Let's pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The "bad" year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they've more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they "need" the money.
Some years ago ago, I was a happy subscriber to Google Music. But, they added it to the graveyard, and instead grafted on some music playing functionality to YouTube and called it YouTube Music. So, I went back to Spotify.
Then I started paying for YouTube Premium Lite. It wasn't unreasonably expensive, although it was a bit annoying I couldn't just have "YouTube" in the household, like with Netflix. So if wife would cast a video to the TV, it would play with ads.
It was about a year ago, when Google starting cracking down on adblockers, that they also removed an option to pay for the service. I think YouTube Premium Lite wasn't a thing in the US (correct me if I'm wrong), but they removed YT Premium Lite, and the only option left was a twice as expensive YouTube Premium bundle that included YouTube Music.
Tldr: fucked up Google Music, then removed an option to pay for YouTube premium, leaving a fairly expensive alternative with the pile of shit they replaced Google music with. It'll be a rough time if they manage to force ads. I won't pay for it, out of principle.
Edit: I looked at the numbers again. I'd have to pay more for YouTube than for the highest Netflix tier. It's more than Prime and HBO combined. They also don't have to front large sums to fund risky projects. If they didn't include YouTube Music, I might have considered it. But with it, it just pisses me off, they can go get f.ed
You know enough to find a different app and make it do what you need it to. Not a hard thing, but something many non-tech savvy people could struggle with, or more likely--
People often will just use what's there. We know we have options, we are aware of the privacy concerns... but many people simply aren't and/or don't care enough to do anything about it.
We spend a lot of time here, so it seems to us like second nature to avoid intrusive apps... I find in my day-to-day life not many people are talking about that kind of stuff, or don't have much knowledge/experience in that realm. (I realize that is anecdotal).
I 100% agree with your statements--just trying to rationalize how so many people end up using/staying with these ever-worsening services/apps...
To be fair, one of the apps mentioned, [Re]Vanced, is literally just the stock app with extra features patched in and the premium features enabled for free (like no ads and downloads). It makes sense that it would be more user friendly. Allowing that modified version doesn't get them any revenue though while still costing them to host and serve the content to those users.
At least with NewPipe it supports multiple sites and is its own app with their own code and UI.
I pay $4/mo, mainly for YouTube music (I'm part of a friend's family plan).
It's pretty convenient since you can use the background audio on an iPad as well - I don't use it often but it's nice when I do. And there's no ads there it's pretty insane seeing the level of ads when I try and use my work phone which I'm not signed into.
Also, you can make channels within your single goggle account so I made one for my mom and bro so they get no ads aswell. They have to sign in to my acct which can feel a little sketch but I trust them since they're just using the YT app on their TVs. They stay in their own user acct. and it doesn't affect my history or anything
That's likely what they want. If you're not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a 'customer'. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you're blocked or when you eventually stop using it.
Thing is you also stop sharing and commenting and engaging with other users. If it wasn't useful they would pull the plug long ago, nothing technical is preventing them.
LOL what are you talking about? The users had a hissy fit but after that Reddit got everything they wanted. The users mostly all returned a few days later and it was business as usual. Since then they opened up about selling user data and IPO'd and still nothing.
It's become abundantly clear now that there's level of abuse these users won't endure.
If the price was even relatively sane I would be okay with that honestly.
But no, they need to keep driving the price up and up. I have to pay my part so that little Jimmy can host 297 hours of white noise on his account that no one wants to watch.
They simply need to change their tactics a little. It cost you some small sane amount to host your videos there. If your videos don't g gather watches and make money you should be the one paying for them.
I want to pay about nine bucks a month for a family account it's just b-f rate content. You can pay less to get actual well rated movies from other services.
Also give me the option not to throw in Google music I don't give a s*** about Google music.
Weird to see this downvoted. Youtube is actually a good service that also isn't cheap to run, and it also pays good(?) money to the people producing popular content on the platform so why not pay for using it? Or, you know, live with the ad infestation. Businesses need money to run, and if you don't pay for the content, then either it's the ads or eventually the whole platform needs to be shut down.
