Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It feels heavy on negative externalities.
> if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely.
I personally find categorical imperative arguments to be ridiculous. almost anything could be bad if everyone did them all the time.
the reality is that adblocking, torrenting, and similar workarounds are used by a small subset of technically savvy users. most people just don't care enough to configure any of these tools (or even switch to a browser where they are on by default!). Google is not going to run out of ad revenue any time soon.
I don't feel any obligation to allow Google to use my own device and internet connection to serve me ad content that I don't wish to see. Google doesn't seem to care very much either; the most they do is reorganize APIs every so often to break these kinds of workarounds. I'm not sure that's even intentional tbh. content creators have reacted by embedding ads in the content itself. this is usually more tolerable than the preroll ads, so I don't really mind.
I do agree there is a cost to adblocking and torrenting, but it's not the one you identified. when I pay for content or view associated ads, I am voting for more of that type of content to exist in the future. when I don't pay or block ads, I am throwing away my vote. for most throwaway content, I don't really care. but I find a way to pay for stuff I do care about, or at least disable adblock while I'm consuming it.
> I don't feel any obligation to allow Google to use my own device and internet connection to serve me ad content that I don't wish to see.
That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction: You are choosing, voluntarily, to consume the content that they are offering on their website. The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you.
Now obviously the financial value involved is de minimis in the case of a YouTube video, but nevertheless you're taking service and declining the payment.
The actual offense is so vanishingly small that they basically don't care enough to do anything about it, but let's be honest about what's really happening here. They're not just sending ads to you for no reason without your consent.
I don't know what to tell you other than I simply don't agree. at a high level, the YouTube website is a wrapper for endpoints that serve ads and endpoints that serve content. nowhere in the flow of clicking a video from the homepage and watching it does there appear any language saying that I need to hit both sets of endpoints to use the service at all. they merely make it inconvenient not to do so.
this is essentially a rehash of the "what constitutes unauthorized access to unsecured resources?" debate. my personal opinion is that access cannot be unauthorized when the authN/authZ mechanism does not exist at all. others may disagree.
> this is essentially a rehash of the "what constitutes unauthorized access to unsecured resources?" debate
Youtube's Terms of Service[0] specifically say:
```
The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:
...
2. circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;
```
It's not a matter of "disagreeing" on what is allowed or not. If you don't agree with the ToS, you're free to not use the service. Let's not fool ourselves here.
Irrespective of the larger argument; I mean many TOS are unethical and/or shouldn't carry moral weight. If it was one company sure, don't use it. But the majority of companies (web or otherwise) have excessive and dense TOS to which the average person cannot give informed consent to anyways.
> I mean many TOS are unethical and/or shouldn't carry moral weight
Surely, some ToS are poorly written. Still, the owners of the service decided that those were the rules they want to play by. If they go against some law in a certain country, I'm sure a court would invalidate them in specific cases. Do you have reason to believe Youtube's ToS is unethical or shouldn't carry moral weight (specially the #2 paragraph I quoted)?
> But the majority of companies (web or otherwise) have excessive and dense TOS to which the average person cannot give informed consent to anyways.
YT's ToS seems pretty straightforward. Do you think the paragraph I quoted which talked about obstructing the service is written in excessive legalese? Was it unclear somehow?
That's quite different. In criminal law, ignorance of the law is explicitly not a defence.
In contract law, you have to sign up to the contract. One side can not just assert that the other side agreed to some terms unless they can show that this happened.
I too use an ad blocker, download torrents etc. but I really dislike when we ("tech savvy people") suddenly feign to ignore the rules of society and start to use the same arguments as line cutters, shoplifters, or any non-disabled who park on a disabled spot.
This is just misbehaving guys, stop trying to find a silly defense.
I agree: In a way (but not legally), YouTube does basically give you the ability to watch without ads. The reason this is generally allowed is because Google knows that the perceived value of keeping their stranglehold of viewers allows them to keep their monopoly on those viewers' eyeballs, thus forcing creators to keep uploading their videos to YouTube (lest they upload to eg. Nebula and get 1/10000th the viewership). If they did do something extreme, they risk triggering some mass exodus from YouTube to other platforms; their monopoly on non-television video advertising would crumble overnight.
Now, i'm sure that if everyone did suddenly download Vanced and Youtube's largest profit funnel, mobile devices, ceased to exist, they could quickly whip up a system that does all it can to block video views without an attestation ticket vended when the ad server thinks you've watched the ad(s). At that point it'd be pretty clear cut that watching without any sort of indirect or direct payment is not allowed.
Morally, if you really get that much value out of YouTube, you probably should be paying for Premium even if you use Vanced or newpipe, if just to resist YT's shorts feature or other features that don't improve the quality of the main video experience. Premium views payout much more money per view to content creators than any ad would, especially if you have otherwise never bought something by clicking or engaging with the ad.
> That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction
1. The parent commenter seems to be quite candid and sincere, so I don't think the word disingenuous applies here.
2. YouTube has decided NOT to obligate all users to view ads in order to retrieve content from their servers. The public needs to accept NO Terms of Service to curl a video down from their servers.
3. There is no such "implied arrangement" when it comes to YouTube's servers which YouTube provides to the public. Yes, some such arrangement is clear when using youtube.com or the official YouTube application. That distinction is critical here.
Also as some side-commentary from a utilitarian perspective, since this discussion seems to have a distinct moral slant. If one opts to view YouTube with ads – instead of without them – is that action increasing or decreasing the net human well-being in the world? Given that no laws are broken and no crime has occurred, this seems to be the last remaining question we must answer.
And it seems quite clear to me that the alternate world where video-bandwidth is NOT purchased with human attention spent on advertisements seems to be, in nearly all ways, an improvement on what we have today.
"but nevertheless you're taking service and declining the payment"
Those strong words would need a real, clear contract between google and the user.
"We serve you a video and we track everything you do, allmost wherever you go online"
I haven't seen it spelled out by google like this and surely this is genral knowledge around here, but most people still don't have a clue about the general concept.
In either case, even if the ads are blocked, you still pay with your data, by being tracked what you watch and when you watch it - and in combination with always online smartphone controlled by google - with whom you watch.
In other words, if it would be only about ads or no ads and just the service, I would agree. But this is not the case, so I also have zero question about moral with this one. It is more about self defense of your attention.
So yes, we need other payment models than advertisement. But I doubt this can come from google, no matter how much I would pay them, for a single service.
> So yes, we need other payment models than advertisement. But I doubt this can come from google, no matter how much I would pay them, for a single service.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you still being tracked by Google even when using YouTube Premium? So while you not get ads, you are still paying an additional cost that is your data which is used for ads elsewhere.
And for whatever it's worth, it hurts the person who uploads the video. YouTube represents a portion of my income, and it making less makes it harder to justify uploading videos.
I don't like the ads either, so I pay for YT Premium. I want to support the creators that I watch, and I don't want to suffer ads.
