Youtube, they would just shut Youtube down. Yeah, they make a lot more money than they need to maintain youtube. But they’d probably prefer to put that money towards the things actually making them money.
And yeah, it would be nice if some site existed that wasn’t corporate driven, but most of them either have no content, or are just siphoning off of Youtube’s content anyway.
And yes, you can say Youtube’s (users) content, and it virtually makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. Hosting the content is still required to do.
…That…doesn’t bode well when they already have an alternative revenue option. It sounds like the adblock is hurting their revenue, and the alternative options aren’t making it up.
Like that doesn’t sound like they have a good reason to stop trying.
You will never get the sympathy for YouTube that you’re looking for. Not as long as the ads keep being so blatantly offensive and irrelevant, and while they continue to dangle their power over the users and content creators, who ultimately make them what they are.
No one cares about their hosting fees. You’re right that it’s expensive to keep the necessary servers and bandwidth, but you’re wrong that people will care because of the lack of care YouTube has shown. On the other hand, paying for something like HBO Max, for example, is a thousand times more justifiable. Look at the novel content they actually create. They also host that content, but that’s not why people pay.
I think people go to the ends of the earth to block ads that are offensive or irrelevant. Some people block any ad because of the history of offensiveness and irrelevance that ads from the majority of services have been. Ads can be those things for lots of reasons. Too many, too long, too often repeated, actually offensive, annoying, distracting, insulting to your intelligence, conflict of interest, against the grain of the content they infest, just to name a few… But instead of advancing that front, services like YouTube would rather just cram them down your throat, and then block you if you object. Ultimately YouTube needs users. Nothing works without the users. The ads only even make money because of the users…
They should be giving us massages and making our stay as pleasant as possible… instead they are power-tripping because they think we need their bullshit, but we don’t.
But i’m not being sympathetic, i’m being realistic. I just know the end-point is going to be bad and leave everyone disappointed. Google isn’t going to try less, and none of the alternative sites popping up are remotely able to keep up. Many existed in youtube’s time and either died out or they’re still around and nobody cares.
I’m sure one day youtube will go away and take all the videos of 20 years with it, as well as leave people with nowhere to go just rubbing their heads trying to figure out where their content can go.
I will say though: Youtube needs users. Google doesn’t need users. They can go to any of their other products if they ever determine youtube isn’t worth it.
Most importantly they are simping for Google and acting as though YouTube is an independent company with its own separate stocks and unaffiliated under the Google monolith.
I dont use those particular other services to be fair. I do admittedly pay for Nebula, but to my understanding that is supposed to be more creator driven and is quite cheap anyway.
The thing about YouTube adblocking, at least for me, is that I dont think they owe me free and ad free content, or that they should be obligated to offer that for some reason. I fully understand that delivering video the way they do costs some amount of money even if not very much for an individual user, so blocking their monetization scheme means that using their website costs them money. However, I do not like or respect that company, I feel that their engagement algorithms have proven generally harmful to society as a whole by pushing people to more extreme content to improve retention, and I feel that their position as the primary place anyone thinks of to upload or view video not created by large scale studios is non-ideal. As such, when I do end up watching something there (content which, I might add, isnt even something that they create, just stuff independent creators are pretty much forced to upload there to be relevant as they are by far the largest game in town for their niche), I’m not bothered by blocking their ads, because I dont really care about Youtube’s profit margin. If anything, if doing so actually harms them, in some tiny way, that is a bonus in my book.
If Google wasn’t so blatantly malicious in their advertising practices then I would gladly pay for YouTube premium. However, their current business model of “take any and every bit of data on them to sell more product” is morally repugnant. Subsequently, I feel no shame in blocking ads and using invidious to avoid giving them even a cent of revenue.
I know but … YouTube belongs to YouTube, and I’m sure google is already making tons of money selling/using the data of all their users so…
I would not have a problem with one or two ads, but they often put three or more annoying ads per video.
Yeah, you can tell by the replies how much this forum is filled with entitled children and hipster anarchists.
That and by how anytime Google is mentioned here in literally any context, the top comments are all about how much people hate Google. Could be an article about Google rescuing lost kittens, and people here will make up stories about how Google is doing it for some evil reason and it’s a threat to the internet as we know it.
Anyone who tries to argue with me will be summarily blocked because I don’t have the patience today. Thanks in advance for helping me populate my block list.
You and the other person’s misrepresentation of the reason others are complaining about this are little more than complaining about other people complaining.
