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YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization

YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization and you could place a single ad at the beginning of your videos. Now I see video with 10x two ads interspersed. You have to constantly click to bypass them. It's getting incredibly annoying, and it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google. That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?

unnouinceput 6y ago
it's called uBlock Origins, available for all major browsers, try it, you'll be amazed. Haven't seen an ad on youtube since last decade (preemptive snark comment - current decade started on 1st Jan 2011 and will end on 31st Dec 2020).
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  I've been running ad blockers for... well, since they were created. I have no idea how anyone lives without them. But YT in particular has started bypassing all of them. I'm down to using just Firefox with the YT enhancer plugin, because it's the only thing that manages to skip the ads for me now. And I'll quit using it if that breaks.
  - wruza 6y ago
    I'm using ubo on desktop and adguard on ios/android. No ads on YT ever, and very rarely I see ads on sites. Do you have your lists well-updated? What blocker did you use before?
  - fuzxi 6y ago
    I have personally not seen an ad on youtube in years, bar the video recommendations on the home page and the 'sponsored content' some channels bake into their videos. On desktop, I use uMatrix for more granular blocking + uBlock Origin for hiding empty frames, and I use Youtube Vanced on Android.
- lozaning 6y ago
  Reactive snarky comment: No it didn't : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 Specifically 4.3.11 defines the start of a decade as any year where [year]%10==0.
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    there is no year zero. Let that sink it
    - ac29 6y ago
      There is in ISO 8601: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
      - unnouinceput 6y ago
        And how many calendars use it? Lemme give you a hint, it's the same number as the the year in question Also there is no day 0 of the month, no month zero of the year. It's how calendars work.
Reedx 6y ago
Well, hosting videos is an expensive operation. You have 2 options to pay for the resources you're consuming: Trade your time (ads) or trade your money (subscribe). The latter is worth it if you're using YouTube a lot.
coldpie 6y ago
The disconnect between your first and second paragraphs is pretty hilarious. The ads are there to pay for the bandwidth, man.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  Yeah but I don't think YouTube is aiming for breakeven or small profit, they are squeezing as much as they can. That opens them up for disruption.
  - icebraining 6y ago
    It's very likely that YouTube still loses money.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Content, advertising, and bandwidth (along with other technical services) operate as entirely different types of economic goods, in multiple senses, but especially in terms of elasticities, rivalousness, appeal, and excludability. There's also the role of attention and content and service ranking. Content is a public good in the economic sense: zero marginal cost, high fixed costs, nonrivalous, and poorly excludable. Advertising is a rent (to advertisers) and an imposition (to its audience). There's an active aversion to it, the content is very often deceptive, manipulating, and against the recipients' true interests. At the same time, as more attractive audiences are driven away (and they will be) those who remain are subject to ever more, ever lower quality ads for ever more manipulative or harmful products and services. Bandwidth and availability must meet or address peak demands which are infrequent though often predictable. Users' decision criteria, as with highway traffic, externalise most costs, whilst benefit is privatised, incentivising overuse. Provisioning must be based not on some average utilisation, but on probability of availability and service quality, with additional nines costing orders of magnitude more to provide. That risk environment may itself be quite variable. The consequence is that demand, revenue, and cost components follow vastly dissimmilar dynamics, making the business exceedingly difficult on market terms, and incentivising numerous pathological behaviours.
nathanyz 6y ago
Up front disclosure, I am the founder of a video hosting company. I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow. There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies. So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  On the storage front, it seems to me like you could get around that a bit by not keeping content forever. You could make a more ephemeral video hosting site. As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.
  - nathanyz 6y ago
    These are good ideas. Our theory is that by simplifying the complexity of video hosting, it makes it viable for more people to test against various business models without having to do the heavy lifting of figuring out video encoding, delivery, and storage just to start. Basically similar to the role that WordPress, et al provided for websites themselves. There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
stevoski 6y ago
I got sick of the YT ads, I bought a YT premium subscription. Now I don't get ads.
lrem 6y ago
> it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google. Except it doesn't come from Google, does it? The amount of monetisation is entirely in the creator's discretion. Disclaimer: I do work for Google, but that's public information.

unnouinceput 6y ago

it's called uBlock Origins, available for all major browsers, try it, you'll be amazed. Haven't seen an ad on youtube since last decade (preemptive snark comment - current decade started on 1st Jan 2011 and will end on 31st Dec 2020).

