It’s a sad state of affairs. I would pay for youtube in a heartbeat if it wasn’t connected to the biggest spyware company in the world. But now, even while paying you still get ads and they still track you. The people working at Alphabet are bad and should feel bad.
I feel like youtube is losing sight of why users are paying for the service then.
To me, personally, youtube is useful enough that I will keep paying to remove ads entirely (in combination with ublock). That being said, there will come a time when the value proposition is no longer balanced. Then I will stop paying, and probably stop using it as well.
But as always with Google, I question whether their motive is to kill another service. They’re very competent at that specific thing.
They just want users who are paying full freight as they know the ad business is in step decline.
Is it in decline? I mean, I want to believe it, but I haven’t seen any hard data on that.
It very much is and is talked about basically nonstop everytime the topic comes up from any content creator that’s been in the game for longer then a decade.
The ad based system the internet is built on is unraveling.
The internet isn’t built on it. The commercial websites who do not have other products (as in all the websites related to RL goods, stores,…) are.
Exactly. If every ad-dependent website went offline tomorrow and all we were left with was Wikipedia, PeerTube, government/academia sites and a bunch of Geocities-esque “labor of love” hobbyist pages, nothing of value would be lost.
True, but my point was that even a lot of the commercial websites that do have other products do not depend on ads, e.g. Amazon and all the other stores would still be there, every company offering a paid service would still be there, every company providing a service related to their RL goods (e.g. specs, drivers, product descriptions, lists of stores where you can buy them,…) would still be there.
Advertising does not finance a very large percentage of the useful parts of the internet. And among those advertising financed websites that are useful a lot are essentially duplicates to get a chunk of the ad revenue without doing a lot of work (e.g. almost all news websites that just republish AP, Reuters,… content).
YT is only usable with ad blockers nowadays. And then it does not make a difference if you have a subscription or not.
I would subscribe YT if they had a reasonably priced ad free tier, but if it does not make a difference, I’ll watch it for free.
That way of thinking is a trap. They did have a more reasonably priced ad free tier but people using it only made it worse over time because it got so popular that Youtube could confidently raise prices and slash benefits. And the line has to go up. That‘s the only thing that matters to them.
This is literately the equivalent of cable.
No, it’s worse. With a cable DVR you can skip all commercials.
DVR is the equivalent of having a yt-dlp frontend that includes SponsorBlock.
Can you, though? Because I remember when DVB started in Europe, they’ve sent a signal during commercials that makes your device block the fast forward feature.
I don’t know whether that’s still a thing. But you needed a hacked firmware on your TV / set top box to allow to FFWD through commercials back then.
I’ve never heard of that being the case in America, but I can’t speak to how it works in Europe. That would be lame if it worked that way.
Youtube is telling me daily that they’ll soon disable my youtube because I have an ad blocker. Still waiting for it to actually happen.
I’ve been using Ublock origin for years and I’ve never seen a message like that
Same. The last time I saw an YouTube ad was around 2015.
I’ve been using Ublock origin for years
Same here. I started seeing them this week.
correct me if I’m wrong, but I think ublock origin updates quickly enough to remove these notifications before most users see them
It often does, yeah. Not always though. I got one of the adblock warnings last night, and it refused to play the video. I fixed it by heading into ublock settings and manually updating. It always makes me laugh how rapidly the ad-blocker arms war progresses
I don’t even login so I don’t know what they are going to disable.
Same here. And I’m waiting for them to finally do it because it’ll free up so much of my time. I might start reading books again.
Also, it’s the last Google-service I’m using. So, banning me from it will allow me to finally delete my Google account.
For your web browser, don’t use Chrome. Use Firefox with uBlock, NoScript, Sponsorblock, and a VPN like Mullvad.
For Smart TV usage, block your TV’s built in “smart functionality” and its access to the internet via MAC address blacklist on your router. Also use SmartTubeNext on a Shield Pro with FLauncher instead of Google’s.
For mobile, use 3rd party YouTube clients on your device like Vanced on Android, and Unwatched on iOS.
I’d love to see a transition to other platforms like Nebula. As users it would be nice to start choosing by principles too.
That’s how they’ll convince me to pay for premium
Would you like to pay us and have ads?
wtf is premium lite?!!? Lmao
it’s the opposite of Economy Plus
Oh so you pay to be abused, gotcha.
Common People, Black Mirror Season 7
They are really dedicated to helping foster the pirate side of the Web, aren’t they?
Super tube next on android tvs, free tube for android
I used to pay Google for things back when they were pretty awesome. Haven’t paid them a dime for years now.
It feels insane to me that you’re paying and you still get ads. I fucking refuse to do that
