I can’t wait until computers and compression algorithms advance to the point where YouTube competitors become commercially viable!

Just kidding, YT will probably just blackmail their content creators into only posting on their platform and nowhere else to maintain their monopoly.

I would prefer it not be owned by Google as well, though that wouldn’t really change the economics of the situation.

edit: sorry for the wall of text again lol

thanks, I appreciate your response too. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I wrote it lol but this response was a pleasant surprise

I will admit that I never really engaged with likes/dislikes, so while I was annoyed on a conceptual level when they removed dislikes it didnt really affect me. I might feel differently about paying youtube if that wasn’t the case.

I wasn’t aware when I wrote this that there were so many people who respond to simple complaints about ads with “just buy premium”, that was a total blindspot for me. Most comments ive seen about it (before reading comments on this thread, dear god) were more similar to mine, albeit more brief.

at risk of overgeneralizing, I think anyone who pays for YouTube /just/ for the ads (while watching mostly on PC or android), is probably an idiot. adblock is trivial to set up on those platforms and will likely soon prove to be more effective at preventing ads than paying for YouTube. its upsetting the sheer amount of people that will give money to evil corporations just to avoid having to think at all about what theyre consuming, and if thats really the loud majority of people who pay for YouTube then I can defintily understand the negative interactions ive had in the past.

this has been an enlightening discussion for me, thanks for that!

If i paid money to every the patreon of every content creator that I want to support, it’d be a lot more money than youtube premium. Better believe ill be cancelling premium the very first ad I see though.

Doesn’t Patreon then take a cut? What’s the difference? (Fee % might, haven’t checked to be fair)

I’m supporting one creator via Patreon and got merch from another one (and have tried channel memberships), however this doesn’t really scale.

• merch is only really great when one needs whatever is offered anyways
• Patreon is nice, but requires explicit effort and regular payments for each channel

So from that perspective, having creators being payed more per-view is actually a nice, convenient effect and will cover channels that might otherwise get nothing. I’d like to have something like this for the general internet - pay some monthly fee, no more ads and websites, news sites etc all get some share (that is ultimatively more than what the ads would’ve given them in the first place).

No no no no, you’re supposed to use the app on mobile devices. There are no browser pages in mobile Ba Sing Se /s

Last time I tried, I couldn’t install add-ons on Firefox on the iPad. Because Firefox on iPad is just safari with a coat of paint.

It does, I use adblocks, Untrap, DeArrow, and SponsorBlock on iOS safari, and I don’t see shit other than the video itself.

I would absolutely love to do this but I am nearly tech illiterate. I use firefox already and poked around on ublock origin’s site but I dont know how to install extensions or whatever on ipad and I didnt see anything obvious in the settings on firefox. Any recommendations?

This is exactly why I just switched to Tidal. And I had the grandfathered price. It’s just not worth it for a shitty product.

Never heard of Jdownloader, does it offer any benefits over yt-dlp?

Smart

I spend so much money on Patreon and I never regret a penny of it

Sure but also ugggh

They will break the internet as much as they need to in order to accomplish this.

Counts as two minutes if you start a minute and end it in a few seconds and start another minute later

Those both require subscriptions for access though instead of offering an ad based tier so that already excludes a majority of viewers from being able to move over from yt and those producers are unlikely to abandon their current audiences for a possibly bigger audience under a different corporation. I think that’s going to be necessary for a majority of viewers and producers to switch to another A/V distribution platform. If Netflix or MTV had an ad-only based tier and released apps for phones, Roku, browser, etc and allowed producer uploads then I suspect they could take a big chunk of Google’s yt viewership and profits.

I think I heard it put like this once (paraphrasing):

Ads aren’t to make you buy the product. Few people are gonna see a regular commercial about chocolate and go out and buy it. That’s not their intent. They’re meant for brand recognition. They’re about that moment in the supermarket when you have 50 choices of what soda to get. 40 of them are noname and store brands. You’ll almost never try them unless you want to save some money and/or aren’t interested in what you’re buying. But then you have your coke and pepsi. The old reliables - the names that are stuck in your head since forever. And sometimes you’ll want to check out the new mountain dew or dr pepper flavors, cause you’re curious. But when you’re not in the mood for new, when you just want a soda and don’t wanna think about it, you’ll get a coke or a pepsi or one of the few brands whose name you recognize.

After 1000 raid shadow legends ads, guess what you’re gonna feel like trying in 3 months when you get bored of your current mobile game and are scrolling through their top picks for games? “Hmm, Raid shadow legends? I’ve heard about this before, maybe I give it a try”

Sure, it backfires sometimes - for example, I always make it a point to not try out a game if I feel it’s been in too many ads - I don’t wanna waste time in something that blew its entire budget on marketing. But with most people this doesn’t happen. And I’m pretty sure even I tried some item from an ad that I said I’d never get - the name probably just got stuck in my head and I got it without even realizing it.

Marketers make a shit load of money based on human psychology. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.

Yes, otherwise companies would not spend their money on them.

I wouldn’t as that’s just asking to get screwed

When they first started ramping up ads and demonetising more videos for being insufficiently advertiser-friendly, they probably still had enough goodwill from users that if they’d immediately launched YouTube Premium and presented it as a way to both remove ads, and support video creators that couldn’t rely on ad revenue, it would have been decently successful. A good number of YouTubers who had to switch to sponsorships and Patreon could have been pushing for people to subscribe to Premium instead of play Raid: Shadow Legends, which presumably would have boosted subscriber counts, and might have been enough to make YouTube profitable and much more pleasant for both free and premium users than it is today. Instead, they burned through a large amount of goodwill before implementing Premium, so people were already more reluctant, and for a long while it only shared revenue with a select few channels who were already raking in ad money, and was unaffected by view counts, so early Premium subscribers were paying Logan Paul even if they never watched that kind of video, but weren’t paying the channels they actually watched.

Maybe we should start mirroring to a federated service

Just some time ago, I was thinking about some P2P Video service, where everyone would provide the data they have - so like a BitTorrent YouTube

But I’m not sure if that would be viable

Just to be clear, ads free cable TV was a thing on a very small minority of cable channels for less than 10 years (from 81 up until 87 if I recall the research I did on the subject correctly), the only reason people keep talking about it is because they didn’t live it. At first the vast majority of cable channels were just regular channels from regions too far away to get a signal for with antennas and cable only channels mostly had ads as well, there were something like four of them that didn’t.

Some of the shorts are ads themselves

I blocked YT ads on my Samsung tv using TizenTube. It’s fucking great.

Probably because shorter videos get more views

But I’m only guessing…