10 ms·

Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI

by dilap 5y ago

Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI) YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable. How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused effort of early-stage companies without devolving into the raw exploitation, rent-seeking, and monopolistic behavior of late-stage companies seems an open problem.

duxup 5y ago
>it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of using their service.
briefcomment 5y ago
> forced ads Recently, some people were trying to tell me that ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader, when I brought up some videos that clearly had way more ads than any content creator would reasonably allow.
- mavsman 5y ago
  I once swore to myself that I'd never monetize videos. Now my small-time channel has ads before my videos and I don't even have enough watch-time (yet) to monetize them to grab the pennies that could be mine. Once I do have the watch-time (4000 hours per year) to monetize, I will feel sleazy about it but I don't think it would make any difference to viewers, I'll just be taking the pennies I deserve.
  - freeopinion 5y ago
    You can monetize your videos from day 1. Just line up sponsors. If you want you can embed ads for your sponsors. Oh, wait, you mean you can't monetize without exerting some actual effort? How is that Youtube's fault?
- mavhc 5y ago
  It's as if Google doesn't want to host the world's videos for free
- bmn__ 5y ago
  > ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader Some Youtubers talk shop on their channels. I have learnt from them that this is not the case. Even if a Youtuber is very meticulous about placing and restricting the ads (e.g. two mid-rolls), sometimes the software "forgets" and goes full ad blast on the viewer (one pre-roll and six mid-rolls). The cynic's interpretation would be that this happens on purpose.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  How recently? Up until Wednesday last week, I believe every single ad was placed by the creator. Some just go more wild with it than others. (disclaimer- I work for the Goog)
  - briefcomment 5y ago
    Hm, this was a few weeks ago. I just thought it was ridiculous that a creator would put an ad every three minutes on a three hour video. I guess it's possible. There were some other creators that I saw some less egregious but still questionable cadences with, which I thought would go against their general ethos (like ads every five minutes on an hour long video by a person who is generally against a culture of over-capitalization). Maybe A/B tests?
ghaff 5y ago
Consumers need to be able and willing to pay money rather than renting their eyeballs. (And creators need to be willing to pay for hosting/discovery.) If YouTube could make more money as a gated subscription site that charged for uploads and, say, $100/year to access, they'd be more than happy to do so.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  Wait, isn't YouTube premium this and basically no one uses it
  - RandallBrown 5y ago
    I've been paying for YouTube Premium for a few months now and absolutely love it. If I ever get logged out it's a horrible reminder of how annoying the ads are.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    That's sort of my point. You could also look at Vimeo vs. YouTube. There's also the point that pretty much every time a paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably post some work around to the paywall.
  - denimnerd42 5y ago
    I see a lot of negative about YT premium online but I've been using it for years.. I don't know how you can use the YT app on mobile without it.
    - MikusR 5y ago
      https://vancedapp.com/ https://vancedapp.com/
      - Crash0v3rid3 5y ago
        How about we stop pushing these alternatives that ensure creators never get paid? It’s hard work to make content, many channels are run full time. I know people hate ads, and if that’s the case, just pay for Premium.
rvz 5y ago
He made the right choice there. It's not fit for purpose for small creators or users anymore and the big established media players have spoilt it for them. Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership governed by 'The Algorithm'. For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily basis. One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem like 'freedom' as YouTube describes it. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/about/ https://www.youtube.com/about/
elwell 5y ago
Can you add advertiser-unfriendly content to your video to avoid YouTube forcing ads?
- CharlesW 5y ago
  You can turn off ads. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en
  - somethingor 5y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube-will-now-show-ads-on-all-videos-even-if-creators-dont-want-them/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube...
    - CharlesW 5y ago
      Wow, ugh. TIL, thank you!
- freeopinion 5y ago
  You can add advertiser-unfriendly content. You can add Youtube-unfriendly content. But that won't necessarily prevent Youtube from forcing ads. Or... you could route around Youtube completely. Why do you use a service with which you are unfriendly?
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I can, but let’s not forget that YouTube is serving a billion hours of video a day, which costs. If you don’t want ads to appear on your videos, you can host the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming performance or audience you’d get with YouTube.
