• OR3X@lemmy.world
    584·
    4 days ago

    The people saying “just pay for premium” don’t seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads. When google purchased it they promised to keep it that way. Then they slowly started with ads. At first they were pretty unobtrusive banners, then a short skippable preroll then multiple preroll then unskippable preroll. The reason I refuse to pay for premium is because Google created this issue and is now selling the solution. I refuse to be a part of that. It has nothing to do with the creators.

    • FosterMolasses@leminal.spaceEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      The people saying “just pay for premium” don’t seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads were born after the 2008 housing crash

      Ftfy.

    • Pirate2377@lemmy.zipEnglish
      143·
      4 days ago

      The cost of hosting YouTube itself doesn’t pay for itself unfortunately. They could get away with it back then because the internet itself wasn’t that big. Therefore, we need to KICK THE NORMIES OUT OF OUR INTERNET. WE WERE HERE FIRST, REEEEEE

    • Pman@lemmy.org
      13·
      5 days ago

      ReVanced and Grayjay do the same thing but for free and are open source so long as Google keeps trying to engineer enshitification the proud people of the open source community will engineer a solution.

      • r3plic@lemmy.world
        22·
        4 days ago

        Hmm weird take. Yes these are solutions to the Ad’s problem from the user side but they are just UI Wrapper for Youtube so they don’t have any costs for hosting & providing all the content. So yea they don’t need to monetize. This doesn’t however fix the problem for Youtube itself. How are they supposed to pay for cost & make a profit?

        I totally agree that Youtube with all the Ad’s is unusable (I’m using an AdBlocker) but Youtube is still a Profit orientated company so how do we fix this dilemma. Youtube Premium feels not worth it to most people because Youtube was always “free” so paying for it now makes people go like “WTF?”. So Ad’s & enshitification was/is the only way to make a profit for Youtube. I don’t like it either but this is reality.

        If you have a solution for them I’m sure they would pay you handsomely for it.

        • Pman@lemmy.org
          3·
          4 days ago

          Peertube is a solution, it is an open source peet to peer video hosting platform. But in truth having good competition is a way to force better practices, and if open source is the best option people will go for it if they know about it. linux, thanks to valve and Microslop’s poor idea of what people want (and governments leery of Microsoft and Trump’s close association decoding to have their own OS for internal use at least), have gotten a small influx of users as a whole, but with more users the more open source solutions to compatibility will be produced, and hopefully if you are looking for the YouTube equivalent you’ll try peertube.

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      9·
      5 days ago

      I would totally pay for youtube if it was even remotely decently priced.

      You can get multiple concurrents on disney+, Hulu or Netflix with blockbuster content for the same price as youtube’s slop filled premium family.

      Seriously, the service is worth maybe $9 a month. I don’t want their music, i won’t use it, the quality is crap.

    • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
      44·
      4 days ago

      I mean, as it grew the hosting/staffing costs went up as well. There’s no way it could have continued to be completely free.

          • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
            2·
            4 days ago

            Yes, it is. Start by offering unsustainable ad-free video. Drive competitors out and monopolize the market. Start turning the screws. Classic tech bro bait and switch.

            • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
              1·
              4 days ago

              That’s really not what happened. YouTube wasn’t created to drive out competitors and monopolize the market.

              It may have ended up doing that, but a bait and switch is an intentional action.

              • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
                21·
                4 days ago

                But you yourself literally just argued the impossibility of it running ad free indefinitely. If you attract customers by knowingly offering a level of service at a cost you know with absolute certainty that you can’t maintain, then yes, it’s a bait and switch. It’s deception and manipulation. Classic bait and switch. Youtube isn’t special. They’re just Walmart.

                And you’re just wrong. There’s no other reason to offer a service temporarily for free than to use it to drive out competitors. That strategy only has any value as a means of driving out competition.

                But, sure, keep simping for the evil megacorp.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
      152·
      6 days ago

      Oh no! The video is black for a few seconds instead of showing several ads for a minute! Whatever am I going to do???

      • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
        105·
        6 days ago

        Even if they keep the screen black for 30 second to a minute, I’d still gladly wait in silence than be subjected to advertisements.

        If they ever make it impossible to watch videos without first watching ads, then I’ll just leave the platform. I have no loyalty to YouTube and I’ll sooner dump the platform and move on to other video sites than deal with enshittification and ads.

        • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
          23·
          6 days ago

          If they ever make it impossible to watch videos without first watching ads, then I’ll just leave the platform.

          Yep. Then it will be time to finally start exploring peertube or something…

            • IndieGoblin@lemmy.4d2.orgEnglish
              9·
              5 days ago

              The problem isnt discovery its content. There isnt much good content on there. You’ll find the good stuff pretty quickly.

              • TheEmpireStrikesDak@thelemmy.club
                9·
                5 days ago

                I take that personally :(

                Actually most of my videos are just boring things that I find interesting, and I get just as many views on there as I did on YouTube. And the autocaptions are waaaaaay better.

                What I like about peertube is it’s just people uploading for the love of it, not content farms and AI slop chasing a quick buck.

                Edit: oh yeah and not having multiple ads on my videos.

        • krisevol@lemmus.orgEnglish
          536·
          6 days ago

          But they offer an ad free plan that isn’t expensive, and the service is really fast and reliable, and comes with YouTube music as well. Why pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock, but won’t pay for YouTube?

          • Vespair@lemmy.zipEnglish
            13·
            5 days ago

            Why pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock

            I don’t? Anyone who pays for a service to show them ads is a rube?

            I would actually consider paying for a service like Youtube if it truly was as simple as that, but it isn’t. Even if they aren’t showing ads after your buy premium, they are still collecting, training on, and selling your data and habits. This is payment. I don’t believe in double-dipping; if I’m already paying in my data, then I’m not going to give you money or watch your ads.

            If you want to show ads without harvesting data or offer a way to pay monetarily that stops ads and data harvesting, then I’ll watch ads or buy. But I absolutely do no accept double-dipping. If I’m already paying, I’m not paying again.

          • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
            27·
            5 days ago

            I don’t pay for streaming sites. 🏴‍☠️ And I definitely won’t give YouTube any money. I’ve always been able to browse their videos without paying a cent. I’m not about to start now.

            Besides, I don’t like how everything has become subscription services nowadays. You used to be able to pay once and own a product. Now you need to pay monthly to have temporary access to a constantly changing library. No thanks, I’ll only spend money on things I can own forever.

            • krisevol@lemmus.orgEnglish
              18·
              5 days ago

              I love ad free music on my car, and no ads on my phone and pc, i and support company’s they allow my to get this service. You enjoy pricing every company is right to go to the ad models because people won’t pay for the ad free versions.

          • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
            11·
            5 days ago

            Not expensive? I just checked. It’s 8€/m for me. Which means 96€/year.

            Maybe that’s not expensive for the USAians that earn hundreds of thousands per year. But it is expensive to just remove a few ads that can be easily blocked. It won’t even stop the Google tracking, it just stops the ads on YouTube. An ad blocker will also block the tracking.

          • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
            12·
            5 days ago

            I used to pay for YT.

            I quit because they were very anti-creator and i did not support the changes they were making.

          • FarceOfWill@infosec.pub
            14·
            5 days ago

            I just dont trust them not to use the payment and account info to track me more for every other ad they serve.

            They get nothing.

          • chunes@lemmy.world
            7·
            5 days ago

            The way I see it, don’t make your thing free for 20 years if you want people to pay for it. At this point, it’s as natural and free as a summer’s breeze in our minds.

            • krisevol@lemmus.orgEnglish
              13·
              5 days ago

              It’s still free though. The paid version is just an ad free version. YouTube had always had ads for the free version.

