This just in, people don’t like ads. At all. Most people.
It is time to find a new business model that works. I’m not smart enough to know what that is so that you don’t piss off users, but whoever figures it out will be a billionaire.
Back in the early days of youtube, I didn’t mind them. Just a few ads here and there. Nowadays, the internet is barely usable unless you have an adblocker.
I don’t mind ads in the sidebar or on that little banner across the bottom of the screen sometimes. Its when the ads completely cover the content I’m trying to watch/view and/or start auto playing at obnoxious volume that I get annoyed. (Also fuck people on metered connections right?)
The trouble with YT Premium is how much they’re charging for it.
We used a VPN to get Ukrainian family YTP for a fraction of the price they charge here in the UK. We pay something like £4 a month now for both of our accounts. That would be the better part of £20 a month if we’d done it legit. Fuck that noise.
Sure, it comes with YT Music, but I’ve literally never used that. I have Apple Music and an iPod. So £20 a month JUST TO REMOVE ADS.
People need to eat, bills need to be paid, shelter needs to be provided and unless people can have these at no expense and create things for pure passion & share for others to enjoy then they need the means to pay for these things.
The internet has whittled this down to a few basic models:
Pay the service directly for the content (subscriptions or 1 time purchases)
‘Free’ content and they serve you ads which they are paid for by companies trying to sell something to you
‘Free’ content and they sell every bit of data they can scrape from you to companies which are again, trying to sell something to you.
If you could find a way to do anything without having to pay for our human needs then would it be a trillion dollar idea or would money be meaningless now when people wouldnt need it to live & enjoy their lives?
I pay for YouTube and use FreeTube and NewPipe. I try to pay for whatever services I use. I think this is the way, either pay or let the ads play. I do this because the YouTube app is trash for many reasons mostly having to do with trying to funnel me to the money making bits.
There are greedy corporations making the user experience worse and doing everything they can to wring every penny they can. Ultimately, I attribute this to the wall street investor model. A company can be making money and still be losing because their revenues shrank from the prior quarter. That is a broken system that will only eat itself. That being said, people gotta eat and that includes the janitors, etc… at Google.
Point is, its a mixed bag. There are people on the other end making the product you are using, AND there is a soul sucking company making it worse for both their customers and their workers/creators. To be clear, there is something to be said about how poorly Google supports their creators. In many ways, they are taking advantage of the creators that use their platform. How is it that Google is making so much money in ads, but creators have to open Patreons?
I still don’t think we should just expect stuff for free.
Tangentially, I need to be better about helping support the open source projects I use, especially the smaller maintainers, to be honest, but I do send to a few and I encourage everyone to do so as well as much as they can.
The credit card companies should have invested heavily in micropayments. If I could just pay a tiny non subscription fee for a bit of media I would do that in a heartbeat.
I would pay for premium IF it was a reasonable price.
I don’t want shitty music bundled or whatever fuck else they are calling it now JUST youtube.
AND here’s the big one, I want the fucking downvote count back and sponsor skip. Most videos have ads and fucking sponsor segments which are also fucking ads. I’m not paying to watch that.
And downvote count is absolutely crucial to be able to detect bullshit videos quickly.
Google is offering a shit product and asking a premium price. Fuck em.
This just in, people don’t like ads. At all. Most people.
It is time to find a new business model that works. I’m not smart enough to know what that is so that you don’t piss off users, but whoever figures it out will be a billionaire.
They want people to pay for premium. That’s why they’re pushing more ads. To make the free plan insufferable.
Then they will enshitify premium when they have a large percentage on it.
How about a cryptominer that runs while watching videos, that would surely be a great idea :D
/s
Back in the early days of youtube, I didn’t mind them. Just a few ads here and there. Nowadays, the internet is barely usable unless you have an adblocker.
I don’t mind ads in the sidebar or on that little banner across the bottom of the screen sometimes. Its when the ads completely cover the content I’m trying to watch/view and/or start auto playing at obnoxious volume that I get annoyed. (Also fuck people on metered connections right?)
The two hour long ads that try to act like they match the title of the video are horrible.
Maybe like a subscription where people could pay a fee to avoid ads?
The trouble with YT Premium is how much they’re charging for it.
We used a VPN to get Ukrainian family YTP for a fraction of the price they charge here in the UK. We pay something like £4 a month now for both of our accounts. That would be the better part of £20 a month if we’d done it legit. Fuck that noise.
Sure, it comes with YT Music, but I’ve literally never used that. I have Apple Music and an iPod. So £20 a month JUST TO REMOVE ADS.
Nah, fuck ‘em.
That is absolutely a solution. But what I’m talking about is a way to monetize while keeping the service free but without showing ads.
This is the billion dollar idea. If not trillion.
There is no such thing as a free service.
People need to eat, bills need to be paid, shelter needs to be provided and unless people can have these at no expense and create things for pure passion & share for others to enjoy then they need the means to pay for these things.
The internet has whittled this down to a few basic models:
If you could find a way to do anything without having to pay for our human needs then would it be a trillion dollar idea or would money be meaningless now when people wouldnt need it to live & enjoy their lives?
I pay for YouTube and use FreeTube and NewPipe. I try to pay for whatever services I use. I think this is the way, either pay or let the ads play. I do this because the YouTube app is trash for many reasons mostly having to do with trying to funnel me to the money making bits.
There are greedy corporations making the user experience worse and doing everything they can to wring every penny they can. Ultimately, I attribute this to the wall street investor model. A company can be making money and still be losing because their revenues shrank from the prior quarter. That is a broken system that will only eat itself. That being said, people gotta eat and that includes the janitors, etc… at Google.
Point is, its a mixed bag. There are people on the other end making the product you are using, AND there is a soul sucking company making it worse for both their customers and their workers/creators. To be clear, there is something to be said about how poorly Google supports their creators. In many ways, they are taking advantage of the creators that use their platform. How is it that Google is making so much money in ads, but creators have to open Patreons?
I still don’t think we should just expect stuff for free.
Tangentially, I need to be better about helping support the open source projects I use, especially the smaller maintainers, to be honest, but I do send to a few and I encourage everyone to do so as well as much as they can.
edit: Grammar
The credit card companies should have invested heavily in micropayments. If I could just pay a tiny non subscription fee for a bit of media I would do that in a heartbeat.
I would pay for premium IF it was a reasonable price.
I don’t want shitty music bundled or whatever fuck else they are calling it now JUST youtube.
AND here’s the big one, I want the fucking downvote count back and sponsor skip. Most videos have ads and fucking sponsor segments which are also fucking ads. I’m not paying to watch that.
And downvote count is absolutely crucial to be able to detect bullshit videos quickly.
Google is offering a shit product and asking a premium price. Fuck em.
Then how did google make money?
Ads aren’t to bad, I watch them on TV. The problem is the targeted ads and surveillance