- regularfry 5y ago
  They've also dramatically increased the proportion and intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive audience.
  - slinkyblack 5y ago
    I would also argue that part of the reason for the escalation of ads is spread of ad blocking. They have fewer users they can monetize, so they have to monetize those users more.
    - pixxel 5y ago
      Do you know the percentage of users that use ad blocking on YT?
      - slinkyblack 5y ago
        No idea, but I know it's a self defeating cycle. I started blocking ads because they were getting annoying, I'm sure many other do the same.
  - forbiddenvoid 5y ago
    What monopoly? I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.
    - pta2002 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
justbored123 5y ago
I have to ask the obvious question here: How do you plan to maintain the second largest website on the internet that has high bandwidth demands to serve 4k video content and serves 122 million users a day, 2+ billion a month if you are not willing to even tolerate simple adds that you can easily bypass in 1 minute of your time by installing an add blocker or downloading Brave browser or God forbid paying 10 dollars a month? My friends will not even host the torrent that they just downloaded for a single hour and my family don't know what torrent is and more important than that, they don't care. Good luck with really large scale p2p solutions. You must be really happy paying 100 bucks on fees to transfer 10 dollars on the Bitcoin or ETH networks, but hey! no adds or "evil" companies!
- anthk 5y ago
  I don't block ads, I just use a host file avoiding connections to sites I don't like to send metadata. Ad blocking it's just a feature.
flaque 5y ago
Somewhat of a plug (apologies), but we're bootstrapping an open platform for video on top of RSS to solve this problem. It can play videos on (most) podcasting apps people already have on their phones. Here's an example: https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml (try putting that into your podcasting app) We make a publishing tool for it with a linear/superhuman-like interface that's free to use. Since it's just RSS, it's fundamentally open: if you want to use a different tool, or roll your own, you can do so without losing your audience. And since it's a podcast, you can piggy-back off of an already thriving ecosystem of apps, tools, distribution channels, and monetization strategies. If you watch videos on RSS, and the app you're using puts ads on the videos, you can just use a different app. And if the video creator wants to put ads on their videos; the money is at least going to them, and not giving a 45% cut to one of the wealthiest companies in the world. It's a bit early, but if you'd like to try it, send me an email: evan @ streambus dot com, or fill out the thing here: https://streambus.com/ https://streambus.com/
- swiley 5y ago
  That's awesome to hear, I'm a little surprised videos in RSS have been so unpopular, the UX is pretty amazing and all the tools are there ready to go.
  - flaque 5y ago
    It's still a bit clunky. Not every app supports every video format, and RSS doesn't cleanly do fallbacks. Our goal right now is to create a publishing platform that smooths over some of these hiccups (for example, generating backwards-compatible RSS links for each app), as well as creating incentives for apps to coalesce around HLS/m3u8 natively.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  RSS is definitely a useful technology. What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates). This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck). But the ability to be notified of new content from within what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out, that ... seems like more work than it's worth). The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication channels are seen as appropriating value from the sites is also problematic. It's endemic to both advertising and surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet another case of how such practices when widely adopted actively destroy useful tools and platforms.
huslage 5y ago
Just here to point out that you can actually pay for YouTube. It's $12/mo (https://www.youtube.com/premium https://www.youtube.com/premium). I don't get any ads at all. Ever. Other than those "sponsorships" that are just as annoying.
app4soft 5y ago
> Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads JFTR, Eric Buijs[0] (author of mentioned SolveSpace video tutorials) moved to PeerTube[1] few years ago: > I do hope that people, that love their privacy and want to control their content, will follow me and start uploading great content to PeerTube for this is the only way to get out of the YouTube stranglehold. To get you started I’ve made a list of some useful links. See you on PeerTube. P.S. Follow Eric & me on Mastodon if you are interested in showcases of SolveSpace app, a free & open-source 2D/3D CAD software.[2,3] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl [1] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/ https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/ [2] https://fosstodon.org/@ericbuijs/103665384686311116 https://fosstodon.org/@ericbuijs/103665384686311116 [3] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/103665316320159292 https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/103665316320159292

by dilap 5y ago

duxup 5y ago

>it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of using their service.

