- "If YouTube adds so much value to your life, then you should pay for YouTube Premium -- Why are you being frugal about it?"
- "I want to be in control of what I see on webpages -- No company should enforce their agenda on me. If I don't like to see YouTube Shorts or Recommendations, then I must have that freedom. uBlock is more than an adblocker at this point -- it allows me to "detox" the bloated YouTube UI and make it more tolerable."
The second group might not even mind paying for YouTube Premium, but that doesn't solve their problem. If YouTube really wants to increase revenue, there are other ways.
I really despise shorts. I wish i could block them in YouTubes own app.
About 10 years ago i put up some basic videos of some openGL stuff and games stuff I was working on for college. These were screen recordings. Not from a camera phone.
A few months ago I checked and YouTube had converted them all to shorts. No way to undo this. Now my decade old very basic projects get randomly shown to people that didn't search for it. And the Shorts format removes/hides all the text explaining the video context etc.
Youtube have no method to allow me to undo this. Any video of certain resolutions and lengths will be converted to a short. The only suggestion online from other users is to reupload the videos but add large side margins.
Wow, and I thought the only shitty thing about the shorts is that you can't really rewind them easily (there is a way, but it's enshittification at it's finest).
My objection to the first argument is that I don't think YouTube adds a lot of value to my life; it's the individual contributors who do. These creators are on YouTube because that's where the audience is and vice versa. I have a lot of problems with Google's stewardship of this dominant position and I don't want to do anything to perpetuate it. The creators who do add significant value to my life I support directly through Patreon and/or through watching them on Nebula, which is a paid video service.
Part of YouTube premium dues go directly to the creators whose videos you watch. My understanding is that creators earn more from a premium subscriber view than from a free user with ads.
Patreon is much more helpful and we don't know how much of a membership goes to creators. Nebula seems great but doesn't allow for free access to education for all of it is a paid service so that seems like a worse way to gatekeep information than ads alone.
"I was fine with paying for YouTube, but the price has gotten so high that it's unreasonable."
I'm not going to pay YouTube more than I do Netflix, Hulu, Disney, even Spotify. Especially when they're starting to get competition from Nebula, Curiosity Stream, and even TikTok.
There is also an argument that web services should not force you to pay after already pulling you in for free (unless it's explicitly a trial). Obviously this doesn't account for people using a service for free due to a hack of some kind, but there is also an argument that adblocking is not a hack - rather, that it is a "working as intended" feature of the web, and is simply a habit of a subset of the viewerbase, and, crucially, that this is known to YouTube, who chose of their own free will to explicitly allow it for many, many years.
I find Shorts annoying, but at least on the web YouTube and on the app version that is on my streaming devices Shorts are grouped together making them easy to ignore. It's not like they autoplay or are animated. They just take up a little space on some pages.
The thing though is, it's not really two distinct arguments. It's easy to pay for it and control the experience by blocking shorts or recommendations using uBlock.
What the second group of people really want is to not pay for it and also block ads.
It is a disservice to users of the service to whittle down this issue to 2 simple points. Under Google's lead, YouTube has been offering a service - as we've been accustomed to accessing it - since 2006. That's ~17 years.
Suddenly, they want to change the very nature of their business model. It is no longer the YouTube we've been accustomed to accessing for those ~17 years. A no log-in required service, ad-blockers, plenty of browser extensions, etc..
Let's keep in mind that YouTube made ~$29.2 billion in revenue in 2022 [0, 1]. They reported 2.7 billion active users in 2023 - this makes them second only to Facebook.
Its YouTube Premium Service has 80 million subscribers (as of September 11, 2022). Netflix, in comparison, has 247 million subscribers worldwide (3rd qrt, 2023) [2]. Disney+ has 146 million worldwide subscribers (3rd qtr, 2023) but they've been bleeding subscribers [3]. These are actual Premium Video Services.
YouTube is trying to be both an annoying (ad-ridden) general video site and a very expensive premium site. I call this arrogance.
Basically... YouTube is doing very well financially right now ($29 billion). They want to make even more money because $282.8 billion (2022) in revenue for Alphabet is not enough [4]. We can all see the greed.
The problem... Google wants to do this by changing the core of their business as far as access is concerned. It is this change to their core business model that we are up in arms about. It will no longer be the same site.
Isn't there still not a lot of information on YouTube's profitability?
I don't think it takes $29 billion to run it but if it hypothetically took say $24 billion that is a 20% revenue loss from take a loss in the billions.
