When you have a goose that produces a reliable daily supply of golden eggs do you:
"But what about profits"
"The ~$10MM in profit we booked last year is not enough!" The curse of infinite growth.
Youtube most likely never made any money. Hosting these vast amounts of video is expensive. Google stopped telling us how much they money youtube made them lose. You would think they would start bragging when they could make a profit off of it.
That being said, this still sucks of course.
They have really gone all out on the whole enshittification process during the past couple of years, haven’t they?
oh boy, I wish youtube kills itself like reddit is doing right now so decentralized alternatives can become widely adopted
YouTube is a bit of a different animal.
YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there's a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.
YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won't get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.
Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won't pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.
The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn't exist for there to be a viable 'federated' YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That's a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.
Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.
Text, however... well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.
I do wish that YouTube wasn't a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that's close, and it has it's own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there's Vimeo, but they've got a very different approach.
I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.
Then I’m going to begin not fucking watching YouTube.
There is a federated version of YouTube...
But storing video is a massive challenge, way harder than dealing with a Lemmy or Mastodon instance.
My rational mind realises it’s such an expensive system to run that it’s reasonable for them to charge or show ads. The problem is they’ve been extremely aggressive with ads and pushing subscriptions, to the point where I’m pretty resentful of the idea. Plus they’ve neglected so many things (like allowing aggressive copyright predators and refusing to implement sensible human-based appeals processes) that they really should have dealt with and instead embraced an algorithm that I’m pretty sure is at least partially responsible for the radicalisation of large groups of people.
I.. don’t mind paying for shit. I just don’t want to give them money.
Also: wow there’s federated video sharing? Bet that’s not cheap to run.
Also: wow there’s federated video sharing? Bet that’s not cheap to run.
It's called PeerTube for the record.
Also youtube-dl/yt-dlp (or mpv directly) if you just want to play and/or download videos and don't care about the UI or subscription stuff.
lol
As fill-in ads are a vector for computer viruses and other malware I for one will NOT be disabling my ad blocker unless YouTube is willing to provide a lifetime subscription to something like Life Lock and make me whole for anything lost to whatever malware arrives as a part of an ad.
Where else can I watch sci-show, Linus-tech-tips, and all the other channels I subscribe to?
Just use newpipe. It's youtube without the ads. Doesn't have casting support, but it allows you to download the videos. You can also listen/download to the audio of videos, without fetching the video.
Newpipe will probably be blocked as well if youtube is doing this. Honestly not sure why youtube hasn't blocked yt-dlp and others already.
It's not easily block able as it scrapes the YouTube website. They'd have to stop having a website for that to happen.
I'm not a 100% sure but I think newpipe uses a scraping method instead, so its harder to block since it pretends its a regular user
We did the Twitter to Mastodon migration. Now we are doing the Reddit to Lemmy/kbin migration. When are we doing the YouTube to Peertube migration?
Yeah, good luck making me watch ads trough newpipe
Just FYI for anyone reading: Invidious and Piped are great YouTube mirrors, and Piped even blocks in-video sponsor sections!
YouTube is the only Google service I use on a regular basis. Happy to leave them behind if they continue with this type of behavior.
It would be less convenient, but it is what it is and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s ads.
I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn't cheap. It's not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don't watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?
I can't speak for everyone, but I block ads and don't pay because I hate Google. In addition to their repeated violations of user privacy, they go out of their way to disable OS features unless you pay them. Like disabling background play or PiP with Safari on iOS. Those features use the same open standards as foreground web browsers, so it literally takes extra effort to break them. Effort that could instead be used to fix the numerous problems with their platform, which they don't. I refuse to reward that behaviour.
And if you don’t watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?
There is an awkward gap where most services (not just YouTube) don't offer reasonable pricing for consuming small amounts of content. So if you consume a lot of YouTube, the subscription price is justified. If you consume very little YouTube, you can probably suffer through some ads. But if you're somewhere in the middle, there isn't a great option.
YouTube probably makes fractions of a cent off of ads on a single video it shows me, but I can't pay fractions of a cent to watch one video.
I'd consider this to actually be a pretty widespread problem across the internet, where it's frustratingly difficult to buy small amounts of content for a reasonable price. It's either the subscription or nothing for a ton of services.
I hate ads. They are annoying, and waste too much of my time, are irrelevant to me 90% of the time, and often can be malicious.
I would like to watch videos on youtube, but I dont wish to watch videos on youtube if there are ads. Also, ads are not every now and again, they are 2 ads for every video without fail now. 2x 30s ads for a 5 minute video is as bad as cable, I ditched cable and replaced it with youtube.
I feel like extensions are pretty savvy for fixing this. If not, I will waste less time on YouTube. Hell, why not another big site getting over my limit for hoops that are worth jumping through vs value I get.
Yup, a lot of my time got wasted on YouTube.. I watched "educational" and "interesting" videos but I have to say that many of the creators got caught into enshittification process too.. I would do well with 95% reduction in watch time. However, if they start a real war against adblockers.. 100% reduction will it be.
The 10min minimum is why I pretty much stopped posting. If you don't provide enough viewing time for 2 pre-rolls and one intermission your revenue per 1k views drops off and you don't get promoted to new viewers.
Seems like it's profit squeezin season on every major platform.
small cease and desist for users
Great, now YouTube is being further enshittified.
Nebula is really good at this point. Almost everything I enjoy watching is one there now.
Seems like one of the best options to support your favorite creators.
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