They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
No, it could not have been avoided. I don’t watch ads. Ads don’t need to be “scam ads” for me to not watch them. I just don’t. Full stop.
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I’m not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or “Mr. Beast” types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
Did you get a premium account?
No everything has to be for profit in this life.
I’ve no contract with them, I’ve not made any purchases. They post something online for anyone to see.
They are completely free of locking their content behind a paywall, there are plenty of platforms for that.
But I want to make my first statement clear: no every single thing any human being does has to be done just for the sole purpose of getting an economical profit. That would be the death of humanity.
I still remember 90s internet when we had tons of websites with lots of content that was just there because the creators were fans of such content, no further intentions. Barely any ads or monetization whatsoever. The ‘shark’ mentality is killing internet.
Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
That’s why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I’m old fashioned.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I’ll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.
I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.
Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people’s voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There’s a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I’m sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.It’s hard to run AI on phones and low-end hardware though. It’s not that easy.
Give it 5 more years in hardware performance improvements and software/model optimization and I don’t see a problem. The important part is that improvements are made public for everyone to use and improve upon instead of letting openai and microsoft take the whole cake
I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.
What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?
Google is operating at a 24% net profit margin. They don’t need to get their shareholders more money…
Do you actually understand how this works? It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.
At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.
And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.
If investors go elsewhere then they’re trading for a higher risk and return ratio than a massive company with rich history like Google. Plus, it frequently performs large buybacks and offers, and even offered a dividend recently. There is always going to be something attractive to investors, here.
I mean, yeah. It did so for years.
Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.
They actually have a pretty huge net profit margin and what basically amounts to a monopoly on advertisement, so even if their ads reached less intended targets it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line much.
I sort of spent a decade uploading and streaming to it, started before it was even bought by Google, so I’ve really dug myself a pit at this point.
People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
TBH I don’t expect AI to be able to solve this.
some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
What would be terrifying about it?
Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.
EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).
When I have to wade through sixteen different “Would you like to join YouTube Plus!?!?!?!” pop-ups every time I whisper the words “online video” in the direction of my phone, I’m rarely inclined to use YouTube to begin with. Its a bad fucking service.
My TV doesn’t pull this shit on me. I get Show -> Ads -> Show -> Ads in regularly spaced intervals, like I’m a civilized human being. I don’t get WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET SLIGHTLY FEWER ADS!!! GIVE ME
$8$12$15$20!!! every time the fucking thing turns on.
