Sometimes the answer really is: it is well managed product.
The YouTube management has to be adaptive enough to work in the small window that society allows at that time.
If you see Youtubers getting kicked out constantly you might be subscribing to some weird stuff...
They take 45% of YouTube premium subscription revenue. That’s higher than the App Store (30%), Spotify (30%), and any other content marketplace on the internet.
I think they get a free pass for now because they allow creators to monetize with their own native ads within videos. If I had to guess, this may become a point of contention in the future…
The fact that we’ve accepted such ridiculously high profit margins from tech companies is simply due to their network effects monopolies, and the impossibility of competing with them.
Just look at any other marketplace business with more competition, like say a grocery store or any brick and mortar retail. Their net margins are often sub-5%. Physically shipping goods across the world is far more expensive than delivering video.
Only other monopolies, like Governments, can get away with charging 45% taxes. Having known a few Youtube employees and also a few federal government employees, I would say the low stress, low effort, low fear of layoffs, low work output expectations are...ahem...similar.
Youtubes profit margin isn't that high so it is pretty close to that, it took a long time for it to get profitable even with Google ads, unlike the digital stores that serves customers for basically nothing compared to how much revenue they bring in.
Twitch also takes around that much from streamers and they still aren't profitable since it costs more to serve the streams than they make.
And then charge even higher rate if you give them more money. Ask them how they spend it? Proudly poorly. /rant
Are you sure? It is a logistics issue, not a technology issue. Streaming video, near instantly, around the world, without any perceivable user-experience issues, infinite times, for infinite users is a massive-massive technology issue.
Amazon same day deliver was problably the most revolutionary thing that came to the domain, but otherwise shipping 1000 cars across the world, while impressive, is a pretty straight forward task. The technology that you need are ships and trucks. You can use a 1950s era technology to do that.
Do you think bandwidth and storage are free?
If I open the Youtube app on my phone, I have to click through 3 menus before I can even see the newest video from the users I'm subscribed to, and then I have to watch 2 ads that change the entire layout of the app to present me more information about those ads - or I can pay $30 a month to skip those ads.
If I have spotty connectivity, I also can't buffer a video to watch anymore. I have to wait for some minimal percent to load, watch that part, then wait again. If I skip ahead, the earlier part is lost and has to be re-buffered.
Furthermore, not of immediate consequence to me, but still insufferably annoying is that creators I follow are regularly suspended from earning income on YouTube due to false copyright strikes, or saying a "bad word" that has no clear enforcement guidelines and seems to be different from person to person or day to day, and thus have begun to produce less content or found other platforms to move their videos to first.
It's pretty terrible, from my point of view. It's a bad service where a good service used to be, surviving on the dregs of goodwill and familiarity from its heyday.
Creators themselves PAY to upload/host something. Their in-video ads are what allows monetization.
No adds at all from youtube. Uploading COSTS money, maybe a few dollars.
Creators make their money solely from sponsors or selling/advertising something themselves.
It isn't very popular since the internet doesn't advertise your content for you, youtube do that so its much easier for content creators to get big on youtube. Also it is free to upload on youtube, so small creators start there, small creators later grow to big creators and stay on youtube.
My issues with YouTube are usually limited to some UI problems. I think I can even list them all:
1) Thumbnails autoplay but the disclaimer about paid content is so large that often I click to watch the video and get the paid content info page.
2) Translates stuff depending on my browser language and IP. Very annoying
3) The add to queue button sometimes doesn't work and just plays the video right away. Very annoying
4) When I'm listening to songs, sometimes I just let it auto play the next song it picks and often it picks 2 hours long video of songs sticked one after another. Very annoying
5) The share button adds som ID that I have to remove every time, it's probably to track my sharing behavior. Annoying
6) When chromecasting, tapping on a video or receiving it through airdrop used to give me an option to add it to the queue or play it right away. Now just plays right away. Annoying
7) If I navigate from a page and go back I'm presented with a different page and often the video I noticed previously isn't there.
