14 ms·

Revenue is down for YouTube, compared to last year. Maybe this explains recent increases in ad placement [1] and the choice to gate 4K quality behind the YouTub

by lwneal 4y ago

Revenue is down for YouTube, compared to last year. Maybe this explains recent increases in ad placement [1] and the choice to gate 4K quality behind the YouTube Premium subscription [2]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/4/23386782/youtube-premium-subscription-4k-quality-resolution-restriction-google https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/4/23386782/youtube-premium-... [2] https://9to5google.com/2022/09/16/youtube-ads-unskippable/ https://9to5google.com/2022/09/16/youtube-ads-unskippable/

nightski 4y ago
Frankly YT Premium pricing is ridiculous. It's not worth $23/mo for my family. That's way more than Netflix and Google doesn't even produce its own content... If it was cheaper I'd subscribe.
samyok 4y ago
They seem to have walked back both of those and instead have just lifted the price of YouTube Premium as a whole [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/21/youtube-premiums-family-plan-gets-a-price-hike-in-several-countries/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/21/youtube-premiums-family-pl...
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>Revenue is down for YouTube, compared to last year. Maybe this has something to do with becoming the defacto censorship arm of the government and banning/blocking/demonetizing/driving away many customers and viewers.
- CabSauce 4y ago
  Maybe it has to do with extraterrestrial viewership being down. (If we're just making stuff up.)
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    You sure they seem to be up by my metrics?
  - newsclues 4y ago
    It’s not made up, a favourite YouTuber was banned so I signed up for Rumble and shift my viewing to alternative platforms as much as possible.
    - Kye 4y ago
      I'm sure at least one kid who said their dad worked at Nintendo was telling the truth.
    - insanitybit 4y ago
      Oh wow, did Alphabet disclose this in their Q3 earnings?
- numbsafari 4y ago
  The main negative I have is just the opposite: YT’s algorithm persistently pushing crazy alien theories, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson garbage into my feed, or worse. I wish they would censor that stuff more, because I’m not interested and no matter how many times I say “not interested”, it finds its way back in.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    To clarify, I don't consider YT's algorithmic choices to be "censorship" one way or another. Censorship is blocking, banning and/or demonetizing videos and preventing consumers from proactively deciding what they want to watch. I fully agree that allowing users to curate what Youtube suggests to them would be a massive improvement over the current system. If you are interested in learning more about actual Youtube censorship, Matt Taibi has been covering the issue for almost 2 years. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-ford-fischer https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-ford-fischer
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I either get "<Ideogogue> destroys <ideology>" videos or some really insane things, my favorite being videos from instructors who say they can teach you to fly if you give them thousands of dollars. By fly, they mean levitation and not airplanes.
- olliej 4y ago
  To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants? Because the evil censorship that you believe the government is forcing does not exist. There is no legislation and there is no planned legislation from any us political party banning content, but there’s a hell of a lot of “conservative” legislation aimed at forcing YouTube etc to host racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, and literal nazi content - in other words the exact BS the 1st amendment is meant to prevent the US gov from doing. Wait I lied, I forgot the GOP has got huge amounts of legislation that tries to ban acknowledging that LGBT folk are human, that slavery happened, that conservative states are to this day doing everything they can to limit which Americans get to vote, etc Given every time I see you commenting on HN it’s the same bigoted BS, that you then try to pass off as caring about treating things “fairly”, im going to stick with what I thought initially: you’re a bigot, and any time you claim that you are just interested in fairness it’s just another bit of bad faith BS rather than owning up to you being a bigot. It’s America, and HN has no rules against being a bigot, but I’d rather you just preface your arguments with “I don’t think lgbt people deserve equal rights, I believe that anyone that doesn’t let people use their services to spew forth claims of straight white Christian superiority is is somehow censorship violating the 1st amendment, and I think anything that counters this view is propaganda” JFC
  - triviumslingah 4y ago
    They should just adhere to their own stated TOS.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    >To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants? I don't have a favorite political party, they are all trash (in the United States). But that isn't what I was saying. What I was saying was very straightforward: If you are a corporation that wants to maximize profits, driving away a segment of potential customers is a poor strategy.
    - mr_toad 4y ago
- triviumslingah 4y ago
  A possible factor, but a drop in the bucket. Gilder's book highlights structural factors, ex-economics that will deflate the ALPHA bubble.
- dilap 4y ago
  Downvoted, but seems like a reasonable comment to me. YouTube is still king, but their policies are unfriendly to creators and viewers alike. Over time, that will eat away at your audience.
Archelaos 4y ago