It is a separate discussion if Premium pricing is appropriate etc. But it's quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be "free" even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
It's funny how this comes after Chrome's switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can't block ads on the first-party site, they're going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
Search shows you random videos because “the algorithm” is hoping to drive you through to videos that are the most monetized and the most likely to keep you on the platform based on their data
The shorts thing is because they can pack more ads into 15 second bits of content while using less bandwidth and they’re hoping to hijack your attention with an “endless stream” of short clips a la TikTok or instagram reels
The video bandwidth drops to low every time because they’re hoping people will still watch, see the ads, and not bump the quality up, saving Google on bandwidth costs
The live streams thing is just more advertising revenue again
None of that applies if you’re a paying customer like me, and I see all the same bs. So no, it’s really just bad design, it’s not trying to do any of the stuff you mentioned.
The live streams thing is not about advertising. Problems like putting the hearts button on top of the chat instead of next to the chat or having the chat cover up the entire left side of the stream every time a single message is sent are just because they don't care.
Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!
Host them yourself to watch them locally.
Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!
We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.
I also recommend NewPipe for Android. It lets you download in multiple formats and shows comments in a mobile format (you can get it through the F-Droid store or from github.)
Made a script/cron job to auto dl new videos from my favorite channels with ytdlp and then they are hosted through jellyfin. Archived forever, ad free, accessible to me from anywhere.
Depends on where you get it. Recently had to go through and find another version, as mine was detected by YouTube and just said to download the official version of YouTube to play videos.
Gotta love this shit.
Conservatives/companies: "Let the market decide!"
The market: "We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it."
Companies: "Waaaaaa, they are fighting us."
This isn't the market deciding as it's not using an alternative
It's more like an event charging too high of an entry fee so you jump the fence - if you were to let the market decide, you'd pay, go to another event or stay at home, and the event organisers are free to build the fence higher to stop people jumping it... Google have a product that's good enough that the majority of people will watch it with ads or pay to watch without ads, and nobody else has come close despite their efforts
As much as I'd like competition, what is on par with shoplifting is still not a competitor or alternative to the YouTube
Also, fighting against them IS 100% a valid method of market action. We are part of the market, we want to support the creators, not the platform, so we block their ads and pledge to the creator's patreon. As an analog to the concert example, it is jumping the fence to stiff the venue and spending the ticket money on the band's merch.
If you are going to use shoplifting as an analog, then what they do to content creators is wage theft. They purchased a service which has hundreds of thousands to millions of people "working" for them producing content, which they then censor or go to great lengths to minimize the amount they are paying for it, to the point that the overwhelmingly vast majority of is free to them, then they place ads on the content, even if it is demonetized to reap their reward for the work without actually paying for it.
Also, wage theft vs shoplifting in real life is an orders of magnitude difference in how much money it actually accounts for, and I will let you guess which side of that scale has created a crater when it was released.
As soon as 3rd party clients don't work as they do anymore, I am stopping going to YouTube. Simple as, I know it doesn't matter as a singular thing, I am just one user. Was the same with reddit, now I am here but reddit is still going (how well we don't need to debate now).
I've been using youtube on Firefox with ublock since the premium price raise. Even on android.
The experience is not great, but that makes sure I don't have ads at all.
Also discovered unhooked addon yesterday. Is desktop only, but great for going into less youtube rabbit holes that waste my time.
Fuck them. I'd rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.
The issue is not only the ads, it's the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it's the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it's every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn't work for you, it works against you. That's not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.
Youtube isn't some one of a kind miracle. There's at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it's not as difficult as people think.
It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube's library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it's a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.
No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.
The number of times I've heard "XYZ will never happen" in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.
Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we'd all like to see, but it will happen.
If the modern internet teaches us anything, its that everything is ephemeral even when you stringently catalogue every last byte of data. People just dont need access to 90% of YouTube's library, yet Youtube has to pay big money to make 100% of that library available 24/7 365.
There's already rips at the seams of these systems. Time is not on the side of YouTube.
Video hosting is still rather expensive, live streaming even more. Not sure that even youtube is profitable. Until some new tech comes along I think only amazon would be able to support some kind of viable alternative - and not sure they will be much better.