Besides that, I think I don't have much issues with YT. Best money spent on a premium subscription ever.
you tube is close to perfect using third party clients, like PipePipe.
it automatically skips paid adverts in the video. not even a shadow of actual ads. background music only. etc.
but now they are adding those dumb features, such as translating titles, as if i'm a peasant who don't speak several languages. so lame.
It was a few days ago for the AI auto-filter and also Beato copyright claims.
Then there's the issue of AI slop channels, and pre-AI slop directed at children like the infamous Elsa and Spiderman spam.
Every so often they also are in the news for AB testing some anti-adblock measure. And people used to adblock who see it with ads for the first time in a while seem to always be shocked at the level of ads for pure fraud or malware.
YouTube seems to be a terrible place if you put anything up there that you actually care about. But I agree on one thing: it's not "ripe for disruption". Google sank so much losses into it for so many years just to have this monopoly, so it's not going to be easy to replace.
They have all the eyeballs. All creators that got fucked over YT stay on the platform if their accounts are restored. And who can blame them, where are they going to go, Vimeo?
Also, the amount of highjacked accounts and the length of time to regain control is absurdly long.
And Shorts. I wish I could disable Shorts from my feed.
A website? ("platform" for advertising) A website's users? ("you are the product") Paid subscriptions? (insufficient revenue to sustain operations)
If YouTube is a "product" does that mean US products liability laws apply? (Please support your answer with facts not opinions)
History so far has shown website popularity varies over time
https://hosting.com/blog/the-most-visited-websites-every-yea...
Would anyone today claim that, for example, Yahoo.com was "extremely well managed"? Yahoo was #1 for many years. Change is inevitable
It is hilarious to see people obsessed with targeting virtually anything for "disruption" until their favorite website becomes the target
In any organisation there is always room for improvement. Monopoly power reduces, perhaps even eliminates, incentive to improve
So they started discounting AI data collection bots?
Source: Similarweb, world-wide
So, I stopped going there as much. They stopped respecting visitor intentions. Just like every other platform, they just want to keep you on the site for as long as possible sifting through a feed of dopamine slop.
videos you just watched
videos you watched 10 years ago
auto dubbed videos on topics you are not interested
clickbait videos with 10 views
anything, but what you are used to watching
If you have to lose a lot of money for a long time to compete, how is it ripe for disruption?
YouTube works because it has eyeballs, content/creators, advertisers, a cdn, and has made enough piece with large copyright license holders that it's allowed to continue.
Competing with YouTube is certainly possible, and there's a lot of fun technical work, but there's also a big challenge to attract the people you need to make the thing work. You probably already need to already have two out of four of users, content, advertisers, cdn. And you need to get licenseholders on board quick. And probably law enforcement as well.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a monopoly, but it would be hard to compete with. I think monopoly would depend on the defined market... a broadly defined market might include netflix and even cable tv. A narrowly defined market would include durably published user uploads, which has a lot fewer entrants.
how can you expect company that has less resource make an alternative ???? I still remember when microsoft throwing money to make mixer (twitch alternative) and yet it failed miserably
tiktok is close as we can get honestly, but youtube also expand toward shorts
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find such kind of work "fun". I would have a constant feeling of "well, we are simply trying to mimic what YT did, maybe we should just hire someone that worked there and do the same, instead of going through the same inevitable mistakes".
Handling massive amount of video ingestion from content creator; Transcoding to various format that is optimal for various devices, Live streaming with Live to VOD, Geo restriction, Live Commenting, Ad insertion and penalise adblocker, Recommendation engine.
There are many features and challenges that are unique to OTT streaming applications and running at YouTube scales makes it even more challanging, or fun to some, to handle.
It is, but it's hard to gain the same audience share for all the reasons you mention.
Just ask Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, Odysee, Peertube, Rumble, Kick, BitChute...
The problem PeerTube has is that there isn't demand for what it is doing because YouTube is a pretty good video custodian. Although everyone seems to be sensibly alert to the risk that they eventually go bad, right now it works. Obviously don't expect any video currently on YouTube to be available in 20 years though.
In what way?
Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.
A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.
Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.
I pay $5cad/mo to get ad free access to the CBC catalog. I would gladly pay the same or even double for the BBC catalog or iPlayer (whatever its called).