          • recursivethinking@lemmy.world
            5·
            5 days ago

            not OP but personally I watch maybe 2h of YT /month. Because I only watch one dude who posts about monthly, then the rest is just random links I’m clicking from a post or something. I donate to the guy periodically. The other links half of them are news clips or something that I could prob just get from their site.

            The one-size model just doesn’t fit my use case. I’d pay for a per-time-watched plan if it was reasonably priced but it doesn’t even exist.

            Honestly I could do without it entirely. Personally.

    • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      11·
      6 days ago

      I’m fine with waiting 10 seconds at the beginning of a video. I wonder how much YouTube would save (by reducing bandwidth, smaller caches, choosing slower storage) if they didn’t have the goal to start the video virtually immediately.

      • DragonOracleIX@lemmy.ml
        5·
        5 days ago

        That feature isn’t built into YT? I have it set on my browser to where the video needs to be manually started (excluding playlists).

        • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          My point was: You don’t need to wait for it to buffer or even load. Once the page is there, the video is playable.

    • pewpew@feddit.it
      7·
      6 days ago

      I don’t know why this just happens on my laptop. Probably it’s because it has a slower CPU. Also, this website shouldn’t be this bloated

        • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
          6·
          5 days ago

          You can tell they’re deliberately causing the delay by the way it pops up instantly and sends you to a page about turning off adblockers. The experiencing interruptions message used to send you to a page about ISP network performance…

    • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 days ago

      Very well knowing why and watching them do their stalling is indeed fine.
      Every time you are reminded how petty they are.

    • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
      271·
      5 days ago

      The best part is that Youtube ad revenue is low enough that everyone who can is doing their own sponsor segments, so paying for Youtube to remove their ads doesn’t remove a lot of the ads. The only way to an ad-free experience is adblock+sponsorblock.

    • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      I was happy to pay for YT Premium when there was a loophole so you could sign up from a far cheaper country. I paid about £6 a month for the family plan, purely so I could watch on Apple TV without having to tolerate adverts.

      Then they closed the loophole, shitcanned our premium, and demanded £20 for the same experience. We had Netflix at the time, which was cheaper. So I made a little app as a frontend for yt-dlp, and downloaded what I wanted to watch into my Jellyfin server.

      Fuck Google.

    • Tilgare@lemmy.world
      214·
      5 days ago

      I’ll never understand why people are proud to waste their life watching ads. Or are proud to use adblock and steal the content being posted by small creators. You’re really sticking it to the little guy, great job.

  • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    With the glorious return of Tom Scott, I finally signed up to Nebula yesterday, and am pleasantly surprised at how many of my YT regulars are already on there. £30 for a year, no ads, and an Apple TV app.

    Which is £30 more than I paid YouTube, because the family plan is a ridiculous amount of money.

  • Xylight‮@lemdro.idEnglish
    191·
    5 days ago

    They’re eventually gonna start banning accounts for this and then requiring login to view YouTube.

    • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      111·
      5 days ago

      I doubt they’ll ever actually do it, just threaten it constantly.

      They’d rather have people without accounts, and/or using adblockers keep using the site. If they started actually cracking down, then it would create a significant pool of users who would use some other platform. They’d rather eat the losses of some people not viewing ads then push a significant amount of users to a potential competitor.

      Much like how Microsoft hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed windows installs because it would push a significant amount of people to look for an alternative OS.

      • Xylight‮@lemdro.idEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        well, I don’t think people would actually move platforms if that happened. reddit did some stuff that everyone hated and it’s still absolutely massive while the alternative, Lemmy, is small af. that’s not even considering the difficulty of making an alternative to YouTube.

        • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          The difference is that Reddit was still largely usable after the API changes and most affected users weren’t getting banned. Some people have a high tolerance for ads, but a lot of people would find YouTube unusable without an ad blocker, and if YouTube was banning people, they’d be destroying a lot of the inertia against going somewhere else.