Man y’all really expect high quality, extremely diverse, and robust video streaming platform for free?!
YouTube gotta pay it’s bills somehow. Why y’all ok with paying Netflix/prime/hulu or whatever but not YouTube?!
YouTube don’t owe nobody free services. Get over it.
It’s google. They’re paying their bills just fine
Awww, poor little YouTube/Google/Alphabet, helpless and basically living on the streets, barely able to make ends meet.
literally laughs my fucking ass off
If it is so dire for the poor conglomerate, it could shutdown YouTube to cut costs.
crickets
That’s what I thought.
Won’t somebody please think of the CEO!? Spare a thought for the investment portfolio!
Exactly! Give the CEO their 9th Lamborghini and 7th country holiday mansion. They deserve it!
So they should just provide you a totally free service the costs them money because…? Are they still going to pay creators or do you want everyone to work for free to entertain you?
Petition the government to make a nationally owned and run video sharing site if that’s what you want, don’t be surprised when a capitalist company doesn’t give you everything you want for free
People are generally okay with some ads. It’s the quantity and aggressiveness and propensity for making the content worse by how they inject them into the videos that people don’t like. Yes, their infrastructure costs money to run. But their service is only possible because of the people who make videos for them and the people who watch them. It’s always been a give and take relationship. They’ve just been gradually deciding over the years to take more and more as their monopoly over a certain category of digital media has solidified and people have responded in the way people always do.
The entitlement around here and on Reddit is insane. Just stop using the service if the ads are too much. Or pay for the subscription
Corporate apologia 🙄
Do you work for free yourself? Is it completely unreasonable to expect money in return for your services?
Except Google is double dipping, making money off of your data while charging for the “privilege”. Fuck all that
Agreed. However I still can’t make a good faith argument as to why YouTube should be free. I too prefer not to pay but I never expected that to last forever and we’ve had a good run. I basically got a 15 year free trial and now they want me to pay for it - fair enough (I don’t yet thought)
JW do you know how much money google actually makes off of your data?
I tried searching it and didn’t find anything.
“Selling my data should be enough money to cover video bandwidth” is a common argument in this thread and was wondering if anyone actually had numbers to back that up.
Even that’s misleading, because Google doesn’t actually sell anyone’s data. It’s not like advertisers buy user data from Google. They have a product they want to advertise to a specific audience, and by choosing to advertise on YouTube, they can tell Google to only show these ads to their specific target audience, which YouTube can do, because they know who you are and what you’re interested in.
Do the Google engineers work for free?
No. What’s your point?
Then it sounds like everyone is being compensated just fine.
If you want to argue, then make an argument.
Just a reminder that blocking adblock is contributing to google engineers salary, so you’re arguing to maintain the status quo and not disrupting it.
Every single piece of apologism here casually pushes the idea that YouTube isn’t profitable and their poor staff are starving.
In 2020, YouTube gleefully declared they were generating $5 billion in ad revenue every 3 months.
Even after their bandwidth, storage and incredibly well paid engineers, there’s no way they’re burning that much money on expenses. That’s a billion dollars – 1000 million – per data center, per quarter. Enough to buy half of the CPUs leaving Intel’s factories
They’re not attacking ad blockers because they’re struggling to make ends meet as they hack away in their garage.
They’re doing it because there is no amount of money that can quench the greed of their shareholders.
And there’s you, grovelling at their feet.
Naw dog, just wanted to point out your one sentence reply didn’t do what you thought it did, because it was using an assumption made under a status quo to argue against the status quo, with no further details.
You’ve definitely got me curious though - do you have actual numbers for operating expenses?
Here’s where I’m coming from - in my experience, it’s not uncommon for someone barely breaking 6 figures in salary to cost the company 300-500k. Take into account senior staff, and imo we can just say each full time staff costs the company 500k. And that’s just for companies I’ve had experience with, which has benefits and compensation nowhere near as nice as googles.
I casually looked around the internet and saw the that YouTube had roughly 2000 full time engineers, so the numbers come out to, with my shitty assumptions, 833 million a month.
I’m going to say that’s the minimum, because as I said earlier, YouTube employee compensation and benefits are leaps and bounds better than mines, and we’re not taking into account the additional cost of bandwidth and hardware.
I gotta go head out so that’s as much sleuthing as I can do - care to do some number crunching for the bandwidth end of costs, so your revenue statistic can be reasoned with alongside two lemmings shitty estimate of operating costs?
I have YouTube Premium because I also use YouTube Music, so the subscription fee is worth it for me.