I tried looking for this but failed to find anything. I also thought about how these multi-billion dollar companies hide profits behind tax codes so that - many times - they pay little or no taxes. This, more than anything else, makes the search for real profits very difficult.
Netflix made ~$31.6 billion in revenue worldwide and they are profitable - as well as undisputed leaders in the Premium Video Category.
Google is so quick to kill projects that, I think, if YT wasn't (happily) successful it would have made changes long ago.
Netflix has 250m subscribers and made $4.492B in net profit.
YouTube has 2.7 billion users.
If YouTube paid per user what Netflix did they would go broke.
So it isn't as simple as "Netflix does okay".
Especially since you say these changes make you want to leave the platform. Why would you expect YouTube to cause that kind of damage earlier than necessary?
I don't claim they need this to survive, just that it is hard to know how profitable they are without any real numbers.
The Netflix to YouTube comparison is an apples to oranges one.
I would compare TikTok and/or Facebbok to YouTube before I make comparisons to Netflix because their business models align... attracting as many eyeballs as possible. That's it. Numbers for its sake.
Through our efforts - they did just that. They were successful in attracting over 2.5 billion active monthly users. That was their main goal.
It was up to them to monetize it in a way that didn't chase users away. They did that for nearly 17 years. There were no complaints at any time.
It was sort of like Microsoft's monopoly on Operating Systems. They rather we pirate their OS than take the chance we would get comfortable using another OS. Well, Google was the same. They rather some of us use ad-blockers than possibly use another service - ie, keeping those eyeballs only on their site.
I do not see Google doing anything to keep me (and many millions of others) from leaving. Quite the opposite. Nowadays, I have basically moved over to TikTok - their actual competitor. Their hardball tactics mean little to me. They may also be losing an entire younger generation (too tired to source this).
Maybe they just resigned to losing the numbers game and are trying to segue into increasing revenue. I don't know. Netflix/Disney/Amazon are there the same way Facebook was there when they tried Google+. TikTok is also there for the short-form, creator stuff. YouTube is surrounded...
Google seems to not understand the market anymore but they're trying to keep investors happy with revenue growth.
It really makes no difference to me what Google does. I shrug. Their only hope to fend off TikTok is government intervention. Attempts, as is common knowledge, have already been made.
You vastly overestimate the impact these changes will make IMHO. Unless there are numbers backing up that they lost users there isn't proof that locking down had negative impacts.
I don't care how you feel about Google, I am just pointing out that "they made a lot of money" has an asterisk.
Not sure if ublock updated their blocking rules to bypass the block or youtube stopped the experiment - but starting yesterday, I'm no longer seeing any adblock warning which previously had started blocking me (as opposed to originally just nagging me to disable) from watching youtube videos.
I do wonder if the actual outcome of the experiment was increased rates of adblocking though - since every time it makes it into the news, more people are exposed to the idea it's even possible.
Aside, (cmd+l, cmd+c, cmd+shit+n, cmd+v, enter) is a pretty useful sequence to have muscle memory for to open the same page in incognito, which easily bypasses the block as well.
For a few days I was getting the prompts and finally the 3 video warning. I went without youtube for a few days, when I tried yesterday my AdBlocker was working fine on it. I watched several videos and got no warnings. It's unclear to me if they gave up, or if they're testing this in waves to see what happens.
It's both A/B tested and a very frequent cat and mouse game with ad blockers. Youtube was pushing out updates daily, and uBlock Origin was responding in kind within hours (Sometimes you would need to manually update your extension though). The last few days Youtube hasn't put out any updates[1]. I believe the last change was 3 days ago.
[1] The current youtube ad notice version can be found at the bottom of this link. No dates, but it's useful to compare if you knew what the last uBlock Origin filter version you were aware of.
https://pastefy.app/G1Txv5su/raw
I initially blocked that popup with ublock origin, but I've since turned it back off and let it block me instead. It's a fantastic way to prevent you from mindlessly watching videos. Now I just use yt-dlp to download videos I know I care about and subscribe to.
- "If YouTube adds so much value to your life, then you should pay for YouTube Premium -- Why are you being frugal about it?"
- "I want to be in control of what I see on webpages -- No company should enforce their agenda on me. If I don't like to see YouTube Shorts or Recommendations, then I must have that freedom. uBlock is more than an adblocker at this point -- it allows me to "detox" the bloated YouTube UI and make it more tolerable."
The second group might not even mind paying for YouTube Premium, but that doesn't solve their problem. If YouTube really wants to increase revenue, there are other ways.