briefcomment 5y ago

> forced ads Recently, some people were trying to tell me that ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader, when I brought up some videos that clearly had way more ads than any content creator would reasonably allow.

mavsman 5y ago
I once swore to myself that I'd never monetize videos. Now my small-time channel has ads before my videos and I don't even have enough watch-time (yet) to monetize them to grab the pennies that could be mine. Once I do have the watch-time (4000 hours per year) to monetize, I will feel sleazy about it but I don't think it would make any difference to viewers, I'll just be taking the pennies I deserve.
- freeopinion 5y ago
  You can monetize your videos from day 1. Just line up sponsors. If you want you can embed ads for your sponsors. Oh, wait, you mean you can't monetize without exerting some actual effort? How is that Youtube's fault?
mavhc 5y ago
It's as if Google doesn't want to host the world's videos for free
bmn__ 5y ago
> ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader Some Youtubers talk shop on their channels. I have learnt from them that this is not the case. Even if a Youtuber is very meticulous about placing and restricting the ads (e.g. two mid-rolls), sometimes the software "forgets" and goes full ad blast on the viewer (one pre-roll and six mid-rolls). The cynic's interpretation would be that this happens on purpose.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
How recently? Up until Wednesday last week, I believe every single ad was placed by the creator. Some just go more wild with it than others. (disclaimer- I work for the Goog)
- briefcomment 5y ago
  Hm, this was a few weeks ago. I just thought it was ridiculous that a creator would put an ad every three minutes on a three hour video. I guess it's possible. There were some other creators that I saw some less egregious but still questionable cadences with, which I thought would go against their general ethos (like ads every five minutes on an hour long video by a person who is generally against a culture of over-capitalization). Maybe A/B tests?

ghaff 5y ago

Consumers need to be able and willing to pay money rather than renting their eyeballs. (And creators need to be willing to pay for hosting/discovery.) If YouTube could make more money as a gated subscription site that charged for uploads and, say, $100/year to access, they'd be more than happy to do so.

SQueeeeeL 5y ago
Wait, isn't YouTube premium this and basically no one uses it
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  I've been paying for YouTube Premium for a few months now and absolutely love it. If I ever get logged out it's a horrible reminder of how annoying the ads are.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That's sort of my point. You could also look at Vimeo vs. YouTube. There's also the point that pretty much every time a paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably post some work around to the paywall.
- denimnerd42 5y ago
  I see a lot of negative about YT premium online but I've been using it for years.. I don't know how you can use the YT app on mobile without it.
  - MikusR 5y ago
    https://vancedapp.com/ https://vancedapp.com/
    - Crash0v3rid3 5y ago
      How about we stop pushing these alternatives that ensure creators never get paid? It’s hard work to make content, many channels are run full time. I know people hate ads, and if that’s the case, just pay for Premium.

rvz 5y ago

He made the right choice there. It's not fit for purpose for small creators or users anymore and the big established media players have spoilt it for them. Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership governed by 'The Algorithm'. For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily basis. One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem like 'freedom' as YouTube describes it. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/about/ https://www.youtube.com/about/

elwell 5y ago

Can you add advertiser-unfriendly content to your video to avoid YouTube forcing ads?

CharlesW 5y ago
You can turn off ads. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en
- somethingor 5y ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube-will-now-show-ads-on-all-videos-even-if-creators-dont-want-them/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube...
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    Wow, ugh. TIL, thank you!
freeopinion 5y ago
You can add advertiser-unfriendly content. You can add Youtube-unfriendly content. But that won't necessarily prevent Youtube from forcing ads. Or... you could route around Youtube completely. Why do you use a service with which you are unfriendly?