But if you don’t use YouTube Music, it’s far too expensive and tough to justify the cost for YouTube alone.
It’s $25 CAD. You can add 5 family members. It’s literally $5 per month.
Yep. That’s why I also pay for it. It’s a reasonable price for a valued service. Moaners gotta moan.
I am so tired of seeing this argument. I do not care about ads. That is not the problem. The problem is that YouTube thinks it is entitled to suck up every little bit of information about me and everyone within speaking distance of me just because I use their service. Do you want to run ads? Go for it. Do you want to get a little bit of basic information about your audience? Such as State or city? Honestly, that is fine. We need to establish a line, but I am not wholesale against any sort of information coming in. But that is not what they are doing. They give us these opaque TOS’s that allow them to take so much information and even sell it to third parties. It is out of control and we have no sense of what our data is worth or who is getting it. That is not OK.
If you want to do an on air read, I’m not going to skip it. If YouTube to run the occasional ad, I’ll watch it. But I will never, ever take down my VPN and ublock origin. I will never apologize for obfuscating my data a little bit. That is my right, and I will exercise it every time.
There is also one other very simple problem with this argument: you don’t have to run ads and steal all my data in order to make money. There are tons of other revenue models out there.
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they get all content for free though, unlike netflix etc.
The vast majority of content uploaded is never going to make them any money. They get free content but hosting it is incredibly expensive.
Vast majority of content won’t fucking lose them money either, you hairless ape. They show ads even on unmonetizable content, i.e. they’re using voluntary labor to make money.
Boo fuckin hoo. The poor multi billion dollar corporation, what will they ever do?
They also pay content creators, so perhaps you will need to drill into a bit more detail instead of offering a factually inaccurate single-line reply.
The ads are just out of control. Back when it was one, maybe two, ads that were 10-20s long combined, I was willing to sit through it. Now there are almost always multiple ads concurrent, ads in the middle of the video, ads at the end of the video if it plays all thr way through, then ads again before the next video plays.
Bring it back to a single ad at the beginning of the video and give me a variety of ads so it isn’t the same 3 over and over, and I’ll sit and watch it.
That’s the way greed creeps.
You could build a successful service that brought in $1 million a month from happy users treated ethically, but there will always be an insatiable psycopath whispering “if we sold our user data, we could make a extra $100k each month”.
So one ad becomes two. Users are tracked and the information sold. Algorithms are created to make services as addictive as possible, because “one more video” turns into “4 more ads”.
However many apologists may post about poor, destitute Google being unable to feed their children because people aren’t watching enough ads, we’re absolutely correct to oppose that endless creeping.
There is always another sleazy way to manipulate people out of money. Companies need to learn to accept that their tens of millions of dollars profit are enough.
you watched a short video, now bend over and take it so daddy google can get another bonus, you entitled slut 🥵🥵
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I wouldn’t object to paying if:
I think the price is very fair if you split the family plan with others
Also I think creators get a 55% cut for ad revenue which seems reasonable to me
You’re joking, right? Creators make the whole video, Youtube only has to serve it. Also, not all creators get money from ads, so Youtube gets to STEAL from the little guys.
You realize that serving the video is incredibly expensive right? There’s a reason Lemmy doesn’t support video hosting
They also pay for hosting the thousands of videos from “little guys” that no one will watch
Cry us a river. I will find ways to block ads and tell people how to do it
Difference is those other networks actually make content thats arguably seen as worth paying for. YouTube recycles user content and barely pays those users for it. Yes you can say that they deserve your money for servers and whatnot, but you can’t compare YouTube with those other services you mentioned and expect people to cry big crocodile tears…
They’re not recycling anything though. They’re hosting it. For 90% of therm they’re not even charging the person to host it.
That’s only possible because of ads, because it’s not out of the kindness of their hearts. If there was not just value but negative value in Youtube, they would just shut Youtube down. Yeah, they make a lot more money than they need to maintain youtube. But they’d probably prefer to put that money towards the things actually making them money.
And yeah, it would be nice if some site existed that wasn’t corporate driven, but most of them either have no content, or are just siphoning off of Youtube’s content anyway.
And yes, you can say Youtube’s (users) content, and it virtually makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. Hosting the content is still required to do.
Ads aren’t the only form of revenue for them, and historically, YouTube had been run at a loss for years.
…That…doesn’t bode well when they already have an alternative revenue option. It sounds like the adblock is hurting their revenue, and the alternative options aren’t making it up.