That I get YT music included and save on not having to subscribe to Spotify is a little bonus.
Google is so powerful they can basically mold their audience and is one of the most profitable companies in the world. I do not care if consumers want more control over their lives and do not wish to be propagandized by ads. Nor do I mind if they don't want to transfer more wealth to the fabulously wealthy.
The transactional relationship morality being posited is more appropriate for relatively equal parties, or for the stronger party to give the the weaker party. For the weaker parties to owe stringent obligations to the cosmically stronger party creates a positive feedback loop of oppression. You might reply, but that's how the economy works. You have now advanced one step in your understanding.
This might be the right model if web media were an ideal marketplace, with a variety of competing options to choose from.
That's clearly not the case. A better model is that Google has tried to limit your options to "either do business with us or don't watch popular media", with only partial success because a lot of people don't like either option. I think the truth of this model is betrayed by the fact that Google has not (yet) embedded the ad in to the same video stream as the content. They have not really tried to out-block ublock because they'd rather you steal youtube videos than support a different platform.
My assumption is that it's less of a monetary loss for them to serve the ads unbundled compared to putting the engineering resources behind bundling them. They, obviously, have the exact numbers readily available, and I assume the "money lost" lines will cross eventually.
Regardless, there is a loss, and they'll respond to it when it becomes significant enough.
edit: uBlock Origin has over 10,000,000 users, according to the chrome web store. I can only imagine something will change soon, or there's some serious technical debt holding things back.
> My assumption is that it's less of a monetary loss for them to serve the ads unbundled compared to putting the engineering resources behind bundling them.
Yes, just like it's less of a monetary loss for you to install an ad blocker than subscribe to YouTube Premium!
> That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction: You are choosing, voluntarily, to consume the content that they are offering on their website. The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you.
Yet Google, like Microsoft back in the day when piracy of Windows was rampant, would rather adblock users still use their site. They have the means to make it close-to impossible to watch YouTube with an adblocker, but they chose not to.
Clearly they believe that adblock users still provide net-positive value to them.
Physical stores have the means to make it close-to impossible to shoplift goods from their store by investing in security, but they chose not to.
Clearly they believe that shoplifters still provide net-positive value to them.
Which is obviously bs, just because they don't stop you from doing it doesn't make it a net positive from them. It could just as likely mean that the time and effort to stop it is more expensive than the losses they would incur.
They are offering you a service with two options to pay for the service. Either by watching ads or paying a subscription. You are choosing to consume the content without paying.
I'm also paying them with my user data. They use this data to generate insights and make more products that make them more money. It's very easy to overlook how much you are paying through your user behaviour.
As long as Google put something on the web that can be accessed using standard HTTP calls, there’s no obligation on anyone’s side to use the way of consuming that is most convenient for Google. If Google want to control it, they can sell CDs, embed ads inside a video or similar. Or just get of the web. But using HTTP on the internet the way it’s intended to be used is totally ok.
> The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you.
No refunds. You can't demand a refund from a movie theater because you hated a movie, and you can't return a new game to Best Buy because you hated the game. I don't understand why you'd imply YouTube content comes with any "satisfaction guarantee."
We have a lot of solutions for distribution of content. Because of youtube's stranglehold, content creators go there even if they're not monetizing for the exposure. I don't care about blocking youtube ads because they're an innovation stifling monopolist, and the amount the give back to creators is pretty garbage, while raking in stupid profits.
There is a third party involved here. As an advertiser I do not want my ads shown for someone that don't want to see them, that is wasted money. Isn't that fraud, telling your fans to click/watch the ads because you make money for each click/watch? Adblockers save me money and lets me reach more people that matter.
Is it truly voluntary when everything you want to watch is only available on youtube? there's no way for an individual to pay or do anything for an alternative option.
What would that user experience look like? $0.50/mo per channel? $5/mo for all minecraft channels?
Given the overhwelming negative response to how cable priced and bundled channels, and the simplicity that competitors like Netflix have, I'm not sure users would prefer that.
The core issue for me is that what YouTube provides isn't valuable enough by itself for a monthly payment.
They don't produce their own content like Netflix, they are at best a video distribution platform, I can pay to creators I watch via Patreon but to YouTube itself, that's complicated, they would have to get a very low share of the creator revenue to start to feel convincing.
The wake-up call should be directed towards ad creators, not viewers. Ads slow down pages, clutter content, potentially inject malware, negatively emotionally manipulate the viewer, etc. I pay for two sites that I use daily so I don't see ads. Every single ad-serving site should have this option. My only fear is that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. cannot survive on a subscription amount alone. Our data and ad viewing is just too lucrative for them to stop.
That was actually my #1 reason for using an ad blocker: to prevent ads from trying to exploit security vulnerabilities and hijacking my web browser. It's exceptionally rare, for sure, but I've had ads on legitimate web pages forward me to an advertising site with no input from me.
These days, though, the web is god damn near unusable without an ad blocker, especially on mobile. So much bandwidth (That I'm PAYING for! Data isn't free!) is wasted on content I don't want. I've seen a page have TWO ad videos playing at once, taking up well over 40% of my screen.
Advertisers can cry me a god damn river. If they didn't make ads so damn intrusive, I wouldn't need a blocker. I don't even care about trackers, at least they make my ads relevant so I'm not seeing ads for Tampax.
Now if only there was an easy way to block the god damn "WE USE COOKIES!" alerts.
>I personally find categorical imperative arguments to be ridiculous. almost anything could be bad if everyone did them all the time.
Btw..... This is in good faith but...... If everyone started using electric cars at once, the traffic jam would be unimaginable!!!! To me, individuals aren't thinking of the negative externalities :(( (especially to private oil monopolies)
Traffic jam? What kind of autonomy do you think modern EVs have? If you're gonna make a good faith argument about why we couldn't switch to 100% EV over night, talking about grids' capacities would be more genuine.
I believe your parent poster was just poking fun at the "if everybody started to do X" construct. If all humans started to use EVs (or any other type of vehicles) at the same time, the traffic jams would indeed be horrific. At any given time perhaps <5% of people are on the roads, so how would you even fit 100% of people onto roads at the same time?
Oh, didn't cross my mind. I think you are right and I probably misinterpreted the comment. My brain went straight to it being about running out of power and causing jams, probably because it was such a common fear with regards to EVs (and still is to an extent, CC Bill Gates and Porsche/Tesla in 2020).
It was just a teasing comment about these devil's advocate style of comments being non-sensical and counter productive, and often in favor of some incumbent which normally receives pretty fair criticisms.
I was in South America for some months and I decided to buy Youtube premium because in my house in Germany would be heavily used as well.
My account was blocked until I was able to produce proof that my address was effectively in South America, so I had to spend all the time there with a blocked account.
When I came back to Germany I tried contacting customer support again to unlock the account and I had to deal with a couple phone calls and emails, costing me time.
I never want to have such an ordeal to remove some ads.