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I can, but let’s not forget that YouTube is serving a billion hours of video a day, which costs. If you don’t want ads to appear on your videos, you can host the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming performance or audience you’d get with YouTube.

regularfry 5y ago
They've also dramatically increased the proportion and intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive audience.
- slinkyblack 5y ago
  I would also argue that part of the reason for the escalation of ads is spread of ad blocking. They have fewer users they can monetize, so they have to monetize those users more.
  - pixxel 5y ago
    Do you know the percentage of users that use ad blocking on YT?
    - slinkyblack 5y ago
      No idea, but I know it's a self defeating cycle. I started blocking ads because they were getting annoying, I'm sure many other do the same.
- forbiddenvoid 5y ago
  What monopoly? I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.
  - pta2002 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

justbored123 5y ago

I have to ask the obvious question here: How do you plan to maintain the second largest website on the internet that has high bandwidth demands to serve 4k video content and serves 122 million users a day, 2+ billion a month if you are not willing to even tolerate simple adds that you can easily bypass in 1 minute of your time by installing an add blocker or downloading Brave browser or God forbid paying 10 dollars a month? My friends will not even host the torrent that they just downloaded for a single hour and my family don't know what torrent is and more important than that, they don't care. Good luck with really large scale p2p solutions. You must be really happy paying 100 bucks on fees to transfer 10 dollars on the Bitcoin or ETH networks, but hey! no adds or "evil" companies!

anthk 5y ago
I don't block ads, I just use a host file avoiding connections to sites I don't like to send metadata. Ad blocking it's just a feature.

flaque 5y ago

Somewhat of a plug (apologies), but we're bootstrapping an open platform for video on top of RSS to solve this problem. It can play videos on (most) podcasting apps people already have on their phones. Here's an example: https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml (try putting that into your podcasting app) We make a publishing tool for it with a linear/superhuman-like interface that's free to use. Since it's just RSS, it's fundamentally open: if you want to use a different tool, or roll your own, you can do so without losing your audience. And since it's a podcast, you can piggy-back off of an already thriving ecosystem of apps, tools, distribution channels, and monetization strategies. If you watch videos on RSS, and the app you're using puts ads on the videos, you can just use a different app. And if the video creator wants to put ads on their videos; the money is at least going to them, and not giving a 45% cut to one of the wealthiest companies in the world. It's a bit early, but if you'd like to try it, send me an email: evan @ streambus dot com, or fill out the thing here: https://streambus.com/ https://streambus.com/

swiley 5y ago
That's awesome to hear, I'm a little surprised videos in RSS have been so unpopular, the UX is pretty amazing and all the tools are there ready to go.
- flaque 5y ago
  It's still a bit clunky. Not every app supports every video format, and RSS doesn't cleanly do fallbacks. Our goal right now is to create a publishing platform that smooths over some of these hiccups (for example, generating backwards-compatible RSS links for each app), as well as creating incentives for apps to coalesce around HLS/m3u8 natively.
dredmorbius 5y ago
RSS is definitely a useful technology. What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates). This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck). But the ability to be notified of new content from within what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out, that ... seems like more work than it's worth). The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication channels are seen as appropriating value from the sites is also problematic. It's endemic to both advertising and surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet another case of how such practices when widely adopted actively destroy useful tools and platforms.

huslage 5y ago

Just here to point out that you can actually pay for YouTube. It's $12/mo (https://www.youtube.com/premium https://www.youtube.com/premium). I don't get any ads at all. Ever. Other than those "sponsorships" that are just as annoying.

app4soft 5y ago

> Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads JFTR, Eric Buijs[0] (author of mentioned SolveSpace video tutorials) moved to PeerTube[1] few years ago: > I do hope that people, that love their privacy and want to control their content, will follow me and start uploading great content to PeerTube for this is the only way to get out of the YouTube stranglehold. To get you started I’ve made a list of some useful links. See you on PeerTube. P.S. Follow Eric & me on Mastodon if you are interested in showcases of SolveSpace app, a free & open-source 2D/3D CAD software.[2,3] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl [1] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/ https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/ [2] https://fosstodon.org/@ericbuijs/103665384686311116 https://fosstodon.org/@ericbuijs/103665384686311116 [3] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/103665316320159292 https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/103665316320159292