YouTube cracking on ad blockers.

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.
- They knew what they were getting into when they acquired yt - or at least they should have known. I was a teen when yt started and even I could see how much of a money pit it would be. If G wants to throw wads of cash at it, fine. But I'm not propping up their fiscally-failed project with my own money.
  
  You try to bait others into your poorly-crafted arguments when the core statement is stupid: there is no way yt would or will be profitable, full stop. That's it. And G waited way, way too long to try and monitize or start a subscription model, and now they have a sea of users who will not pay because 'it's always been free'. Through and through G fucked themselves with yt. They only have themselves to blame for the situation they now find themselves in.
  
  It's an amazing video sharing site that's made the world better in so many ways, especially for small businesses and individuals. Just the access to video guides on how to repair things was a game changer on its own, breaking content creators out of the traditional media monopoly has been absolutely huge.
  
  All this and the only cost is they occasionally show adverts, it's such a tiny tiny price
  
  occasionally
  
  Something tells me that you either haven't been on yt since 2010, or you block their ads yourself. When I watch family members use yt, it's 3x 30-second back-to-back unskippable ads for a 5 minute video. If it's a longer video like a show episode, several randomly placed ads interrupt the video. It pains me.
  
  It was acceptable when they did a toast overlay for 10 seconds at the bottom of a video during the midsection, that you could also click away with no delay if it bothered you. Now it's just like cable TV. (shoutout to yt TV which started at $35 and is now like $85 even if you don't want 90% of the content)
  
  I wouldn't say it 'made the world a better place' either, as most content is redundant (lets have 75 short unboxing and first impression vids of this week's new phone!) or just pointless (reaction videos, prank videos...). It's a place for netizens to throw videos at and see if they get lucky.
  
  I subscribe to 65 people, most of which have stopped producing content long ago (10y+). I have... 4 creators that I actually care about (2 of them I support through patreon, 1 via occasional merchandise, the other doesn't have any means of external support). If they relocated, I'd follow them. But if the rest (~25 active-ish) suddenly stopped, eh it's a bummer but no real loss.
  
  Kinda akin to MySpace. Everyone in my circle knows about it and remembers it fondly in the early days, but now it's not really maintaining a pulse. It's just there, existing - and always craving more money.
  
  I can agree with some of that but I really don't think it's akin to MySpace, I don't think I've ever met anyone who doesn't use YouTube for something, sure there are a million Iphone unboxing videos but there's also how to reach the awkward nut on my exact model car, literally everything I need to get started in my new hobby, and a million funny videos and interesting projects to relax to.
  
  We might see something replace YouTube it it's better at video sharing, there's a way for creators to get paid and it can attract an audience but that's a big ask.
- 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
  
  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.
  
  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)
- Do the Google engineers work for free?
  
  No. What's your point?
  
  Then it sounds like everyone is being compensated just fine.
  
  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 doubt the information needed to accurately predict their costs is publicly available.
  
  But they announced $29.2 billion in revenue in 2022. That's about as much as countries like Australia, Canada and Italy spent on their entire military.
  
  And that's just money. Google is absolutely aware of how much indirect value there is in the internationally recognised brand and near total capture of a communication medium.
  
  So again, who exactly am I supposed to feel sorry for? Who is supposed to be suffering? It's not their staff. It's not their shareholders. It's not their suppliers.
  
  They pay a lot of creators fuck all, despite the platform being nothing without them. Will the extra revenue be going to them? Because nobody has mentioned them in any of their guilt trips so far.
  
  As far as I can tell, I'm supposed to feel morally obligated to listen to KFC advertisements at ear splitting volume every 2 minutes for the privilege of watching a video that will make the creator nothing so that some of the wealthiest people in the world can grow wealthier.
  
  To put it bluntly, that's corporate propaganda.
  
  Here's to open source alternatives taking off, but personally I'm not holding my breath.
  
  Big creators, moderators, and hosts gotta get paid, and as much as I believe in people doing things out of the goodness of their hearts (I am on Lemmy after all), video hosting seems like an order of magnitude more expensive to deal with than text and photos.
  
  If you want to argue, then make an argument.

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.
- It's actually still $25. You, the user footing the bill, isn't getting 6 people's worth of entertainment from it.
  
  It's also $300 a year, plus taxes and fees and whatever else. If you're actually collecting on those 5 other users, every month, reliably and automatically (unless your time is literally worth nothing), then sure. But financially it's usually ill-advised to assume that 'if I can just get X others to do Y for Z time, then the price goes down'. Most fall into this, fail to capitalize on the opportunity, and end up spending equal or more compared to a single-user subscription.
  
  Just be sure that the 'winner' in the situation is truly you, and you aren't being had by the thought of $5.
  
  It's actually $5 when everyone pays me their portion.
  
  In Canada we have this technology called e-transfer and automatic payments. No need to ask.
  
  Not sure why Lemmy users are so angry about paying a few dollars for ad free entertainment.
  
  So, you just reiterated what I said, which is weird and unnecessary but okay.
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.

Thanks for having a reasonable take and not being a corporate apologist.
Thanks for having a reasonable take and not being a corporate apologist.
Thanks for having a reasonable take and not being a corporate apologist.

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 🥵🥵
- Another comment in here pointed out that there's also sort of a tragedy of the commons.
  
  When half your userbase is blocking ads, you have to squeeze twice as much revenue out of the remaining half, resulting in more ads for those that see them.

they get all content for free though, unlike netflix etc.

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.
- They pay some creators a pittance, and can revoke that amount and/or ability at any time, for any reason, even for reasons which are not listed in their terms, are factually inaccurate, or otherwise allows them to fuck the creator. Yt is like the waitstaff in the US, "yeah we pay them" ($3 an hour and the rest has to come from elsewhere to make ends meet).
  
  Call me when you see a 90 second sponsor segment for SquareSpace in your next Netflix show.
  
  Oh boy, I have bad news.
  
  Product placement is not a literal advertisement shoehorned into an otherwise unrelated media.
  
  YouTube does not have the authority to dictate what content creators include in their video, nor do they charge them for content they promote. The way in which YouTube generates revenue is through ads and subscriptions. Other streaming services do the same; the only difference is semantics.
  
  I'll refrain from further arguments as the last hasn't been touch on: product placement is not persistent sponsorships or advertising. We only see this on YouTube as they do not pay creators a fair amount of the cut, and thus creators need to augment their yt income. We don't see any James Bond/007 movies where he has a flat tire and breaks the fourth wall to ask the viewer if they have AA service, as 'it is very useful and quite affordable' with a 20% discount voucher for opening weekend viewers, shown at the bottom of the screen. 'that's theaa.com, and tell them James sent you' before cutting to the next scene where the Aston is arriving at the hotel on a flatbed.
  
  Merely driving the Aston without the AA bit, as a form of product placement, isn't exactly advertising in the same sense. There is realism and there is peddling out of necessity.
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?

I wouldn't object to paying if:

Their pricing was more reasonable
A fairer cut went to content creators
They had something that actually qualified as a search function on their site
They weren't trying to bully everyone into paying

This. I used to pay for ytp family plan, way back when now. I had to skip a month as money was that tight. When I went to resub, they wanted an extra ~$5 a month, or like 25%, for the same content and features. No advertised changes in revenue sharing amounts.

I just pay creators directly now, via patreon and ko-fi. I don't care about yt, I care about a few creators. A few have stated that $1 is more than they make from yt per user per month. The revenue split is wild.

I don't care about ytm. Cut the cost in half and give more to the people that are actually providing content. Right now yt in my eyes is greedy and their additional price hikes solidify that.
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

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.

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.

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.