I simply don't care. I don't tolerate viewing ads. I currently use sponsorblock as well. I have paid for YouTube premium at some point but I see no reason anymore. There's enough people who don't know how to block ads and frankly if it ever got to that point I expect the big G to crack down hard (technical and legal means). It's the same thing with ad blocking. I'm sorry but when you have 11 percent of my average network requests being ads I will simply block those requests. Is it selfish? Of course. I'm not claiming to "stick it too the man", I just don't wanna see your shilling. Simple as.
Vanced isn't equivalent to paying for premium. It includes features like ReturnYoutubeDislikes and SponsorBlock which would normally be available via extensions (as would the premium's lack of ads via adblock), as well as further customisability.
It replaces some enhancements that are normally done via browser extentions and I personally find it extremely handy to be able to copy with a timestamp, set a video on infinite repeat, restrict video bandwidth on a finer scale (the native app removing this baffles me), set a default playback speed and reenabling tap to seek (another baffling change).
I happily support creators and alternative platforms (Nebula, Floatplane) via direct channels, and personally I don't find the service or youtube as a platform worthy of support.
That's a very good point, and I agree that Vanced brings a lot to the table over just ad removal. I may even consider using it even though I pay for Premium already. But I imagine that that's a demographic that a very small percentage of Vanced users fall into.
I use vanced, and I have YouTube premium. Sponsor segments and missing dislike counts are killer to my experience. I also like that I can turn off elements of the YouTube design that are clearly rushed and/or TikTok also-rans demanded by management.
On hn I find people often talk about how as individuals we shouldn't ignore the negative externalities we might create for massively profitable monopolies, but never in the same breath do we talk about the negative externalities those monopolies thrust on us as individuals or on our governments.
I'm sure most are aware just how well Google will be regardless of whether they bypass ads or not.
My main consideration is for content creators, especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them. Any concern I have about YouTube not being able to sustain itself does not come from a place of caring about Google's livelihood.
I also have a whole laundry list of complaints and gripes about YouTube and Google as a whole. But I'm probably not going to get much productive engagement from them airing those here, so I targeted my question to the HN audience.
I would argue that the ethical thing to do in this case is used Vanced/blockers and then support the content creators directly. (I happen to pay for YT Premium now, but I understand and sympathize with objections to it and used Vanced before I switched to an iOS device).
In fact, in that case, the creators see more of the money, and they get data indicating what stuff people will and won't pay for. That $15/mo. YT Premium budget could easily go to supporting content creators.
Content creators are screwed, long term, if they continue to rely on ad revenue, because both the ad companies and the platforms have incentives to keep the content creators' cuts as low as possible. Creators need revenue sources not under external control.
I agree and throw ~$25 a month to various folks on Patreon / Substack. Content creators will always have to pay the piper to some degree though if they want a platform for distributing their content, and discoverability. Patreon gets by right now by relying on external hosts for videos (See https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017431292-S...) and by largely having creators direct their audience from existing platforms. Without YouTube or Twitch or Twitter, Patreon doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. I definitely look forward to YouTube getting stiff competition from a direct monetization focused video platform though.
This doesn't touch on how easy it is for the YouTube monopoly to never pass ad revenue to users and how it's in their favor to keep revenue information as opaque as possible. If it were a competitive market, perhaps blocking ads would be the bigger problem at play for creators trying to recover revenue through it, but that's just not the case even though OP is content dismissing the much more interesting discussion as "bad faith" or "unproductive".
> My main consideration is for content creators, especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them. Any concern I have about YouTube not being able to sustain itself does not come from a place of caring about Google's livelihood.
The best solution I've found to this is to support content creators directly. Subscribe to their Patreon, Liberapay, GoFundMes, etc. Most YouTubers who sincerely try to make a living from their content already do this. Or just disable adblock for a video or two.
When the discussion is based on "negative externalities" of individuals towards tenants who are already at the mercy of a non-negotiable relationship receiving an opaque and steadily decreasing cut of revenue, and when most tenants attempting to create have to rely on more than just ad revenue to keep creating, it seems to me that the more harmful actor in this scenario to tenants is the monopoly and not those who avoid ad revenue.
It's not productive or in good faith discussion to flip the focus of an examination of negative externalities on those individuals avoiding ads once that is brought up, but again, the largest contributing problem actors are not what you care to talk about.
It's worth considering the scale of the contributing. If you give the creator 1$ directly, that's likely more than they'd get from you watching the ads on 1 year or their videos (if they're releasing more than weekly). Contributing a minimal amount in literally any other way will more than offset the loss from ads.
> especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them
Youtube could communicated the number of blocked ads, and lost revenue, to the content creators. Content creators could either push the Patreon route (this seems required for any remotely controversial topic), or encourage watchers to disable ad blocking for their videos.
I dont use vanced but I am looking into it. Allegedly vanced has an iOS alternative. My reasoning is that Google is disgusting and has created a defacto monopoly. There is no way to outcompete a free product at scale so there basically can’t be an alternative. So I obviously use video and that means I use youtube. I dont want to support google, never want to see an ad and I honestly don’t care about the creator. If i did find someone who I regularly watched I would probably support them directly. I would never want to use youtube premium and infact constantly being bombarded by ads for youtube premium is a major reason i use an adblocker…
So much for everyone less fortunate than you. The vast majority of the people in the world are much less fortunate than the average HN reader. And yes, they are probably not worrying about us, but a little consideration for them in how we vote or how we donate could make a big difference.
I don't if they're saying other people shouldn't have a different take on life. I prefer to actually have a certain level of respect and care for my fellow humans. It's is dwarfed by my concern for myself and my family, but yeah I'm gonna bend down and give someone a hand if they drop something or need a push off the road or battery jump.
I don’t see creators as "someone" because creators are mostly little business and the person you see on the video is just acting and reading a script.
So I can treat them as things. And I do care for the things I enjoy in life when I want them to stay or improve. Not because of the person behind (because, you are right, they don’t know me and I don’t know them) but because I care about what their work bring to my life.
The fact that someone is being able to make a decent revenue for this work is a nice externality that I like. But having great knowledge / content freely accessible is what I care.
However I’m not paying for YouTube Premium because I care about the content and not the platform. It wouldn’t make a difference for me if I had to use another platform.
Platforms should be subcontractors of the content producers. I don’t want to pay for the hosting platform but give my money to the content I love. And that a part of that money is used to provide hosting shouldn’t be my business.
Orion browser (still in beta) on iOS blocks YouTube ads, has background tab playback, Picture in Picture too for cross-app and screen-off playback. Pretty much everything from Vanced, built in by default in a mobile browser.
I use Musi with YouTube. With it, I can play videos in the background, and there are no ads in the video. There are in the app itself, but pihole takes care of that.
I also use Hyperweb, so all YouTube links in safari open in Musi automatically.
Thank you! I dont have pihole but i think i can figure out something. I didnt realize there was a way to declare how to treat links in iOS. This was so helpful!
I used to pay for Premium. Then they kept making the service worse and worse. Eventually I decided that they don't deserve my money.