(iPlayer is free if you're a licence fee payer, but it's nothing close to the full back catalog, it's more like an 'aired recently' DVR with a tuner for every channel. Wouldn't at all be surprised if it's not even everything current though.)
(The Britbox joint venture with ITV was arguably closer to that, but still not, a curated collection.)
The answer is "no", which is why YT is so amazing
Take Kick for example, made to compete against Youtube and Twitch, but ended up with mostly people who are banned by those 2 platforms for a good reason. "Kick streamers" is now a negative words.
So new players on this field has to be specific about curating the people posting on their platforms.
Likes and comments by real humans can remain steady and bot views can vary dramatically. Likes and comments aren't metrics that produce revenue for creators.
Survival of the clickbaitiest.
Volume isnt even your main issue here. YouTube ads are powered by adwords... that all advertisers already use. It comes with tracking and user-analytics built in.
You can't compete with YouTube by replicating this business model.
Even so.. direct YouTube ad revenue per view is low. Many successful tubers monetize with sponsors. That is replicable, if a (single) tuber has enough views.
I think there can be markets for smaller, paid video sites... but that's not really a competitor to YouTube. It's more like competition for substack.
The way YouTube is managed, including all the reasons for criticism, are why it is successful.
Legible rules have loopholes. Keeping advertisers "on their toes" with mystery rules is a strategy.
It makes sense to keep the platform as unoffensive as possible. Strict nudity rules, and other such "hard" rules. Demonetization gives yotube a chance to implement soft/illegible rules... many of them simply assumed or imagined. It also makes business sense to suppress politics a little. The chilling effect is intentional.. and understandable.
Honestly, I think the more open alternative to YouTube is podcasting. Podcasting has terrible discovery, and video is underdeveloped but... it also has persistence that proves it is a good platform.
Half of "the problem" with YouTube is Google running the platform and pursuing their own interests. These are somewhat restrictive, but they also make sense.
The other half is intense competition for daily attention. That's what a low friction, highly accessible platform does. You can't have everything.
Without all the restrictions and manipulations that YouTube do, the platforms would be 100% nudity, scandals and suchlike.
Youtube began as a video hosting platform where creators got a huge cut from ads being shown on their video page. Today, the ads are injected into the videos and creators get only a tiny portion of the profits - if any. The views are gone as only (highly)monetised content is being promoted by the algorithm. Google simply prioritises making money for themselves instead of providing a service that merely breaks even.
Youtube has done what most businesses do - they pay the initial opex costs and provide some kind of freemium, they get huge number of users, then they monetise the sh.. out of them. And it always ends the same - the platform dies as users leave. Youtube is not any different. It's just so big that this process takes much longer than usual. But do not be fooled, it is happening.
Nowadays, people are slowly realising that there is no more free lunch and that you have to pay for the content(see how many streaming services there are compared to just a few years ago). This is why paywall services like Patreon are so popular(and why I have created my own as well as it is one of few viable online businesses left in the digital space).
Content creators who are relying on anonymous views, that Youtube always provided and which is now slowly dying, will end up out of business and many in debt due to costs of the video gear they bought and oversaturated marked/competition. There is plethora of this "i'm broke" videos on YT itself exposing the harsh reality of digital content creation of today.
On the other hand, smart content creators have realised that the way forward is to build smaller community of reliable fans and use paywalls/pay-per-view model, where they can charge tiny amount whilst getting 95% of it for themselves, which incentivises users to pay(ie. i am willing to pay 10 cents directly to my favourite content creator rather than 5$ to youtube). Some are stuck in the middle with injecting sponsored content into their own, but that will die out soon as well and likely YT will ban it straight up sooner or later. There will be some networks that host multiple creators, like we already have with unauthorized.tv, censored.tv and others. The YT alternatives like Odysee or Rumble will not survive as they are using the same outdated business model as Youtube does but they lack the backing of Google(not just money but infrastructure).
It will take time but people will eventually flock to specific content creators instead of relying on algorithms to recommended them content they might be interested in - as this has been completely broken for a decade now and caused huge amount of great content creators to just quit for good. A huge loss to humanity as a whole.
This will be the next generation of content creators whom will understand that the game has changed.