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
I've been running ad blockers for... well, since they were created. I have no idea how anyone lives without them. But YT in particular has started bypassing all of them. I'm down to using just Firefox with the YT enhancer plugin, because it's the only thing that manages to skip the ads for me now. And I'll quit using it if that breaks.
- wruza 6y ago
  I'm using ubo on desktop and adguard on ios/android. No ads on YT ever, and very rarely I see ads on sites. Do you have your lists well-updated? What blocker did you use before?
- fuzxi 6y ago
  I have personally not seen an ad on youtube in years, bar the video recommendations on the home page and the 'sponsored content' some channels bake into their videos. On desktop, I use uMatrix for more granular blocking + uBlock Origin for hiding empty frames, and I use Youtube Vanced on Android.
lozaning 6y ago
Reactive snarky comment: No it didn't : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 Specifically 4.3.11 defines the start of a decade as any year where [year]%10==0.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  there is no year zero. Let that sink it
  - ac29 6y ago
    There is in ISO 8601: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      And how many calendars use it? Lemme give you a hint, it's the same number as the the year in question Also there is no day 0 of the month, no month zero of the year. It's how calendars work.

Reedx 6y ago

Well, hosting videos is an expensive operation. You have 2 options to pay for the resources you're consuming: Trade your time (ads) or trade your money (subscribe). The latter is worth it if you're using YouTube a lot.

coldpie 6y ago

The disconnect between your first and second paragraphs is pretty hilarious. The ads are there to pay for the bandwidth, man.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
Yeah but I don't think YouTube is aiming for breakeven or small profit, they are squeezing as much as they can. That opens them up for disruption.
- icebraining 6y ago
  It's very likely that YouTube still loses money.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Content, advertising, and bandwidth (along with other technical services) operate as entirely different types of economic goods, in multiple senses, but especially in terms of elasticities, rivalousness, appeal, and excludability. There's also the role of attention and content and service ranking. Content is a public good in the economic sense: zero marginal cost, high fixed costs, nonrivalous, and poorly excludable. Advertising is a rent (to advertisers) and an imposition (to its audience). There's an active aversion to it, the content is very often deceptive, manipulating, and against the recipients' true interests. At the same time, as more attractive audiences are driven away (and they will be) those who remain are subject to ever more, ever lower quality ads for ever more manipulative or harmful products and services. Bandwidth and availability must meet or address peak demands which are infrequent though often predictable. Users' decision criteria, as with highway traffic, externalise most costs, whilst benefit is privatised, incentivising overuse. Provisioning must be based not on some average utilisation, but on probability of availability and service quality, with additional nines costing orders of magnitude more to provide. That risk environment may itself be quite variable. The consequence is that demand, revenue, and cost components follow vastly dissimmilar dynamics, making the business exceedingly difficult on market terms, and incentivising numerous pathological behaviours.

nathanyz 6y ago

Up front disclosure, I am the founder of a video hosting company. I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow. There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies. So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
On the storage front, it seems to me like you could get around that a bit by not keeping content forever. You could make a more ephemeral video hosting site. As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.
- nathanyz 6y ago
  These are good ideas. Our theory is that by simplifying the complexity of video hosting, it makes it viable for more people to test against various business models without having to do the heavy lifting of figuring out video encoding, delivery, and storage just to start. Basically similar to the role that WordPress, et al provided for websites themselves. There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.
tinus_hn 6y ago

stevoski 6y ago

I got sick of the YT ads, I bought a YT premium subscription. Now I don't get ads.

lrem 6y ago

> it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google. Except it doesn't come from Google, does it? The amount of monetisation is entirely in the creator's discretion. Disclaimer: I do work for Google, but that's public information.