          If we say that something like 20% of users on YouTube are using adblockers, that’s a big enough addressable market for a competitor to seriously take off. Enough to attract content creators and VC funding to get it off the ground. In the end YouTube would probably win, but it would be after a few years of actually having to compete. The revenue loss over that time period isn’t worth the short term gain of getting some small percentage of users to watch ads.

          If YouTube felt like it could get away with banning people using ad blockers and requiring an account to watch, they would have done it a decade ago.

    • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 days ago

      Do they think they are essential and believe I will not simply forget they ever existed?
      May very well be, but that will be in line with their out of touch and deluded policies.

      • r3plic@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 days ago

        I do not agree with their changes & policies but I think you underestimate the market share Youtube has in this area. Also you are not the average Youtube user (being on Lemmy and all) so you should think about how the average user interacts with the platform (they don’t care about Ad’s & don’t know how to install an Ad Blocker). I think Youtube can do a lot more shit before normal people would start to jump ship, but even then what are the alternatives for them? Peertube etc. don’t have the content they watch…

        • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
          1·
          4 days ago

          Sure they have a huge market share. That’s simply from being the first video-sharing platform and being from Google.
          There is nothing unique or irreplaceable about them and plenty alternatives do exactly the same thing now.
          Only better without ads.
          Problem is there are too many and divide the small leftover market share between them.
          When/if that’s fixed people will not look back.
          ‘normal’ people choose VLC now and other FOSS.
          YT is not their favorite sportsteam, they have no loyalty to them.
          On the contrary. If someone insists on playing YT music for friends and it’s interrupted by an ad, everyone’s annoyed.
          And content is shared on as many platforms as they can since it’s free and they want as much viewers as possible.

    • AngryDeuce@lemmy.world
      21·
      5 days ago

      They got me on chrome with this. I fought with it for about an hour but if I was logged in, videos just would not load.

      So back to Firefox I go wheeeee

  • MyBrainHurts@piefed.caEnglish
    24·
    6 days ago

    My favourite unexpected bonus from switching to Linux has been a completely ad free youtube experience. Not entirely sure why this magic is happening but I love it.

    • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
      311·
      6 days ago

      On windows Firefox + ublock origin is an ad free experience for YouTube. Any chance you picked a browser that has ublock origin added hy default?

      • MyBrainHurts@piefed.caEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        Hmmm, I could’ve sworn my Firefox had ublock origin on windows but I might’ve screwed something up etc.

        I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth though!

    • well5H1T3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      5 days ago

      Firefox for android allows extensions 🎉

      Slapped ublock immediately. Never seen ads ever since.

    • TheEmpireStrikesDak@thelemmy.club
      9·
      5 days ago

      On desktop I get the “Video running slow? Disable your ad blocker” popup in a corner. But videos loaded normally.

      On mobile everything was fine until recently. In the last couple of weeks, videos do have a small lag before loading. Still preferable to ads. And I’m just using the browser’s in built blocker.

    • ThunderComplex@lemmy.today
      4·
      5 days ago

      Yeah and they are pretty bad in terms of wording. It’s like „Try premium now for free“: „Yes“ or „Next time“

    • Logical@lemmy.world
      11·
      5 days ago

      I think it’s referring to the “you can’t block ads on YT or we might ban you” popups you get on YT occasionally, if you’re using an adblocker. I have only had it happen once or twice before I did a quick online search and found an extra filter or two to add to uBlock Origin, and then I stopped seeing them.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        8·
        5 days ago

        I wonder how much time their devs spend working on a new ad block detector scheme that gets shown to a couple dozen people before ublock origin adds it to the default filters and none of their users see it again.

        I wonder if they get frustrated or just laugh and get back to the endless job. Or if they also write some of the ublock filters themselves.

        • Inucune@lemmy.world
          6·
          5 days ago

          This is a cold war happening in the background of the internet. If the advertising industry wins, everybody loses. Advertisement is intrusive by design.