The videos I am being recommended are still about how natural McDonalds food is, how this natural supplement from XYZ is disrupting healthcare and how this coffee machine will revolutionize the way I make coffee.
If the recommendation algorithm would be a bit less corporate, I’d be a happy customer. That, plus Apple Watch standalone Youtube Music app.
After some searching I found a few threads where others had encountered this and restricted mode was the only thing that seemed to stop these videos and honestly they're jarring and unwanted enough for me to warrant enabling restricted mode and all the features it disables - YouTube please please stop these unrelated 'jump scare' videos!
as an example I'm scrolling through videos on how to fix a leaky tap at 10pm I'll come across a thumbnail 5 videos down with a ghostly face or trypophobia type thumbnail then another 5-10 videos down. in no way are they highlighted as sponsored and I find it hard to believe that Google with it's search skills and other far more relevant videos in the results can be returning these videos as results!
This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]
I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]
On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.
This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/gavin.anderegg.ca/post/3lyeayuckv22...
[1] https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...
Something is going on.
It looks like Youtube might be measuring views differently and perhaps getting rid of unmonetizable views which doesn't impact the number of likes or revenue. I think the annoyance is over the lack of transparency and the power Youtube holds over content creators rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.
Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?
I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.
I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.
One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.
I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).
I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.
Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.
Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.
And getting the technicals right won't be easy. Video delivery is not text. Will need dedicated datacenters if you ever get popular and want to keep prices under control. It's expensive.
I feel instead of trying to force google to sell chrome, they should have forced them to spinoff YouTube and other non-search monopolies google has that are insanely profitable.
I dont think I follow the logic. Having a successful business is not grounds for "forcing" to spin out. Airpods are extremely successful, and does that mean it needs to be a separate company? MacBooks are extremely profitable, so should they be a different company? Azure is widely popular, should they be too?
And don't tell me it will never happen, I'm old enough to have heard that a few times already.
Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.
ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.
Their YouTube project can be seen here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube
And you can learn how to get involved (by running a virtual machine appliance) here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
It's the really niche stuff that few if anyone would notice or care enough to talk about that would be properly lost. And if it's niche but there's a lot of care from the few, then that's one way that archivists are made.
I save everything with replay value now, especially music.
It's very possible that it's only that profitable at Youtube-sized scale.
Then why isnt everyone jumping at the opportunity to make a competitor? If it is soooo easy, we should have competitors. Nobody is stopping you from launching margalabargalatube.com and win the market.
Nobody, including Jeff Geerling, has an exclusive deal with YouTube to distribute the videos. Make it happen!
There are significant network effects. Content creators use youtube because there are a lot of viewers watching content there, and viewers use it because there is lots of content there. Since YouTube already dominates the market, it is extremely difficult for another platform to compete, even if it was better in every way.
Google can promote YouTube using its other monopolies/oligopolies. Most notably, google search prioritizes videos on YouTube over other videos. Also, being able to pay for video ads and search ads with a single vendor is probably actractive for ad space buyers.
Google also already has its own CDN, which probably reduces the cost of distributing the content.
Huh? RLM is about as inoffensive as it gets
Rumble and vimeo provide basically the same service, but if you got fed up with YouTube and wanted to take your money (eyeballs) elsewhere, you can't, because rumble and vimeo don't have the same content at all. And if you were a creator you can't take your content elsewhere because there's no viewers.
The blog mentioned that the forced activation of Restricted Mode could have reduced video views, and while it's true that Restricted Mode blocks live streams, which could affect those who focus on live content, it basically doesn't block soft porn, violent videos, or political content. So, I don't think it's relevant.
On what joy? The biggest mistake that DoJ did was asking to court to divest Android & Chrome. Judge took grave offense at that (read the court's opinion) and there's a school of thought that said it distracted from the whole thing.
Once you start being imprecise, all your arguments fall apart.
I haven’t watched a video hosted on YouTube in years. But I hate amateur video. I never watch anything that I can possibly get through reading.
So in my tiny corner of user space, it’s really as if YouTube doesn’t exist except as an annoying thing Google puts at the top of searches I have to scroll past, reminding me to configure this device to use a different search engine.