- YouTube Music is trash. I was an inside early adopter and all of my feedback was ignored. I originally subscribed for Google Play Music (which was pretty good) but I switched back to my own collecting.
- They removed email subscription notices.
- YouTube Originals were awful. They took some of my favourite creators to make slightly better content that I can no longer share with my friends. Not to mention that you were never notified of these videos because they were completely different from normal videos in all of the YouTube UIs. (Thankfully went back on this, but I had left by that point).
- Videos always play at 360p on my 4k monitor. I need to manually up the quality at least 90% of the time. My internet is fantastic and I never see a stutter after raising the quality.
- The recommendations are always awful. I don't use them often but when I do it is all things that I have already watched.
- They keep trying to turn auto-play back on. (Although to be fair this isn't new).
- It still has ads! They just promote the Premium content (that I don't want) instead of other ads. Sure, less obtrusive but still annoying. Just let me use the damn service I have been paying for for years.
I understand the argument that I shouldn't be using the service if I'm not paying for it. In fact I don't use an adblocker on most sites because of this belief (I just back out of obnoxious sites). However 1. I've paid enough that I consider it fair for years of future viewing and 2. costing YouTube money is actually beneficial to me, because if it were to fold the content would move somewhere better.
To me YouTube is a great example of the cost of forever quadratic growth. They had a good product, it was profitable with ads or profitable if people payed for Premium. But they need to keep sucking more value from users otherwise their shareholders get angry. But I've been sucked dry and I'm quitting.
Yeah, the constant ad creep is my justification for ad blockers as well: since the service provider doesn't respect me or my privacy, they'll never be content to serve a few simple ads on the side of a video based on the content of that video to pay the server bills. Instead, they'll build a giant Rube Goldberg machine to target ads, hoover up user data, and shove more and more ads in my face. Even when I pay, I still get "original content" shown in my face because it's cheaper for them to serve than content sourced from other providers.
At the end of the day, you just have to put in the legwork to make things optimal for your use case, because they'll never care about you anyway.
My primary issue with paying for Google services is that, when it comes to Google, I am the product being sold. I honestly haven't looked into YouTube Premium despite consuming a fair amount of YouTube content because I don't strongly feel it will change the dynamic with Google: they will still take my viewing data on YouTube and package that to sell me to advertisers in other avenues.
So now, yes, I get a better YouTube experience by removing ads on my mobile device; but, I'm now paying Google money so they can make money off my viewing habits.
- Because Youtube is run by a company that has money pouring out of every orifice; they don't need any more of yours.
- Because Youtube is built on copyright infringment; giving it money is exactly like paying for an account on any piracy site to help keep it running.
- Because even where there isn't infringment, Youtube has a broken compensation model you should consider not paying into.
- If Youtube died, it would probably only be a good thing anyway for the whole video ecosystem.
- If you really want to donate money or help, pick some worthy cause, like kids with cancer or something; the Googles of this world don't need your charity.
> Youtube[...] has money pouring out of every orifice; they don't need any more of yours.
I'm mostly concerned with money going to the content creators. If you're not watching ads and not paying for Premium, they get nothing.
> Youtube is built on copyright infringment
I think this is a [citation needed] kind of thing, I'd assume that original content and fair use content is the vast majority of their revenue. But I don't know that for sure either.
> If Youtube died, it would probably only be a good thing anyway for the whole video ecosystem.
Long term, I could see this being the case. Short term, I think a lot of creators would be displaced as they tried to figure out how to make it work in a YouTube-less world. People with large audiences would probably survive fine, but I'm not sure if some of my favorite < 50k subscriber channels would stick around. But these are all guesses.
> If you really want to donate money or help, pick some worthy cause, like kids with cancer or something
I don't look at this as charity, I look at it as providing an economic incentive to continue getting content from creators I like. But this is a "but there are starving kids in Africa!" kind of argument anyway, which doesn't really hold up if you try to scrutinize everything that way.
> I think this is a [citation needed] kind of thing, I'd assume that original content and fair use content is the vast majority of their revenue. But I don't know that for sure either.
I read it more as being a historical record kind of thing. Early days when youtube was first getting content it was a repository for all sorts of copyrighted content - music, movies (clip 1 of 20 style due to upload limits), scans of entire books and comics being put up. It was really the wild west of "throw every piece of media at the wall and see what sticks" in terms of what was on there.
There's a fair argument to be made that youtube gained a lot of visibility as a platform in hosting that content and outcompeted places like vimeo, metacafe, etc., as a result.
It was the acquisition by Google that provided the resources and talent to start building out automated systems to detect media and issue a strike (as well as pay the CDN fees and build the hosting network for such a load). Youtube today doesn't rely on copyright infringement for sure, but it certainly took advantage of it in when it was first starting out.
>I'm mostly concerned with money going to the content creators.
This doesn't really hold up when you gloss over his discussion of the broken YouTube compensation model. Even though it's not salient to your biases or original conjecture to bring up that YouTube's compensation system is harmful for most creators, it seems unproductive to put your head in the sand about the issue and keep claiming that you want to see money go to content creators you support.
You're right that I didn't approach that issue, and part of that is because I have a bit more research I want to do before I take strong public stances on it. I agree that the ad-supported revenue model is pretty busted, and YouTube is the primary beneficiary of that. But as far as I'm aware, the Premium subscription model is pretty beneficial to everyone. I don't know exact percentages, but I'm under the impression that the average Premium view nets more money to the creator than the average ad-supported view. I haven't personally seen any content creators explicitly dissuade people from paying for Premium.
But like I said, I don't know specifics to strongly hold that view and publicly argue it. _That_ would be putting my head in the sand. I need to read up a bit more and see what content creators are saying about Premium. I was hoping that prompting this discussion would lead me to some more good info on that.
To be clear, you went as far to omit it from your mostly dismissive response despite your contradictory view underlying your original assumptions, you didn't simply take a stance of uncertainty.
> I have a bit more research I want to do before I take strong public stances on it
>I don't know specifics to strongly hold that view and publicly argue it.
You took a strong public stance on its negative externalities already and that the Premium model is actually a solution before knowing specifics about even how views are broken down into ad revenue, this doesn't hold up.
You're putting your head in the sand about arguments that don't seem salient to your original conjecture. You seem to only want only additional info to disprove your biases - not prove them, and YouTube has an incentive to keep that information private.
>I was hoping that prompting this discussion would lead me to some more good info on that.
This doesn't hold up given the above points about misrepresenting your original strong public stances and providing no information as to why your biases are correct.
I said "It feels heavy on negative externalities" in my original comment which is not a strong stance by any means, and have not said that Premium solves the creator payment model anywhere, only that it gives you the ad-free experience that Vanced gives you, while still continuing to pay content creators for viewing their content. Those are two separate discussions.
> How does that compare to just donating directly?