Could that have started a downward spiral? I noticed that when I am casually browsing Youtube that the increased amount and length of ads let me stop browsing Youtube quite often. Especially when a second ad starts at the beginning of a video or if a video is interrupted too frequently or at the "wrong" point, I close Youtube altogether at that point and do something else. And while the short occasional ads before the videos did not bother me much in the past, now I stop browsing Youtube earlier because it is no fun to watch the same stupid clip a dozen times. Thus, the increase in advertising on YouTube has probably led to my seeing less advertising there overall than I used to.
- adamsb6 4y ago
  Yes. At a previous gig we had alarms that would fire when we were making too much money, because it probably meant something had gone wrong and we were over-serving ads, which was bad for long term user engagement.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    Long… term…? Do you mean setting OKRs every half instead of every quarter?
    - VHRanger 4y ago
      Silly you With annual bonuses, you set everything to max KPIs and leave when the house burns down next fiscal year. It's the Dick Fuld method(tm)
- 1270018080 4y ago
  The ads lately have been painfully excessive. I installed Brave on iOS just a few weeks ago to avoid the spam. I used the Youtube app for years and didn't have an issue giving them their ad revenue. Now I am gone forever.
- paganel 4y ago
  What you describe it's sort of a Laffer curve for our time/attention, and I totally believe that it has an effect.
bushbaba 4y ago
Also the announced 50-200% price increase to Youtube Premium for most current customers.
- phito 4y ago
  And killing adblocks next year ;)
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    How do they propose to do that?
    - slt2021 4y ago
      latest Chromium Manifest V3 changes https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/chromes-new-ad-blocker-limiting-extension-platform-will-launch-in-2023/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/chromes-new-ad-block...
  - slt2021 4y ago
    Hope they try to pull it off asap, so that adblocking community will strike back ;) I am betting Google will never ever be able to prevent adblocks
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Also the announced 50-200% price increase to Youtube Premium for most current customers. Approximately half of Youtube Premium subscribers are in the US, which saw no increase for individual plans and a 28% increase for family plans. The increase in Canada was (as a percentage of prior prices) identical; in the UK it waa again no increase for individual, but only 11% for family plans. So, no, it was not 50-200% for most current customers.
- jorts 4y ago
  *on the family plan
- chrisbolt 4y ago
Sysctl232 4y ago
I'm even getting ads on YouTube Premium when casting to a Chromecast now.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  I’ve never seen that and I do it regularly, but I do know that if you cast to a device (like a Smart TV) with its own YouTube app it uses the recieving device app; it would make sense to get an ad if that app is not logged in to an account with Premium.
  - Sysctl232 4y ago
    It's a known bug that Google seems unwilling to address. This happens on a months old Chromecast v3 by Google. Unfortunately they disabled the (standalone) login feature on the Chromecast so you cannot prevent this by logging in. Ads show on the next video when autoplay is on. Unless you play from a playlist. All in all quite annoying.
  - choudharism 4y ago
    I don't know if that is what happens (and in my experience it does not - the receiving app takes its authentication from the source-of-cast). Regardless, if it ever comes to that, we should ask for more as customers. It doesn't and shouldn't make sense if a paid / pro user had to watch an ad before casting (a fully supported functionality) to a new / unknown device. Corporations are fully allowed and equipped to make money, but the benefit of doubt in unexpected / grey situations should largely be with the user. The alternative allows any entrenched party to arm-twist users for even more money, and while market forces cause an eventual course correction, the interstitial generation has to suffer along the way.
matwood 4y ago
Another TikTok casualty...
stephencoyner 4y ago
As someone who consumes a lot of YouTube and pays for premium, I could never go back to the ads. The experience of no ads easily justifies the cost for me. I also am one of the rare people who uses YouTube music, so win-win
- justapassenger 4y ago
  This. Given how diverse and high quality content on YouTube is, it's by far the top streaming service that it's worth paying for.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  You do that, in the meantime I am going to just use uBlock origin and not reward their user hostile behavior.
  - royal_ts 4y ago
    have fun with that on a TV or other devices
    - slt2021 4y ago
      nice engineering challenge to port adblocker on tvOS or implement adblocking through pihole
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I personally feel that Google is letting us all down with the Youtube product. It works well, but its so behind what it could be. They could take a lesson from tiktok on how to actually surface content people want to see.
swader999 4y ago
The increase in adds feels like they are taunting me into signing up for premium. I won't comply. I'm using YouTube less too.
- phito 4y ago
  They definitely are. Remember they're going to kill adblockers next year and they are going to up the prices of YouTube premium.
  - swader999 4y ago
    I think it will just take a few big names to popularize a different platform so they better be careful. There's always piracy too, that could easily make a comeback.