Ever seen a colorized video from 1900? It's like a time machine. Imagine looking at today's videos, 100-200 years from now..
Words are best when they have meaning!
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
Nobody wants to hear ad-blocking has negative effects. But it does, and it's effectively killed off any YouTube competitor.
All a VC has to do is read a comment section on the topic of yt to say "nope" to funding a competitor.
troupo•21h ago
For me, Premium's only value proposition is removing ads. Recommendations are still the same (quite shitty). Search is unusable (4 relevant results then unrelated recommendations). Shorts are pushed aggressively no matter how many times you hide them. Search in history will often not find even something you just watched a few days ago.
It's the same Youtube.
SchemaLoad•21h ago
SanjayMehta•21h ago
And you don’t have to log in.
makeitdouble•20h ago
I'm in vehement agreement with parent to be honest. "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition.
SchemaLoad•20h ago
The fact that people can get all of that for free with some minor limitations is fairly generous.
makeitdouble•17h ago
Is Google "generous" ?
Magmalgebra•20h ago
The "stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" is really efficient market segmentation. If you don't do that you need to find actual value props that separate the market in just the right way to generate the financials that allow the product to keep going as is. 9 times out of 10 the result is that failing PMs totally fuck up the product and everyone loses.
It's the SSO kerfuffle in a different package - terrible, but the right choice surprisingly often.
tonyhart7•20h ago
so you want people to freely watch videos without paying anything or watching ads ???
how this works then, creator need to be paid, bandwidth need to be paid, infrastructure is not cheap
it is a nice value proposition, if its not somebody would already make a better alternative that not require those 2 (without paying and without ads)
the fact there is not then its not possible
makeitdouble•17h ago
tonyhart7•15h ago
it is the soup, people free to eat the soup or not
the fact that people always focusing on youtube flaw but never recommend alternative is simply saying that they are the best
makeitdouble•11h ago
hdjrudni•20h ago
55555•21h ago
makeitdouble•20h ago
You're paying YouTube to stop annoying you, and they then decide what to do with that money, incidentally paying some creators.
TheAceOfHearts•20h ago
frankchn•20h ago
> If a partner turns on Watch Page Ads by reviewing and accepting the Watch Page Monetization Module, YouTube will pay them 55% of net revenues from ads displayed or streamed on their public videos on their content Watch Page. This revenue share rate also applies when their public videos are streamed within the YouTube Video Player on other websites or applications.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=...
makeitdouble•19h ago
So where does your Premium money go when you watch a very small creator ? where does it go for a demonetized video ? etc.
That might sounds like a subtle difference, but consider the gap with channel membership, super chats (which are also roughly 50% split I think?) or patreon for instance.
kalleboo•11h ago
A "demonetized" video is technically called a "limited or no ads" video in YouTube Studio - it means YouTube has determined that advertisers do not want their ads seen on the video for reputational reasons. Premium views still pay out for them since they are not paid through showing ads.
A DMCA strike is something else.
makeitdouble•4h ago
I was thinking about the videos that were supposed to make money but got shut off monetization for whatever reason. DMCA strike is one, YouTube flagging it as risque is another common one.
msrp•20h ago
pembrook•20h ago
In fact, it might be the highest monopoly tax in all of tech. Even Spotify only takes 30% from the same musicians who post the same music videos on each platform.
SXX•19h ago
pembrook•19h ago
YouTube simply enjoys a classic network effects monopoly, and that’s why their margins are high compared to any other business in the S&P500.
makeitdouble•19h ago
Jensson•17h ago
makeitdouble•13h ago
For reference that's around the point Vimeo started pivoting to different strategies and blocking long content as they couldn't pay for the infra.
That's also around that time that Dailymotion went down the pipes with the French gov stepping in to save the remains.
YouTube thrived from there as creators and advertisers had nowhere else to go at that point. That's the dumping part.