It's currently my preferred YouTube alternative. Granted it obviously doesn't have as much content as YouTube. But several well known content creators post to both YouTube and Odysee now.
Some of the ones I follow include: Louis Rossman, Anton Petrov, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and Zach Star Himself. Just to name a few.
And there's also a browser extension called "Watch on Odysee" which adds a button to the YouTube video if the video is also found on Odysee so you can "watch on Odysee" instead of YouTube. Which can help you locate your favorite youtubers on the platform and let you follow them.
And there is also an Odysee mobile app if you like watching videos on mobile.
Honestly, huge shout out to the wave of enshittification crashing through Google and reddit and forcing me off their platforms. Decade-long debilitating addiction solved.
Yup. At the end of the day, YouTube provides two resources: entertainment and information. Given that I'm willing to drop any particular creator or show, which I am, entertainment can always be found elsewhere. Worst case, I suffer a little bit of FOMO. And information in the internet ecosystem is like water in nature; it finds a way to keep flowing around
Damn, I got my setup so perfect on the TV with SmartTube. But I will not be able to tolerate ads. Then I'd rather only watch on Firefox with uBlock on my laptop.
I did for many years. But then I moved to Korea and they don't allow family plans and paying 4 individual ones is just not in our budget. Then probably just no YouTube for me.
Heads up, "I've" is not grammatically correct when "have" is your verb. Using "have" in a contraction when you're using past-perfect tense. For example, "I've been" is an acceptable shortening of "I have been".
Is it actually incorrect? I don't think it's necessarily wrong, but it just sounds bizarre or Shakespearean if you use it when it's not an auxiliary verb.
"I've no need for that." is a perfectly cromulent sentence.
I personally have no problem with paying for a service. However, if I buy premium to remove the ads, YT has no longer the need to collect my data. But it is Google and they won't stop collecting. That, plus the fact that Google basically has a monopoly with youtube are the reasons I don't buy premium.
Some of the youtube channels I watch also have channels on Peertube instances or on Odysee. Both options allow me to follow using RSS. I prefer my views to go to these platforms, so hopefully more content creators see these as viable hosts for their videos.
Peertube is also federated, so you can follow channels from your Mastodon account (and I think Lemmy too). You could also spin up your own instance if you like too.
I assume you help and financially support your instance of choice to help them with server costs? Video platforms are much more expensive to host than text platforms like mastodon or lemmy.
If they say like that, it means that's now is allowed to make a third party youtube client with login support?
I'd immediately install an officially sanctioned third party youtube app without shorts and without the algorithmic feed, if all i would need to do is let the phone play ads when i'm doing something else
The company shut down one of the most popular third-party apps, "YouTube Vanced," in 2022.
Vanced takes the official YouTube Android client and installs a duplicate, alternative version with a bunch of patches.
It also adds features the official app doesn't have, like additional themes and accessibility features, "repeat" and "dislike" buttons, and the ability to turn off addictive "suggestions" that appear all over the app.
Rather than going after the projects, Google says it's going to start disrupting users who are using these apps.
The company continues: "We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service."
If you remember back to when Google aggressively fought to keep third-party YouTube apps off of Windows Phone, the company seemed to take a similar stance against all third-party YouTube clients, even if they wanted to integrate ads.
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Nebula is really good. I just bought a lifetime sub. Expensive but pays itself back in only a few years. Plus the creators there run it as a coop that has a takeover poison pill of some kind.
@rbos@EverlastongOS that's the only thing I don't understand. If it's lifetime sub, how do they fund their costs from your usage after?
Host providers don't have a one-time payment lifetime subscription for bandwidth usage. Eventually you will surpass the bandwidth cost of your lifetime sub and they'd be losing money keeping you. Something doesn't feel right.
why would you NOT get youtube premium? it's $22 for 6 users and you get music and ad-free youtube it's honestly the best streaming service
i do think that channel subscriptions should include ad free watching for that channel, similar to twitch subs. so if people want to subscribe to just one channel they can get ad free viewing for that channel