by lwneal 4y ago

nightski 4y ago

Frankly YT Premium pricing is ridiculous. It's not worth $23/mo for my family. That's way more than Netflix and Google doesn't even produce its own content... If it was cheaper I'd subscribe.

samyok 4y ago

They seem to have walked back both of those and instead have just lifted the price of YouTube Premium as a whole [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/21/youtube-premiums-family-plan-gets-a-price-hike-in-several-countries/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/21/youtube-premiums-family-pl...

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

>Revenue is down for YouTube, compared to last year. Maybe this has something to do with becoming the defacto censorship arm of the government and banning/blocking/demonetizing/driving away many customers and viewers.

CabSauce 4y ago
Maybe it has to do with extraterrestrial viewership being down. (If we're just making stuff up.)
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  You sure they seem to be up by my metrics?
- newsclues 4y ago
  It’s not made up, a favourite YouTuber was banned so I signed up for Rumble and shift my viewing to alternative platforms as much as possible.
  - Kye 4y ago
    I'm sure at least one kid who said their dad worked at Nintendo was telling the truth.
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    Oh wow, did Alphabet disclose this in their Q3 earnings?
numbsafari 4y ago
The main negative I have is just the opposite: YT’s algorithm persistently pushing crazy alien theories, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson garbage into my feed, or worse. I wish they would censor that stuff more, because I’m not interested and no matter how many times I say “not interested”, it finds its way back in.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  To clarify, I don't consider YT's algorithmic choices to be "censorship" one way or another. Censorship is blocking, banning and/or demonetizing videos and preventing consumers from proactively deciding what they want to watch. I fully agree that allowing users to curate what Youtube suggests to them would be a massive improvement over the current system. If you are interested in learning more about actual Youtube censorship, Matt Taibi has been covering the issue for almost 2 years. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-ford-fischer https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-ford-fischer
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I either get "<Ideogogue> destroys <ideology>" videos or some really insane things, my favorite being videos from instructors who say they can teach you to fly if you give them thousands of dollars. By fly, they mean levitation and not airplanes.
olliej 4y ago
To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants? Because the evil censorship that you believe the government is forcing does not exist. There is no legislation and there is no planned legislation from any us political party banning content, but there’s a hell of a lot of “conservative” legislation aimed at forcing YouTube etc to host racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, and literal nazi content - in other words the exact BS the 1st amendment is meant to prevent the US gov from doing. Wait I lied, I forgot the GOP has got huge amounts of legislation that tries to ban acknowledging that LGBT folk are human, that slavery happened, that conservative states are to this day doing everything they can to limit which Americans get to vote, etc Given every time I see you commenting on HN it’s the same bigoted BS, that you then try to pass off as caring about treating things “fairly”, im going to stick with what I thought initially: you’re a bigot, and any time you claim that you are just interested in fairness it’s just another bit of bad faith BS rather than owning up to you being a bigot. It’s America, and HN has no rules against being a bigot, but I’d rather you just preface your arguments with “I don’t think lgbt people deserve equal rights, I believe that anyone that doesn’t let people use their services to spew forth claims of straight white Christian superiority is is somehow censorship violating the 1st amendment, and I think anything that counters this view is propaganda” JFC
- triviumslingah 4y ago
  They should just adhere to their own stated TOS.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants? I don't have a favorite political party, they are all trash (in the United States). But that isn't what I was saying. What I was saying was very straightforward: If you are a corporation that wants to maximize profits, driving away a segment of potential customers is a poor strategy.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
triviumslingah 4y ago
A possible factor, but a drop in the bucket. Gilder's book highlights structural factors, ex-economics that will deflate the ALPHA bubble.
dilap 4y ago
Downvoted, but seems like a reasonable comment to me. YouTube is still king, but their policies are unfriendly to creators and viewers alike. Over time, that will eat away at your audience.