Ekaros•19h ago
kalleboo•20h ago
I've heard some creators say that in total, they make more money from all their Premium viewers than they make from all their AdSense viewers, even though the former are a small fraction of the latter.
makeitdouble•13h ago
YouTube giving some of the Premium money to creators doesn't make Premium a good product. If'm not that utilitarian to think any single additional penny going to some creators is good whatever YouTube takes in the process and the general impact on the the whole field.
mrheosuper•20h ago
mystifyingpoi•20h ago
makeitdouble•18h ago
If we care about Youtube's infra, the expected business structure should follow that assumption.
mrheosuper•17h ago
Could you explain this more ?, i'm sure i only get Youtube Ads when watching videos, which is "usage of the service".
makeitdouble•11h ago
You can quit YouTube for weeks or watch it 22h every day, you still pay the same. Same way you can exclusively watch non monetized streams or only watch top monetized creators, you'll be paying exactly the same.
The only difference will be how much YouTube gets to keep.
mrheosuper•1h ago
This has always been in subscription model, like mobile data plan, or exclusive club membership. I won't argue if it's good or not, just saying it has been a thing for a long time.
> you can exclusively watch non monetized streams or only watch top monetized creators, you'll be paying exactly the same.
Well, the server do not care if the video's creator is paid or not, it still has to store the same data, and you have to pay for it.
testaccount28•20h ago
e40•20h ago
55555•18h ago
e40•13h ago
GLdRH•20h ago
beeflet•20h ago
If the bandwidth bankrupts them, then boo hoo. They take advantage of network effects so no one can go anywhere else.
Don't feed the bears. That's what I say
jwrallie•20h ago
notmyjob•13h ago
troupo•20h ago
magospietato•20h ago
kelseydh•20h ago
cung•18h ago
carabiner•20h ago
makeitdouble•20h ago
YouTube stays in the dominant position either way, it's not like tomorrow you'll go watch Nebula exclusively (you'd already have done it at this point). They're not providing anything materially, so the amount you pay is bound to nothing except how much you're willing to pay. And how much you're willing to pay depends on how much you're annoyed.
So YouTube's main incentive for this program is to annoy you as much as you can tolerate to optimize the most money you get extracted.
smt88•20h ago
YouTube is expensive to operate. They give me an option of paying by watching ads or paying money. That's much better than my options most other places, which is just to be forced to see ads.
makeitdouble•19h ago
You pay for a specific thing that is produced by a creator and provided by Youtube. "Pay to remove the ads we're pushing" is none of that.
On Youtube being free, this is their business choice, and also the way they crush the competition and cement a near monopoly on the market. If it was a public service NGO I'd see it from a different angle, but it's not.
cung•18h ago
makeitdouble•17h ago
We're in a skewed situation with a near monopoly that only companies at the size of Bytedance can challenge, and I'm not sure why we should see the status quo as something to be protected or encouraged.
Magmalgebra•20h ago
1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service
2) I really really value not having ads in my life
So the price for ad-free youtube really seems phenomenal. None of the other features really matter to me - ad free dominates all value discussions.
syncsynchalt•2h ago
I would amend that to say "any *other streaming service". To me Youtube provides more and better content than the other streaming services, and I don't think people should balk at $14 for youtube when they happily pay that for netflix, disney+, hulu, or spotify.
PrivateButts•20h ago
DimmieMan•20h ago
I come to youtube for the *creators*, the actual platform where I have watch history off and use extensions to block the aggressively pushed slop as it currently stands is not something I want to put money towards.
I'm already a patreon to a few creators and have a Nebula subscription; adding it up it's probably slightly more than a premium subscription.
jojobas•20h ago
marcyb5st•20h ago
While I agree YT without Ads is great, you also get YT music which is really good and for us it replaced Spotify completely.
Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Shorts, however, they are really annoying.
troupo•18h ago
Previously search was just search. It wasn't great, but it wasn't too bad.
Now it shows 5-7 results from actual search (often really bad results).
The next section is "People also watch" which quite often has very passing relevance to what you look for.
Then there are shorts.
Then there's "explore more" which may or may not be relevant to your search, and it has "+N more" underneath.
And then there's the rest of the search which, again, may or may not be relevant to your search at all.
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I think it was slightly fixed recently, so the results are a bit more relevant, but it still is just ... weird
MinimalAction•20h ago
kelseydh•20h ago
jhallenworld•5h ago
The creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.