this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Technology
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It's likely they don't have much of a choice as a business. The more people use ad blockers, the more ads they need to show to make up for the loss in revenue.
And the more ads they show, the more people install adblockers.
Paying for Premium is another option. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but to a creator a view from one Premium subscriber is worth much more that hundreds of views from ad-supported free tier subs. It's the next best option outside of direct payment (Patreon, GoFundMe, etc.)
If content from these creators is really important to you and you spend a lot of time on YouTube, maybe a monthly sub is actually worth it.
That’s good to know. I’m on a family plan with my girlfriend and her kids, so I haven’t seen ads in a long time.
I’m glad to hear this is beneficial to creators as well.
Personally a major problem I have with YouTube premium is when they launched it they took some quality of life features from the free side and moved them to premium. If they didn’t do that I’d probably have premium
Yeah I don't understand why people think they deserve good content for free? Either you pay for it through ads, or you pay for it through money (or you pay for it through either licensing fees or taxes, like the Australian ABC and British BBC). Producing and hosting videos are both pretty expensive, and YouTube's not a charity.
The reason there's no major competitors to YouTube is that nobody else can afford it at a scale anywhere near what YouTube does - most companies couldn't afford to run a service 1/10 the size even.
Yep. I doubt there were that many people using adblockers back when you only had one skippable 15 second ad at the beginning of a video. But when you have 1-2 ads every 10 minutes, on top off all the premium popups, it's just unbearable.
I was pretty tolerant of YouTube ads up until a year ago, when they started playing unskippable food ads which I morally disagree with. No amount of "not relevant" made them go away so I'm hardcore ad-free now. I even tried YouTube premium until they decided to jack up the price on my second month of having it, so fuck em
Yeah, it's a bit of a cycle. If it continues, they'll likely find new ways to make ads harder to block. For example, embedding the ads directly into the same video stream as the actual video and using DRM. I have no doubt they've already prototyped or even fully built out solutions like this, waiting to roll out if/when they're needed.
Youtube never was a especially profitable business on it's own, they basically just need it for the traffic but I guess they might try to change that, if that's the case the logical next step would be dropping independent creators! :/