Archelaos 4y ago

Could that have started a downward spiral? I noticed that when I am casually browsing Youtube that the increased amount and length of ads let me stop browsing Youtube quite often. Especially when a second ad starts at the beginning of a video or if a video is interrupted too frequently or at the "wrong" point, I close Youtube altogether at that point and do something else. And while the short occasional ads before the videos did not bother me much in the past, now I stop browsing Youtube earlier because it is no fun to watch the same stupid clip a dozen times. Thus, the increase in advertising on YouTube has probably led to my seeing less advertising there overall than I used to.

adamsb6 4y ago
Yes. At a previous gig we had alarms that would fire when we were making too much money, because it probably meant something had gone wrong and we were over-serving ads, which was bad for long term user engagement.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  Long… term…? Do you mean setting OKRs every half instead of every quarter?
  - VHRanger 4y ago
    Silly you With annual bonuses, you set everything to max KPIs and leave when the house burns down next fiscal year. It's the Dick Fuld method(tm)
1270018080 4y ago
The ads lately have been painfully excessive. I installed Brave on iOS just a few weeks ago to avoid the spam. I used the Youtube app for years and didn't have an issue giving them their ad revenue. Now I am gone forever.
paganel 4y ago
What you describe it's sort of a Laffer curve for our time/attention, and I totally believe that it has an effect.

bushbaba 4y ago

Also the announced 50-200% price increase to Youtube Premium for most current customers.

phito 4y ago
And killing adblocks next year ;)
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  How do they propose to do that?
  - slt2021 4y ago
    latest Chromium Manifest V3 changes https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/chromes-new-ad-blocker-limiting-extension-platform-will-launch-in-2023/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/chromes-new-ad-block...
- slt2021 4y ago
  Hope they try to pull it off asap, so that adblocking community will strike back ;) I am betting Google will never ever be able to prevent adblocks
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Also the announced 50-200% price increase to Youtube Premium for most current customers. Approximately half of Youtube Premium subscribers are in the US, which saw no increase for individual plans and a 28% increase for family plans. The increase in Canada was (as a percentage of prior prices) identical; in the UK it waa again no increase for individual, but only 11% for family plans. So, no, it was not 50-200% for most current customers.
jorts 4y ago
*on the family plan
chrisbolt 4y ago

Sysctl232 4y ago

I'm even getting ads on YouTube Premium when casting to a Chromecast now.

dragonwriter 4y ago
I’ve never seen that and I do it regularly, but I do know that if you cast to a device (like a Smart TV) with its own YouTube app it uses the recieving device app; it would make sense to get an ad if that app is not logged in to an account with Premium.
- Sysctl232 4y ago
  It's a known bug that Google seems unwilling to address. This happens on a months old Chromecast v3 by Google. Unfortunately they disabled the (standalone) login feature on the Chromecast so you cannot prevent this by logging in. Ads show on the next video when autoplay is on. Unless you play from a playlist. All in all quite annoying.
- choudharism 4y ago
  I don't know if that is what happens (and in my experience it does not - the receiving app takes its authentication from the source-of-cast). Regardless, if it ever comes to that, we should ask for more as customers. It doesn't and shouldn't make sense if a paid / pro user had to watch an ad before casting (a fully supported functionality) to a new / unknown device. Corporations are fully allowed and equipped to make money, but the benefit of doubt in unexpected / grey situations should largely be with the user. The alternative allows any entrenched party to arm-twist users for even more money, and while market forces cause an eventual course correction, the interstitial generation has to suffer along the way.

matwood 4y ago

Another TikTok casualty...

stephencoyner 4y ago

As someone who consumes a lot of YouTube and pays for premium, I could never go back to the ads. The experience of no ads easily justifies the cost for me. I also am one of the rare people who uses YouTube music, so win-win

justapassenger 4y ago
This. Given how diverse and high quality content on YouTube is, it's by far the top streaming service that it's worth paying for.
buscoquadnary 4y ago
You do that, in the meantime I am going to just use uBlock origin and not reward their user hostile behavior.
- royal_ts 4y ago
  have fun with that on a TV or other devices
  - slt2021 4y ago
    nice engineering challenge to port adblocker on tvOS or implement adblocking through pihole

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

I personally feel that Google is letting us all down with the Youtube product. It works well, but its so behind what it could be. They could take a lesson from tiktok on how to actually surface content people want to see.

swader999 4y ago

The increase in adds feels like they are taunting me into signing up for premium. I won't comply. I'm using YouTube less too.

phito 4y ago
They definitely are. Remember they're going to kill adblockers next year and they are going to up the prices of YouTube premium.
- swader999 4y ago
  I think it will just take a few big names to popularize a different platform so they better be careful. There's always piracy too, that could easily make a comeback.