Like that doesn’t sound like they have a good reason to stop trying.
You will never get the sympathy for YouTube that you’re looking for. Not as long as the ads keep being so blatantly offensive and irrelevant, and while they continue to dangle their power over the users and content creators, who ultimately make them what they are.
No one cares about their hosting fees. You’re right that it’s expensive to keep the necessary servers and bandwidth, but you’re wrong that people will care because of the lack of care YouTube has shown. On the other hand, paying for something like HBO Max, for example, is a thousand times more justifiable. Look at the novel content they actually create. They also host that content, but that’s not why people pay.
I think people go to the ends of the earth to block ads that are offensive or irrelevant. Some people block any ad because of the history of offensiveness and irrelevance that ads from the majority of services have been. Ads can be those things for lots of reasons. Too many, too long, too often repeated, actually offensive, annoying, distracting, insulting to your intelligence, conflict of interest, against the grain of the content they infest, just to name a few… But instead of advancing that front, services like YouTube would rather just cram them down your throat, and then block you if you object. Ultimately YouTube needs users. Nothing works without the users. The ads only even make money because of the users…
They should be giving us massages and making our stay as pleasant as possible… instead they are power-tripping because they think we need their bullshit, but we don’t.
You’re right, people won’t care.
But i’m not being sympathetic, i’m being realistic. I just know the end-point is going to be bad and leave everyone disappointed. Google isn’t going to try less, and none of the alternative sites popping up are remotely able to keep up. Many existed in youtube’s time and either died out or they’re still around and nobody cares.
I’m sure one day youtube will go away and take all the videos of 20 years with it, as well as leave people with nowhere to go just rubbing their heads trying to figure out where their content can go.
I will say though: Youtube needs users. Google doesn’t need users. They can go to any of their other products if they ever determine youtube isn’t worth it.
not 90%, 100%. there are no hosting fees on YouTube for anyone. I could see being able to upload content requiring a subscription in future though
They’re one of the largest companies in world: they are the bills
People out here are really dick riding YouTube lmao.
Most importantly they are simping for Google and acting as though YouTube is an independent company with its own separate stocks and unaffiliated under the Google monolith.
I dont use those particular other services to be fair. I do admittedly pay for Nebula, but to my understanding that is supposed to be more creator driven and is quite cheap anyway.
The thing about YouTube adblocking, at least for me, is that I dont think they owe me free and ad free content, or that they should be obligated to offer that for some reason. I fully understand that delivering video the way they do costs some amount of money even if not very much for an individual user, so blocking their monetization scheme means that using their website costs them money. However, I do not like or respect that company, I feel that their engagement algorithms have proven generally harmful to society as a whole by pushing people to more extreme content to improve retention, and I feel that their position as the primary place anyone thinks of to upload or view video not created by large scale studios is non-ideal. As such, when I do end up watching something there (content which, I might add, isnt even something that they create, just stuff independent creators are pretty much forced to upload there to be relevant as they are by far the largest game in town for their niche), I’m not bothered by blocking their ads, because I dont really care about Youtube’s profit margin. If anything, if doing so actually harms them, in some tiny way, that is a bonus in my book.
Poor Google. Such a small company struggling to get by.
Meh if YouTube died tomorrow there would be a competitor the next day. Google bought YouTube back in the day and there are already like platforms.
YouTube is highly profitable already.
If Google wasn’t so blatantly malicious in their advertising practices then I would gladly pay for YouTube premium. However, their current business model of “take any and every bit of data on them to sell more product” is morally repugnant. Subsequently, I feel no shame in blocking ads and using invidious to avoid giving them even a cent of revenue.
How much of their revenue is spent toward content generation?
I know but … YouTube belongs to YouTube, and I’m sure google is already making tons of money selling/using the data of all their users so… I would not have a problem with one or two ads, but they often put three or more annoying ads per video.
Yes
😂 reading the replies to your comment is the fun part. Watching people lose their minds over a comment.
Yeah, you can tell by the replies how much this forum is filled with entitled children and hipster anarchists.
That and by how anytime Google is mentioned here in literally any context, the top comments are all about how much people hate Google. Could be an article about Google rescuing lost kittens, and people here will make up stories about how Google is doing it for some evil reason and it’s a threat to the internet as we know it.
Anyone who tries to argue with me will be summarily blocked because I don’t have the patience today. Thanks in advance for helping me populate my block list.
You and the other person’s misrepresentation of the reason others are complaining about this are little more than complaining about other people complaining.