It was great. Even if I didn’t like the idea of “yet another walled garden, funded by a company known for its track record against open source software (this was during Ballmer era)”, I really liked the design and how fluid the interface was. It could have become another player in the mobile market and lessen the practical duopoly. Firefox OS tried this too, but it also went under.
Like many other online services they’ve saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.
They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.
Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don’t see anyone being able to do that for free for long.
Unfortunately, if anyone is going to “disrupt” youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they’ll have to monetize as well.
My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.
I agree that the sheer quantity of resources required to host videos is hard to be able to compete, but there’s also Invidious, which is the fediverse equivalent. As with other fediverse applications, it will largely depend on the people running the instances and how much they storage they can support.
We need to think about what people did before YouTube. It was already gaining traction around 2006, but before that you could still watch videos on different websites, it was just decentralized and videos were hosted on smaller pages. You might even see a website dedicated to a single video. YouTube’s incredibly convenient, but internet video can and will survive without it.
I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won’t be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.
The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.
Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.
Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I’m sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.
There’s a significant aspect of scale being ignored when you talk about video sites before Youtube took off.
Not a single one of those self hosted sites had anywhere near the storage that youtube allows. Want a video from over a year or two ago? Hope you downloaded it or the creator loved it enough to leave it up. Frame rates? Resolution? What are those? I understand that tech has advanced as well, and those issues would not be as severe now, but I really doubt that a lot of channels even now would be able to keep the same lengthy back catalog of old content if they were self hosting.
I also think that there are countless channels that would never have existed if the creators had to figure out hosting their own site, setting up streaming of the video files on it, potentially managing their own comments plugins, potentially managing their own methods to keep viewers aware when new content was posted, and having to somehow spread the word of their existence without the aid of an existing platform trying to keep people viewing things for more ad impressions.
The monopoly of Youtube is a problem, the lack of easy to use and configure open alternatives is a problem… but we can’t ignore the massive impact Youtube had in lowering the barrier to entry and upkeep costs of being a content maker.
There are a lot of hurdles to content creation and hosting that Youtube enables creators to completely ignore.
Also, lots of the younger generations didn’t really mind the ads. After this news showed up, we had a discussion going on my company discord. Most of the older people started sharing workarounds but most of the younger people said that they’ve been using YouTube with ads and didn’t see any problem with it.
I’ve seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.
I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn’t stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don’t own a TV and turn it off.
I’ve been using YouTube Premium (née YouTube Red) for so long that I totally forgot that there are ads on YouTube and was surprised by all of this news popping off.
Controversial take around these parts but… I don’t mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.
I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I’ll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:
If I’m paying, you don’t get to also show me ads. I won’t even pay for HBO for this reason. They’re showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it’s still obnoxious to me
The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.
It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there’s a million of them and I don’t plan to use one as a central portal for news. I’d rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I’d kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
I find the number of people saying “well I’m not going to use YouTube anymore!” hilarious. Yeah dude, that’s the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I’ll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don’t think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.
Maybe I guess? People keep talking about Google selling user data but that is one thing they explicitly DON’T do. User data is their competitive advantage, not their product. They sell advertising, and advertisers can be explicit in who they target. If Google sells the data, they lose the value they hold to advertisers.
So Google is almost certainly still recording what I do and what I watch. But if I’m not seeing ads related to it, am I paying twice? What makes it different from, for example, Netflix keeping track of my watch history to recommend other shows?
I suppose that the videos I watch might inform the ads I see on search, so in that sense you could say I pay twice. But I don’t use Google for search anyway so it kind of doesn’t matter.
I’d kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
This is exactly the reason I use Apple News+. I get access to multiple magazines I have read forever, actual well written journalism, news briefs tailored to my wants, etc. It’s very much worth the price for me.
Same here except I’ve always used adblocker. The contrast between YouTube with adblock + sponsorblock compared to stock, cannot be overstated. The site literally becomes unuseable. It’s awful.
Lololol you are directly stealing from creators. There isn’t even some thin connection. They get paid on ad views and subscriptions. You are straight up taking money from creatives.
I’m under no obligation to watch advertisements. They can try to advertise to me if they want, I can avoid it however I want. Did you ever grow up with linear TV? Did you just eventually piss yourself because it would have been unfair to the commercial broadcast company to not pay attention to the ads? You mook.
You are under an obligation to maximize your shareholder value as a consumer, anything against that violates the prime directive and will send bots from the matrix to simp for it. Thanks for the reminder, I don’t have to watch anything. What a revelation of information I did not know before this.
Every single one of the content creators I watch who has said anything about ad blocking has encouraged their viewers to use ad block.
They all do in-video sponsorships and run patreons, as anyone serious about making money off video content does.
Beyond the absolutely abysmal ROI for content creators on Youtube ads, Youtube has repeatedly made sudden extreme changes to their monetization rules. They also have some of the worst support for creators when videos get arbitrarily demonetized, or when backend issues cause a creator’s ad revenue to be direct deposited to someone else’s account for literal years. This has lead most creators to not be able to rely on Youtube monetization as an income stream.