It's definitely less effective than monetizing creators directly, I think that's the best option when it's available, and you have the time, energy, and motivation to do it. But if I watch just 2 or 3 videos from somebody but don't seek to support them outside of the platform, I prefer that they get _something_ for the value provided rather than nothing. I'll admit that I'm a bit lazy and it's convenient to have YouTube directly transform my views into dollars for them.
> If they were to do that anywhere in YouTube, you'd think that would be some kind of TOS violation.
I highly doubt that. Just search for videos about de-monetization or the dislike count removal, people make videos criticizing the YouTube platform all the time. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there's some special language around their paid subscription specifically.
If Youtube were a Government
- They would be running huge surpluses, while still raising taxes
- They would be a police state
- They lower the minimum wage at all costs
- They repress their population
I feel content on the internet was free for so long, people just feel entitled to it. Now everyone is anti-ad, with most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day), but they still feel entitled to consume content for free.
I became anti-ad. I absolutely cannot browse the web normally without having uBlock Origin installed. Websites that place intrusive ads are responsible for this.
> they still feel entitled to consume content for free
Yes, and I agree with you. But even if YouTube became a paid service, Google would still find a way to track you and continue its shady privacy practices. There's some entitlement, but there's definitely some principles at work, too. YouTube is the last Google service that I use (beside Android...), and the earlier it implodes the better.
My mother told me about ads on Snapchat and I asked her: "Would you be willing to pay $2/months to not get any ads?". The answer is obviously "No".
We can all agree the web would be a more sustainable place if services were paid, but as you said: now we feel entitled to it.
The real problem with ads is that you have to pay vastly more to remove them through a subscription (where it is even possible) than the revenue they would have brought.
If every Snapchat user paid $2/month, wouldn't Snapchat have decent revenue? For some service the infrastructure might cost a lot, but I don't think it applies to Snapchat (it's a very "ephemeral" photo-sharing platform, after all).
Another way would be to charge for every photo you upload. Those that share more pay more, which would make sense.
That's because the demand for subscription content is magnitudes less than ad-subsidized free content.
Even if you made a hybrid model, the content isn't that interchangeable. The type of customer who pays for a subscription is going to consume vastly different content than the freemium customer.
> the demand for subscription content is magnitudes less than ad-subsidized free content.
A lot of ad-subsidized content only "works" because by the time the user realizes that the content is subpar it's already too late and they've "paid" and can't take their money back.
This wouldn't work in a scenario where an explicit action needs to be taken (to agree to pay a fee) before consuming the content, and/or where due to laws/regulation the customer has the possibility to demand their money back if they've been misled.
The truth is that a lot of content on the internet isn't worth paying for.
>A lot of ad-subsidized content only "works" because by the time the user realizes that the content is subpar it's already too late and they've "paid" and can't take their money back.
Citation needed, because this sounds more like preference projection of someone who prefers subscription content than the majority of actual ad-subsidized content consumers.
Again, the type of customer who pays for a subscription is going to consume vastly different content than the freemium customer.
> preference projection of someone who prefers subscription content than the majority of actual ad-subsidized content consumers
No - I'm referring to clickbait, chumboxes or low-quality articles whose primary purpose is to show ads - the content itself is only there to lure you into seeing ads and is universally hated even by freemium customers.
I suspect that there's a huge amount of content like this which subsidizes the platforms, ad networks and various middlemen.
On average only 3 pieces of information are needed to identify a person. Sure you're person 1234567890, but all the information linked to that user can find out exactly who that person is.
So? If your issue is government surveillance, take it up with them, get a law created so they can't look at it. If it's the company, they truly don't care who you are, you truly are 1234567890 to them. If that, it's unlikely a human being will ever actually look at your data.
If you think you truly are user 1234567890 then you're sorely mistaken. Corporations have one thing in mind, and that is profit. They'll use your data however they see fit to maximise those profits. If that means identifying you, then so be it.
There is a reason phrase like microtargetting exists. When a political group is able to target individuals using their platform, that's not okay.
It gets worse though, government surveillance is one thing, it's another when Corporations give them full access to their data. Or did we forget Snowden already?
I believe all advertising is emotional and mental manipulation, and I feel it is unethical to subject people to that.
Targeted ads are a) that same manipulation but on steroids, and b) the result of privacy-damaging, pervasive, surveillance capitalism. I am against these things as a matter of principle.
For the record, I do pay for YouTube Premium, as well as the ad-free Hulu plan (rather than the ad-supported plan), etc. If I am given the option to pay to remove ads, for a price I consider reasonable based on the value I get, I will pay it. Most websites, however, either do not present this option at all, or require something ridiculous like a $20/mo subscription when the perceived value I get from it is an order of magnitude lower.
I recently clicked a link to an article at The Guardian, and, in their bid for donations, told me that this was the 18th article I've read in the past year. I wish more sites would do this, but I believe that my consumption of any particular news source is similar to that. I am certainly not going to pay for a double-digit monthly subscription for any site where I read just 2 (or even 5 or 10) articles per month; that does not feel like a fair exchange to me. I would be fine paying for articles a la carte (say, 5 or 10 cents each), but of course micropayments seems to be a dead concept these days (for reasons I understand and sympathize with).
> most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day)
That's just small pieces of data about you, adding up, that can be requested by potential future governments which turned into totalitarianism.
The less data about us stored somewhere, the safer.
This is what is fundamentally wrong with the "targeted" part in "targeted ads".
At least you started off with by far your worst example. The alternative to credit scores is only the wealthy getting loans, full stop. Any alternative would require a human being combing your finances for hours, which would obviously substantially raise the cost of loaning money.
Oh so let's build scores based upon social media interactions and google results because this is fair? What?
No. Not ANY alternative would require a human. There are a few numbers you actually need. You should have to ASK for those!!
Besides that: I don't care about someone losing money because they actually have to sit down a human to verify data which is relevant. This is what humans are good for and if it cost you, you can put it on a bill.
This feels like a really condescending take on the people you disagree with. Why do you assume it's entitlement? Netflix thrives because they're worth paying for.
People have the right to not be watched, no matter how "anonymous" it is. Why do you have a problem with that?
You can, today, pay for youtube premium and receive an ad free viewing experience.
>Why do you have a problem with that?
Why do you have the problem with simply paying? Or simply not using any websites that have ads? Speak with you 'wallet' (in this case, view impression) if you will.
> "They're still entitled to consume content for free."
YouTube et al. are free. That's the whole point! The only reason anyone uses them is because they are free, as in free beer. If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything, I never said "oh, but I agree I'll watch the ads/let the ads play/download the ads" in order to be allowed to watch the YouTube video. (armchair lawyers will make murmurs about "Terms of Service" and "End User License Agreements", which may in some cases technically be true in a legalese sense, but are clear cases of trying to weasel out of what's right in front of our faces, which is that these platforms are free).
