this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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This entire shitty ad model these companies have pushed onto the net needs to go. Seriously. Find a better way to monetize your world.
It's not even just the Internet. Marketing fucks up every aspect of our civilization. We can't even handle having a professional election anymore without trashy ads and people acting like children. You can't even watch legitimate news anymore. ...nevermind mind whack kids pranking people on YouTube being used and turning into assholes for YouTube monetization.
Honestly I'm starting to wonder if the reason why we got ourselves into a ad filled hell hole is because we expect soo much to be free and those things have to make money somehow and server space and the electricity they run on aren't free and the only people willing to spend money are whales and advertisers and from what I've been told YouTube was never profitable on it's own for Google and the only reason they've been keeping the site on is because it brings attention to other Google services while also preventing competition so I greatly think we'd all benefit from being open to paying for sites that are like YouTube so YouTube and advertisers have some real competitors I don't know how a my theoreticall site would profit without ads but it's still sad that sites like YouTube are expensive and unprofitable making it so Google is the only option solely because they can afford the loses making yt premium even more greedy
IF you want to get down the rabbit hole of expectations. I lose 34% off my pay. Like that. Poof. Taxes. I lose another 50% of what’s left to rent and groceries (not eating out). That doesn’t cover internet or utilities. Then transportation. And that’s just essentially living. My place isn’t all that.
And now you want me to pay for every website I visit. Or every service I use? Or I don’t use them and just go back to “essentially being alive.”
And I’m in the top 20% of income earners according to recent stats, which is insane because I’m not making fuck you money.
I think the real issue is greed. There’s no need for Disney+ to cost $20 a month. There’s no need for me to pony up another $1.5 a month to get 50GB of storage instead of the 5GB they know you’ll outgrow in a week. There’s zero need to pay $18 a month for a blue checkmark. They tell you it’s because it costs lots and lots of money to operate and the ads just barely cover our costs. Sure.
It’s just greed. It’s all just amoral, unethical, greed. Right on up from the rent/mortgage to all the shit you buy or “consume.”
We saw this surge with COVID, GME, crypto, NFT, absolutely wild, insidious, and morally bankrupt schemes exposing just how much wealth is pooled away from working class (they actually call them ‘dark pools’, where money goes and disappears). Something clicked. And it became a feeding frenzy where everyone is just steadily driving up prices, but not a single company is unprofitable. All the lay offs? None of those tech companies were in trouble. In fact, most made record profits!
No, because they add advertisements to services you pay for.
See: television, streaming services, fucking books even.
It's just unregulated capitalism doing what unregulated capitalism does - gobble up as much revenue as possible, at the expense of everything else.
This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is "buy YouTube premium, so you won't be stuck in our ad supported model" and now we're ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn't YouTube premium exactly that?
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
So "pay or you don't get shit" is okay, but "pay or see ads, your choice" is bad somehow?
Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It's not mysterious at all.
There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.
Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.
All those are fine suggestions, but a "free with ads" option isn't that bad either; the real problem isn't the ads themselves. The real problem is how intrusive the ads are, how many of them there are, as well as much information they (and YouTube) collect on you. Plus, in this case, the company in question isn't exactly a small company who is financially struggling. It's the classic capitalist problem of "infinite growth", where your profits have to be constantly increasing.
But there's nothing inherently wrong about the idea of having ads, just like there's nothing inherently wrong about youtubers having sponsors.
That's a fine opinion, but I happen to disagree.
It's not pay or remove ads. It is pay to give us the money that we need to run our business or we will use ads to get that much money
You're right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn't math.
They simultaneously introduced this ad blocker change and took away the $5 no-ads package.
This is a shakedown and it's been happening across many streaming platforms for a while now.
I don't mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they've become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I'm trying to watch and I'll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
I'm not against using ads to support websites but it's the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can't ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
But no, not like that. Clearly they need to find a way of materializing money from thin air.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
"Guys they don't have any money, they just gotta be privacy vampires and spam us with ads, they have no other means of funding it!"
Maybe stop being a bootlicker for a company that used to be "Don't be evil."
Yeah! There needs to be a model that does neither cost nor inconveniences me. Everything else is unacceptable and corporate BS!
I'm sure they can take a page from every online service before we entered the 2020s, where you could pay to enter without ads, like Netflix was. But no, the ad company has to inject ads into everything.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
"Guys they don't have any money, they just gotta be privacy vampires and spam us with ads, they have no other means of funding it!"
Like charging a fee?
Make it possible to get Premium without YT music bolted on it.
Believe it or not Google: Some users don't want it or already have a platform.
I've been around since YT red, and while Google Play Music was a better app, I am OK with YT music and primarily watch YT over the other sites and yt music is all I listen to in the house or car. So, while not cheap $22/mo for premium family fits my needs.
I'd be OK if yt allowed me to skip/blocked sponsored ads too. At least on PC sponsor block works well. For my TV its a few more hoops to get that there, which I haven't done. Not terrible to ffw across them
I'm not paying them a penny either way, but if you're going to, wouldn't you want more features for your money, even if you don't use them? Or are you suggesting they charge less for a subscription sans music?
Less money and remove music
Aka Youtube Lite Edition.
The bomb is, that Youtube wants for Lite Edition money and still serves "limited" ads.
lmao.
They bundle them together because they want people to buy more. This is why the ad-free only tier disappears and it all costs more.
I think about this Jaron Lanier talk a lot.