It’s not even just the Internet. Marketing fucks up every aspect of our civilization. We can’t even handle having a professional election anymore without trashy ads and people acting like children. You can’t even watch legitimate news anymore. …nevermind mind whack kids pranking people on YouTube being used and turning into assholes for YouTube monetization.
Honestly I’m starting to wonder if the reason why we got ourselves into a ad filled hell hole is because we expect soo much to be free and those things have to make money somehow and server space and the electricity they run on aren’t free and the only people willing to spend money are whales and advertisers and from what I’ve been told YouTube was never profitable on it’s own for Google and the only reason they’ve been keeping the site on is because it brings attention to other Google services while also preventing competition so I greatly think we’d all benefit from being open to paying for sites that are like YouTube so YouTube and advertisers have some real competitors I don’t know how a my theoreticall site would profit without ads but it’s still sad that sites like YouTube are expensive and unprofitable making it so Google is the only option solely because they can afford the loses making yt premium even more greedy
IF you want to get down the rabbit hole of expectations. I lose 34% off my pay. Like that. Poof. Taxes. I lose another 50% of what’s left to rent and groceries (not eating out). That doesn’t cover internet or utilities. Then transportation. And that’s just essentially living. My place isn’t all that.
And now you want me to pay for every website I visit. Or every service I use? Or I don’t use them and just go back to “essentially being alive.”
And I’m in the top 20% of income earners according to recent stats, which is insane because I’m not making fuck you money.
I think the real issue is greed. There’s no need for Disney+ to cost $20 a month. There’s no need for me to pony up another $1.5 a month to get 50GB of storage instead of the 5GB they know you’ll outgrow in a week. There’s zero need to pay $18 a month for a blue checkmark. They tell you it’s because it costs lots and lots of money to operate and the ads just barely cover our costs. Sure.
It’s just greed. It’s all just amoral, unethical, greed. Right on up from the rent/mortgage to all the shit you buy or “consume.”
We saw this surge with COVID, GME, crypto, NFT, absolutely wild, insidious, and morally bankrupt schemes exposing just how much wealth is pooled away from working class (they actually call them ‘dark pools’, where money goes and disappears). Something clicked. And it became a feeding frenzy where everyone is just steadily driving up prices, but not a single company is unprofitable. All the lay offs? None of those tech companies were in trouble. In fact, most made record profits!
I’m not paying them a penny either way, but if you’re going to, wouldn’t you want more features for your money, even if you don’t use them? Or are you suggesting they charge less for a subscription sans music?
I’ve been around since YT red, and while Google Play Music was a better app, I am OK with YT music and primarily watch YT over the other sites and yt music is all I listen to in the house or car. So, while not cheap $22/mo for premium family fits my needs.
I’d be OK if yt allowed me to skip/blocked sponsored ads too. At least on PC sponsor block works well. For my TV its a few more hoops to get that there, which I haven’t done. Not terrible to ffw across them
This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is "buy YouTube premium, so you won't be stuck in our ad supported model" and now we're ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn't YouTube premium exactly that?
What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can’t ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
I’m sure they can take a page from every online service before we entered the 2020s, where you could pay to enter without ads, like Netflix was. But no, the ad company has to inject ads into everything.
You’re right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn’t math.
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It’s not mysterious at all.
There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.
Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.
All those are fine suggestions, but a “free with ads” option isn’t that bad either; the real problem isn’t the ads themselves. The real problem is how intrusive the ads are, how many of them there are, as well as much information they (and YouTube) collect on you. Plus, in this case, the company in question isn’t exactly a small company who is financially struggling. It’s the classic capitalist problem of “infinite growth”, where your profits have to be constantly increasing.
But there’s nothing inherently wrong about the idea of having ads, just like there’s nothing inherently wrong about youtubers having sponsors.
I don’t mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they’ve become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I’m trying to watch and I’ll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
I’m not against using ads to support websites but it’s the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
You see YouTube is a American company and in America every thing is extreme you ether have a lot of ads or no ads you can have a extremely massive car or a cat that’s soo small it doesn’t exist
Straight up what made me switch to YouTube premium was a bit of a 2 pronged thing really
They started including Google Play Music with it, and then I got an unskippable 1 hour ad in front of a video that after I reloaded the page I got the same ad again.
Edit: I don’t have an issue paying for a service if the price is right. I got what I wanted for I price I’m willing to pay.
They bundle YT Music in your subscription because they wanted a share in music streaming, invested in an infrastructure on their platform and then realized that their service doesn’t offer enough to make people want to use it over their competitors’ music streaming services. Instead of taking that loss or making their service worth using, they bundle the shit nobody wants with what everyone needs and use that to justify a price hike.
If there was a basic subscription that just removes ads on the videos I click on without any other useless crap attached to it, I would pay for that. But no, it’s predatory, anti-consumer bullshit, so I just block their ads.
The whole reason is to either make it so annoying that you switch to their paid service or get as many ad dollars into the shortest amount of time possible either way. This is just greed to squeeze as much out of the consumer before they break us.
Semi-related: what’s a good frontend for android TV? I’m loving NewPipe on my phone, but on the TV it refuses to work in full screen and often in not-full screen too…
There’s a popup that YouTube has started showing these days that tells you “AdBlockers are illegal. Stop using them” or something to that effect. This blocks that popup from appearing.
Somehow I still haven’t seen that message despite also using uBlock and Firefox. Perhaps I’m just further down the line and Google will eventually come for me too, but I wonder if my DuckDuckGo and Privacy Badger extensions may also have something to do with it.
I keep getting that pop-up, I have had ublock installed for years. I haven’t done anything special to unlock and just refresh the page and it goes away.
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don’t have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That’s why the change is all that matters.
Prominent example is printer hardware and the ink. Hardware is sold at little mark-up or at a loss and then they force you to use their iteration of liquid gold. Printer ink is dirt cheap to manufacture and costs more than human blood.
There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
It’s funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they’ve been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
Data aquisition for analysis, AI training, tracking and simply having monopolized a space. Theres a lot of positives and indirect profit that might make it feasible.
But does it “Good” for the public like say road improvement?
It does “Good” for the company by increasing the quality of the output of it’s AI/LLM, more data to track users etc.
Is that 10 million active users of uBlock Origin or 10 million active installs? Also relevant because I’ve seen workplaces that deploy UBO to all users thanks to advertising being an easy vector of getting users to click random links they shouldn’t
So I can’t find my original source for that one anymore, but I looked at the Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org and they show a total of ≈17m (10mil on Chrome, 6.9mil on Firefox).
I don’t see a good active users number on uBlockO’s website or anything, and I also don’t have a good way of estimating how many of those installs are second or third browsers; but an enterprise install probably wouldn’t go through the extension storefronts and would instead be delivered directly via MDM. Whether that means they’d count toward the browsers’ totals, I’m not sure.
Still, it seems to me that the vagaries around this probably cancel each other out decently well; sure, some might be double-counted or enterprise installs, but the actual uBlockO users are probably more inclined to be power users, online more often than other users. I’d say that 4% is probably in the ballpark at least. Maybe it’s 1%, maybe it’s 6%, but I don’t think it’s terribly far off.
I followed those instructions to the letter aswell as cleared all the cookies and I’m still getting the popup. I first came up with this code more than 3 months ago so it’s probably outdated by now.
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