YouTubes business model is to give things away for free and HOPE that they can advertise to you enough that it will be worth it. This is, in general, the business model of "the internet". The thing is, we've been at it for so long, that the businesses folks are starting to become entitled. It's been 25+ years and so many people have gotten in on this game (low level content creators are quite numerous) that now the opinion of the tastemakers is shifting to one of "yeah I am entitled to get paid for my work, and since I get paid when people look at the ads I facilitate, I am thusly entitled to have my audience look at my ads so I can get paid." It's a train of thought that seems to make sense, but all the creators are forgetting that that's not how their business model actually works, and that's not the deal any of us in any conscious way have agreed to.
I have a story I wrote a while ago that I feel captures what we're seeing with business people becoming entitled to owning our eyeballs, devices, and attention:
----------
By 2027 we live in a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!"
As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy."
"But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't afford to give away the pizza?" moans the employee.
Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." You do, and with that you walk to your car and drive home.
The frustrated employee would, by 2030, move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer agrees, under penalty of death and enforced by on-site police, to sit with their eyes held open and stare into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would receive a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually and punitively enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments".
Meanwhile in 2028, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.
Worth pointing out that there would be no place selling pizza anymore. Why buy one when you can eat (and read) for free?! It wouldn't be a bright world, but the web nowadays isn't bright. Man it makes me sad.
> If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything
I am served this when going to YouTube, which I have to agree to:
"Before you continue to YouTube
Google uses cookies and data to:
Deliver and maintain services, like tracking outages and protecting against spam, fraud and abuse
Measure audience engagement and site statistics to understand how our services are used
If you agree, we’ll also use cookies and data:
Improve the quality of our services and develop new ones
Deliver and measure the effectiveness of ads
Show personalised content, depending on your settings
Show personalised or generic ads, depending on your settings, on Google and across the web
For non-personalised content and ads, what you see may be influenced by things like the content that you’re currently viewing and your location (ad serving is based on general location). Personalised content and ads can be based on those things and your activity, like Google searches and videos that you watch on YouTube. Personalised content and ads include things like more relevant results and recommendations, a customised YouTube homepage, and ads that are tailored to your interests.
Click 'Customise' to review options, including controls to reject the use of cookies for personalisation and information about browser-level controls to reject some or all cookies for other uses. You can also visit g.co/privacytools at any time.
Privacy Policy • Terms of Service"
Interesting, I do not face any such kind of notification upon visiting YouTube incognito. Additionally, this sort of agreement is what I meant about "murmurs about ToS/EULA" that get brought up. Nowhere in that disclosure is there anything like "hey there, you are expected to: download this data/let us display certain content/look with your eyes at certain content in order for us to give you this content". Instead, it's a disclosure about what they're HOPING to get from you while you are there (data). Maybe they try to slip it into the ToS linked down there at the bottom, but that's not required and does not form a contract with the audience at all.
when it comes to the vast majority of the content on youtube, it was created by someone other than google with the expectation that it would be free.
There is now an expectation that people should be able to find and listen to any song they want on youtube (to a lesser extent movies and TV shows too), but that has less to do with how people feel about the internet and more about our broken copyright system and that most of that content used to be broadcast to the public.
If youtube were behind a paywall most people wouldn't spend as much time (if any) watching youtube videos and far fewer people would bother creating content for it. That'd be a losing situation for Google since they need the public's eyes on ads and a steady stream of data to mine from both content creators and viewers.
Everytime* we have a thread about third-party YouTube clients, there are comments like yours by folks who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of these third-party tools. The same happened year(s) ago with a thread about NewPipe.
The purpose of these apps (including Vanced) is not solely to get past ad-block; Vanced (and NewPipe, and Piped, and Invidious) do far more than just give an ad-free viewing experience -- they provide a breadth of quality of life features on top of usually being more privacy-friendly.
The frustrating thing about this is that we can avoid these questions if commenters would just click the link and read.
The HN title is "Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android". The app being an adblocker is the one thing the submitter thought was worth highlighting. It is also the first feature the app's webpage mentions. The webpage even has paid ads for other adblockers before going into any of the advanced features.
Given the above, it seems pretty darn obvious why the GP thinks that the real selling point of the app is to block ads. If this had been submitted as "Vanced: YouTube app with an AMOLED black theme", do you think it would be at the top of the frontpage?
You're totally right and I wish I had clarified that more in my original comment. I will probably try out Vanced even though I pay for Premium. I was really looking to hear from the people who primarily use it to circumvent ads, which I assume is the primary draw. But there are a lot of other good features worth discussing.
I think it is definitely a primary draw; I no longer use Vanced (used it years ago) but I remember the killer feature back then was being able to listen to audio from videos while having your phone screen off (a feature that YouTube eventually added to the official app).
I primarily use NewPipe. I enjoy the benefit of not having ads, but more than that, I enjoy the simplicity and the drastically lower system resource usage.
1. No ads
2. Free YouTube Music subscription (cancel your Spotify subscription)
3. Download videos and playlists to your device before a flight or other no-service scenario
4. Every time you watch a video, a proportional percentage of your subscription fee goes to that creator, no matter whether they are in a lucrative (i.e., ad-friendly) niche or not.
5. One less browser extension (or mobile app) I need to give permission to track my activity and worry it will be hacked or sold without me realizing it.
2. So I can have access to a worse player ? Which is already impressive given how bad Spotify is.
3. youtube-dl.
4. Giving 0.000005$ to a creator for me watching 20 minutes of video is still Google rent-seeking
5. Fair enough. But then I'm trading one browser extensions that might track me (but that doesn't) for the certainty that Google will absolutely track me to vomit out more shitty AI recommended playlists. Not sure it's worth the tradeoff.
In addition to incognito, also Chromecast. A Chromecast will insert ads before videos added to the queue by non-premium accounts. As a result I got a family account so I wouldn't have to watch ads before videos my wife enqueued.
If a person with a non-premium Youtube account enqueues a Youtube video into a Chromecast queue, that video might play with ads when the Chromecast is playing it.
I should note that I've had Youtube premium on all the accounts in my household for a few years now, so it's possible things have changed since. My guess is that it would have only changed in the direction of "more ads" though, not less.
Same. I was recently chastised (lightly) by a friend for sending a YouTube video link. They asked why I sat through so many ads. I've been using YouTube premium for years and had no idea how bad the ad situation is for non-premium users.
Totally agree with this. If you're going to block yt ads, at least acknowledge that you're expecting content for free. Maybe you can find a way to ethically justify that for yourself (you buy merch from the company, etc), but own your choice. Don't flee into elaborate rationalizations that deny the facts of the matter.
Yes, users are expecting content for free because they're being given content for free. They're also being given a pile of garbage data in the form of ads, and there's nothing wrong with dumping that garbage, in the same way you are free to throw away the ad pages of a free newspaper, or toss the ad flyer that comes with your pizza.
Content creators are facilitating the business model of Google and most big business on the internet, which is that they give things away for free (yes free, I don't have to do anything or sign any contracts to watch a YouTube video) and they hope that advertisers will pay for the chance at their ad to be seen by people watching. Nowhere in there does the audience get a say, nor is the audience asked for their consent, nor is the audience forced into any kind of actual contract that the audience clearly understands.