  • solidheron@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    4 days ago

    So is the scare screen when the UI flicker’s and I get a pop up saying “why you experiencing interruptions”?. I use brave browser

    I found that logging out solves it

  • bss03@infosec.pubEnglish
    1910·
    5 days ago

    You do you. I like my YT Premium. Many of the creators I watch there simply don’t publish anywhere else, and I don’t have time for ads, especially if I’m watching on my smart TV.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      282·
      5 days ago

      This used to be the case, but it’s a different equation now. Ads used to be one or two per video. Fine, I get there are bills to pay.

      Now it’s pure greed and pushing us to a subscription for a service they purposely made shitty so we would think exactly what you are. 4-5 ads, with forced ads interrupting the videos, and auto redirects to more ads after the video fonishes. Unskippable multi-minute ads.

      And if you’re thinking “well then just pay for it”, tell that to Netflix, Hulu, and all of the streaming services that were “ad-free” until they decided that actually, pay twice as much or watch ads (even though your paying).

      So while I understand you’re saying, you’re assuming Google will play fair. They won’t. They will up the price, they will still force ads, and it will get worse. I’m taking a stand now saying enough is enough. I’m not rewarding them for enshittifying the service.

      • oppy1984@lemdro.idEnglish
        22·
        5 days ago

        Check out Nebula, it is paid but there are no ads and they have a decent amount of YouTubers and are adding more regularly.

        Also your feed is based on subscriptions not an algorithm.

        • Vespair@lemmy.zipEnglish
          5·
          5 days ago

          This is the future - independent creator channels and collectives. In truth we consumers might end up paying slightly more, but vastly more of what’s collected will go into the hands of the actual creators and creatives than to a bunch of suits who do nothing.

        • bss03@infosec.pubEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          I am also a Nebula subscriber and preferentially view creators there if the content is also on YT. I purchased a lifetime subscription to Nebula; I hope I get my money’s worth.

          My YT subscription page (https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions) is also just what I’ve subscribed to, in reverse-chronological order. Unfortunately, that’s not all the YT I consume, plenty of after-video recommendations, and sometimes I intentionally visit the main page, which is all algorithm. I do need to work on that – near-ending algorithmic recommendations are probably not the best thing to spend my limited life time on.

      • Zexks@lemmy.world
        8·
        5 days ago

        No one is assuming anything. I cancelled my netflix when they started that shit and stopped watching prime. These are services you can turn off when the terms dont align with your approval. If/When google tries the same shit ill cancel that too.

        • bss03@infosec.pubEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          I decided to keep Netflix (and just pay for the ad-free tier), but dropped prime because there was some content that was not available ad-free, and UBO (et. al.) was unable to strip them.

      • Tilgare@lemmy.world
        48·
        5 days ago

        So you refuse to pay because they MIGHT do something bad? That’s a pretty weak argument. You’re taking a stand against… What? You were never a paying customer in the first place, and they have not enshitified YouTube Premium in the over 10 years I’ve had it. In fact, I still pay a grandfathered $8/mo for my account - which is grace I was never given by Hulu or Netflix as they repeatedly jacked up the price over that same timespan. Seems to me they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
          61·
          5 days ago

          They actually did. They called it Google Play Music, and Google TV/Google Play Videos. I paid for those. Youtube Music and Youtube premium are the enshittified versions of those, and they will continue to make them worse.

          • Tilgare@lemmy.world
            2·
            5 days ago

            I will concede that the YouTube Music app started (and might still be) worse than GPM was in the end. But I’m not sure it could be considered enshittification. Yeah, the YTM app itself was kinda shit, especially at first - but they didn’t make the service materially worse and charge more for features they took away. They didn’t jack up the price to coincide with the “new” service, they just consolidated the two separate services into one. They didn’t introduce ads. They didn’t silently take down a ton of the music offered and leave the price the same - they still have the same 100M tracks as the other guys, and you ONLY get music from those other services.

            I agree and get where you’re coming from on this example - but I think people use the term enshittification more broadly than it’s actual definition, and in my opinion this doesn’t fit.