Again I need to emphasize that literally every single one of the content creators I watch who has said anything at all about ad blocking has encouraged their viewers to use ad block, including against the creators’ own content. Most creators want Youtube competitors to rise.
Youtube has never made a profit since its inception almost 20 years ago. Google makes money hand over fist off of the user data it collects on me and others through analytics and analysis, regardless of the ads I may or may not allow it to display to me, and clearly has found Youtube a worthwhile return on investment for it to have been allowed to continue existing for as long as it has. Google does not baby any of their platforms or systems, and they regularly shutter things that seem far better business ventures.
This crackdown is not the actions of a company scrambling to make something profitable lest that thing be put under existential threat.
I am not looking to get content for nothing. I am arguing that the price has already been paid, otherwise Youtube would have been shuttered by Google many years ago.
I understand that Youtube may not exist if every single user blocked ads. Thankfully for Google, that is so unlikely to occur as to be effectively impossible. That’s also not my responsibilty to look out for.
I’d argue that any singular person believing that their individual actions could make an impact on Youtube or Google needs to find better causes to spend their time on, and should work on their ego.
With the amount of telemetry and trackable data they’ve collected and potentially sold, and the quality of both the service and the content being in a constant decline, I consider my malware-free access to the service to be paid for life.
Shit, considering the way they handled recent controversies, I see it as a moral obligation to hit them in the wallet.
If you’re worried about creators, support them via their patreons or what means they determine. They aren’t making much directly from YouTube, and their support streams are more certain that way.
Why should I pay some extortionate fee each month on Google’s monopoly? Even if I do that they’re still hoovering up all the data they can get from me.
U-block Origin on desktop, revanced/newpipe for mobile.
IMO the money is much better spent on directly supporting content creators rather than padding the coffers of a 1.75 trillion dollar anti-competitive, monopolistic, tax-dodging, privacy-destroying company like Google.
I will never ever pay for youtube and I’ll never stop blocking ads. Theres always a way, and if the day comes where ad blockers actually become iniffective then thats it for me, I’ll find somewhere else. I’m already a reddit refugee since they blocked 3rd party aps and charge a subscription fee, I can’t figure out a workaround yet so I dropped reddit altogether.
Sure, just throw money at the corpos, but please don’t act surprised when they suddenly double the premium fee, or when they start sneaking in ads for premium users. That’s the problem with corpo greed, it just never ends, and the moment you give in to it, you lose.
Remember when streaming services boasted about ad free viewing, only to then Continue to charge you AND serve ads to you WHILE collecting and selling your personal information? These companies can smd.
There are a lot of people frustrated by YouTube’s decision to force a pop-up message for viewers using an ad-blocker as seen in this Reddit post.
Microsoft itself built an excellent Windows Phone YouTube app for its era, only for it to receive an arbitrary block by Google.
An X (Twitter) user named @endermanch posted a workaround for bypassing the extremely annoying YouTube pop-up that, for now, doesn’t force you to disable your ad-blocker but that could just be a matter of time.
At least for right now the method of switching to the Windows Phone user-agent seems to completely remove the YouTube pop-up and allows you to get back to glorious ad-free viewing.
At the moment it’s just an inconvenience and users can click out of the pop-up to continue watching their favorite creators such as our Windows Central channel.
However, with the hubris that these content platforms must feel after Netflix was successfully able to stop password sharing and still increase subscriber numbers, I don’t think it will take long for YouTube to completely block users that have an ad-blocker enabled.
The original article contains 581 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
TLDR Some folks just never update their software. Idk if this is just a Windows problem but damn. I remember reading about this 0-day months ago and thinking to myself malware groups will have a field day before the vulnerability finally becomes dead just because of this.
I paid for it too. I mean fuck man. I’ve been using winrar for almost 30 years. That’s more than I can say for most things in my life. I figured it was the least I could do.
Early in the morning post, worded that wrong, but the sentiment is the same, open source or independent projects, the creators need something in return to keep working on them
I’ve paid for winrar because I decided I’ve used it for the better half of my life and well kindly keep using it and getting rid of that pop up whilst also giving back to soldering i use regularly was the right choice for me.
I loved my windows phone 7, it was the best phone OS I’ve ever had.
I liked the UI, I liked the consistency and simplicity of the apps. I had Xbox music before Spotify really took off. The only problem was the trident based browser and Google specifically blocking all their apps and maps from it.
Then Microsoft just dropped support for it… I held out on 7.5 for as long as I could, and then my charge port failed and I upgraded to the HTC One, which was also pretty good.
“The company has stated from the very start that the Surface Duo would receive just three years of OS updates, meaning today is the last day that Microsoft has to stay true to its word.”
I can hardly find a company that supports their product and their backward compatibility longer than ms. Just recently read that wordpad had an alias “writer” (or similar) because this was its name before decades ago and there could be apps/scripts relying using this nsme.
windowscentral.com
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