Content creators, having lived in this world created by Ad-tech for so long, have grown entitled to the eyeballs, the attention, and the time of their audience. The train of thought goes like this:
"I'm entitled to be paid for my work. I get paid when my audience watches ads. Hence I am entitled to have my audience watch ads."
But that isn't true at all! They're entitled to be paid by the advertiser according to whatever terms that creator has with that advertiser. The creator though has no agreement and no terms with the audience so NO, the audience has no obligation to do anything for the content creator.
If content creators aren't comfy with this situation, they can try to actually build an agreement with their audience, where the costs and the payments are clearly laid out. That's hard to do so few do it, but that's the actual, ethical thing to do instead of complain that users aren't watching ads; if watching ads was actually ethically required then lowering the volume or looking away when an ad plays would be decried as piracy, and while I'm sure that'll happen once eye-tracking starts being built into the mobile app, it'll be as stupid to complain about then as it is now.
For me personally, and I know others as well, I can't stand ads, if it comes down to the end of the world or accepting ads, goodbye world.
So naturally I go quite a bit out of my way to remove ads and build tools that remove ads, everywhere I can.
With YouTube's current trend of doing the worst job possible (see removing dislikes) there is no way in hell I'm going to be paying them anything.
I'm still waiting for good ways to pay content producers directly, how does one tip a tenth of a cent?
Does Youtube offer to not track you in any way when using Youtube Premium? (This is a serious question. I don't know what features Youtube Premium has.)
No, and that use-case for Vanced totally makes sense to me. But you could pay for Premium and then use Vanced in addition to it to take advantage of the reduced tracking, rather than as a replacement for Premium.
I used to have no adblockers on anything, and I was fine with it. Then I had kids, and I wasn't really comfortable with bringing them up in an environment where when you tell a computer to do one thing ("Play this video") it does a different thing ("I will do that, but not before I do what I want to do"). There are a few websites that have ad supported videos that I am ok with my kids watching, and putting uBlock Origin on the computers means that when I tell my computer to play videos from those sites, I know that it is going to do just that, and I won't have my kids being manipulated by stuff they don't understand.
Ads in software are just a case of a computer not doing what you have asked it to do. It has always been ok to ignore ads - putting them on computers does not make them special in any way.
This is just my parenting, and I can imagine that other people want their children to value other things - and I might change things as they get older so they can understand how the ads work. Right now, they are not ready for that.
Same, sometime I get naughty ads, I wonder what impression it would leave on children mind. I think someone has uploaded the few examples of such egregious vice.
Having a kid is what put it over the top for me too. That, compounded by Google's ads being all over the map in terms of content, location in videos, and most importantly, length. I've put on a kids video and mid video there's a ten minute ad playing and a two year old absorbing some content I did not approve.
Tbh I would just pay for YouTube if it were just a video platform that was consumer-friendly, for example LTT's Floatplane service, which I have paid for in the past. Unfortunately, that's not what we're dealing with. Google/Youtube are massive data collection platforms, and I refuse to participate in that any more than I have to.
Youtube and Google make money by being monopolists. They had (or in the case of Youtube, bought) a first mover advantage, grown their platforms aggressively and now they are milking the network effects.
There is almost no way someone could break the monopoly by making a better video sharing platform, not even Google could do it, that's why they bought a rapidly growing market leader instead of making their own failed copycat (Google Plus, anyone?).
So there is absolutely no connection between this reality and the "fair world" fantasy you describe, that could maybe apply to copyright, torrenting etc., but not adblocking on monopolistic platforms. The amount of money and ads views you generate for Google is a monopoly rent, it bears no relation to the value of the platform or its operating costs in a competitive market, or any other justifiable and "fair" income.
The official YouTube app is unable to play 2160p 60Hz video on my Android TV because it stutters and falls back to 1440p 60Hz. Doesn't matter whether I use the native app or the built-in Chromecast. NewPipe doesn't have any problems.
The official YouTube app also sometimes just decides that 480p is enough for everybody and refuses to play any higher resolution until I force-close the app from the Android settings multiple times. Since using NewPipe I have never experienced a video playing in another resolution than the highest available.
Plus, since Google/Alphabet is doing everything they can to funnel as much money away from the EU via various tax avoidance systems, I don't feel any shame. I try to donate to the creators via various channels, if one is available.
I don‘t use Vanced but something similar for iOS. I actually do pay for YT Premium but what the app also gives me is SponsorBlock, so thanks the other viewers flagging sections in videos, it will also skip baked-in ad slots. As I have YT Premium and assumed that the creators get paid for their baked-in spot according to their reach (channel size, engagement, etc) and not how many people don‘t skip that section of the video, I don‘t feel bad but frustrated that I have to go so far to simply watch videos without getting constantly bombarded with ads. If my assumption is wrong I would be grateful to get more info on how these baked-in ad spots are arranged.
I'm doing everything in my power to not give any money to GOOG/MS/AAPL. I would not shed a tear for YT in it's current state if it were to shut down because of revenue problems.
I could go full Stallman on every aspect of my life. I do admire his strict adherence to his own moral code. But at some point you have to realize if you are a gifted person like Stallman, with a large capacity to bring change to this world through uncompromising attitude OR you are just average joe with no real chance of making any meaningful change.
To be frank with you I sleep really well knowing I'm not directly contributing money towards tech giants getting even more powerful while at the same time not completely alienating myself from popular culture.
I mainly use iOS devices and avoid YouTube on my phone, so I don't use this app. I don't pay for Premium though, and I won't because Google is a monopolist and their entire business is built around the pernicious use of data and advertising. I use uBlock which takes care of the ads on desktop, and don't see it as immoral to freeride in this situation. I do pay for plenty of similarly situated services where the agreement is a much more clear "money for goods and services" type arrangement.
Because if someone gives a free magazine, I don't have to stare at the ads either. If they (Youtube) don't want people to block ads, they can stop serving ads and charge for the service. People will move to another free services and continue blocking ads. No company have the right to serve me content I don't want to consume. If not my responsibility as a consumer to justify/support a company's business model
The internet was better before monetization. The profit motive has killed what made it great and promising. I wish everyone used ad blockers and everyone who's in it for the money would either charge upfront or stop producing. The good niche content that's made for love would still be there.
I have mixed feelings about the monetization. I also like creations just for creations sake, but it'd be hard for me to argue that I haven't benefited from a lot of great content that wouldn't exist if people couldn't dedicate themselves full time to making it. A lot of people may say (and feel!) they'd do it just for the love of it, but reality can get in the way of that when you've got to make a living.
That's not to say that there aren't better ways to make that living than ad revenue. I much prefer direct monetization.
> YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It feels heavy on negative externalities.
"YouTube files bankruptcy and closes it's doors because people aren't willing to watch advertisements and executives could think of no other source of revenue to keep the doors open."
That's never going to happen, because the executives would be fired for incompetency. If advertising suddenly becomes a non-viable revenue stream, YouTube (and internet video hosting in general) is not going to disappear.
In fact, I ACTIVELY WISH we would drop the advertising model, and I will not support it if I have any alternative. It is a poison on the world and a giant economic waste. The world would be much the better place if YouTube (and the internet in general) gave up on advertising entirely.
Personally, I already pay for Google One, run my phone lines on Google Fi, and only use YouTube for an average of 15-20 minutes of content per day. Google Fi aside, surely somebody, somewhere, at Google can just bundle these things up and I can just pay a single monthly rate to be "in" the Google universe? I'm not paying $12/mo for something I barely use, to a company that I already give money to for a "premium" membership tier. I also don't have the time to check what crazy bundles Google is attempting to offer this month that will simply not exist next month. I am happy to pay for Google's services, but why do they feel the need to make that an actively hostile process?
Here's another angle: a LOT of common people out there don't even bother blocking ads, let alone even thinking about the possibility that it's possible to block ads without using Youtube Premium. They either:
a) Live with ads, thinking that's the norm or not giving it much thought, or,
b) Subscribe to Youtube Premium without considering the possibility of ways around it.
So, realistically speaking, the probability of everyone starting to use Vance overnight is almost zero.
I also used to feel the same: why can't people just use adblockers!? Then I realized that me and the type of people I normally interact with != the general public, atleast in terms of tech-savviness and/or curiousity.
I agree it's unlikely, but it's a negative externality all the same. In general I try to minimize those. It's also highly dependent on the creator's viewer demographic, since the creator only gets paid for ads watched. A tech focused creator probably sees significantly less ad revenue than one with a more general audience.
For me, it's because I have multiple accounts and don't want to pay for Premium on all of them. For example: I pay for Premium on an account that I watch YouTube on every night. However, I don’t want that account linked to my phone.
A significant percentage of what I watch on YouTube was uploaded by people who don't have rights to that content. For me, turnabout is fair play. YouTube can profit off of pirated content, and I can pirate YouTube.
3/ Google not making money from ads makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
4/ I also run and contribute to Sponsorblock because fuck your VPN ad.
Nobody "values the service" of YouTube, that's bullshit HN founder talk seeping on every other subject. The reality is, there's no other source of videos (everyone is on youtube because everyone is on youtube), ads are a scourge, and there's very little _actually worth the time_ on YouTube.
I'm with you on 2 & 3, but I don't align with 1 at all. Perhaps that's because I'm fortunate enough to have the expendable income to afford it, so it's easier for me to justify the cost.
But it's fair to say that "value the service" is kinda bullshit, I'm mostly talking about valuing the content, and paying for the service that makes it possible. I'd follow the content though, if it moved to a service with more agreeable terms.
For me its the gross level of targeted tracking. Google is essentially spyware at its roots. If paying for it stopped that it would be one thing, but its not.
I find it okay when you can click the ads away like it used to be for a long time, but now YouTube often forces you to watch the whole clip, sometimes even two.
> and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely.
I doubt this. Youtube provides google with a lot more than a means a push ads. It gives them massive amounts of data about the viewers and the content creators to mine for their own use. They collect that data if you view ads on the platform or not.
> Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium?
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by still allowing native ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity (for payment processing).
You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.
i pay for youtube premium (i use spotify for music) just to not have ads, but now there are baked ads in videos, so im thinking about canceling my premium and just installing vanced because it has sponsorblock installed.
im not even watching that much youtube, but i cannot stand ads.
Personally, I pay for Premium but I also think everyone should run an ad-blocker on Google properties. I certainly do. It's at least nice if my premium sub gives 3 cents to the creators of the videos I watch since they wouldn't be getting ad money...
That's personally where I fall as well, I pay for most sites I get a lot of value out of, but continue to run ad blockers. It's quite frustrating how many sites continue to show you ads even if you're a paid subscriber.
YT Premium is actually nice and lets me share with others who I consider "family". It strikes a nice balance at it's current price and policies. If those don't seem like a good deal anymore vanced (et. al.) here I come.
At some point, YouTube realized they are more-or-less the only game in town and started to go from 1 ad every 0.5 video to 2 pre-roll ads, a mid roll ad and sometimes at near the end another ad. They also made some 30s-1m ads unskippable.
I don't want to support the platforms in any way and hope they stop existing. Sadly, its very hard for competitors to take back market share from these global monopolies.
I'll consider giving money of my own free will to Google when they stop farming my data and dodging taxes. I sponsor a number a creators through Patreon.
I am already paying google enough with my personal information. They will not extract more value from me without putting at least a fight.
I completely understand why people would pay, especially if there is no other option to not get ads, but I don't want to pay Google any cents for a service they would be happy to provide for free for influence.
It has negative externalities (Google "lose" money and free video is... un-impacted in the long run) but I value those infinitely less than my attention span.
If you don't view any ads, Google doesn't make any money off your personal information. Essentially all data collecting only exists to tailor specific ads to people they think will find them relevant so they can justify charging more for them.
Sure, but they are still collecting anyway despite them having been unable to put an ad in front of my eyes for several years now. I understand they are probably just doing it "in case of", but the more paranoid part of myself is wondering if that's all there is.
The same reason people use adblockers, get around news article paywalls, and/or pirate. Because they can, and don't see ethical issues with it.
> if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely.
How likely is this though? For example despite adblockers already being widely available, it seems that a significant portion of internet users if not most don't actually use them.
Having worked on a largely ad-supported website in the early '10s, I can definitely say the rise of ad blockers had a meaningful impact on ad revenue. I didn't mind this at all, I much preferred the product investing more effort in making the subscription that removed ads have attractive features, but if users had a way to also get all of the subscription features without paying, I don't think the business would have been able to sustain itself.
The same reason we all use(d) The Pirate Bay. Information deserves to be free, remember? We can distribute videos for free, you remember that, right? We can also pay content creators, who get ripped off by YouTube anyway. Ask them about that.
Are you suggesting that HackerNews readers should also remove their adblockers? That we are bound by a Kantian moral obligation to be subjected to enticement and manipulation for Google’s balance sheet? Will we get kicked out of Capitalism if we don’t acquiesce and watch the ads?
I guess I’m an amoral Bad Boy. Antinomian. A rebel, with strange views on religion, morality, information, and economics - heretical, unspeakable views, that I shall not utter here.
PS: I’m concerned about exposing my mind to advertisements. The risk to the computer, which is but a tool of the mind, is entirely secondary.
Straw man argument. OP was suggesting you pay for YT premium, which does away with the ads completely. Removing your web adblocker is a non sequitur, and exposes your computer to malware / spyware in addition to ads.
Because Google regards us as a resource to be exploited and we're just returning the favor? Class warfare really sucks when you're on the wrong end of it, huh?
If someone can’t afford $15 for Premium, they likely shouldn’t be wasting their time watching videos to begin with, and instead focus their time and effort on making a living.
