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The free ride is over. I feel like the only reason this is upsetting to people is because it seemed to be free for so long. If you give someone a free meal ever

The free ride is over. I feel like the only reason this is upsetting to people is because it seemed to be free for so long. If you give someone a free meal every day for 15 years, and then suddenly take it away, they'll be pretty upset. But nobody ever asked why the food was free? It costs to make and it costs to deliver. Google have datacenters all over the world and we still expect the food to be free. They literally created an entire market of content creators. We can't go back to torrents, we're addicted now.

geraldwhen 3y ago
VPNs are easier than ever, and so are torrents. Plex didn’t exist 20 years ago. Life is good.
avazhi 3y ago
Sorry bud, Google makes its money spying on my email and my searches. Those are tradeoffs I’m willing to make. I absolutely refuse to ever watch ads, though. You say we can’t go back torrents, and maybe you can’t, but I’ll go full Luddite mode before I start watching ads on anything. I haven’t had a television for 20+ years for this very reason. Torrents and a seed box are about as easy as it gets.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  The challenge will be discoverability. Has there been any good work on solving that challenge? If I just watched a great documentary via Torrent and I want to watch another one in that vein or another one by that creator, how do I do that?
- foota 3y ago
  How do you think they make money off you without ads?
- justrealist 3y ago
  You could, of course, just pay YouTube $14/mo for the ad-free version instead of complaining.
  - cocacola1 3y ago
    That’s not even the last resort.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Why should we pay for the experience we used to have for free? It would be an easy sell if google offered some benefit to paying, but making the experience worse and then offering to put it back as a premium option rubs me the wrong way.
    - justrealist 3y ago
      Because you aren't entitled to anything. It's someone else's service they ran at a loss. Remind me to never invite you over for dinner. "Why should I have to split the check now? You paid for my dinner yesterday!" Jesus christ. Grow up. Be an adult.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > It's someone else's service they ran at a loss. IANAL, but running a service at a loss until you have a monopoly position and then cranking up prices sounds illegal. > Remind me to never invite you over for dinner. "Why should I have to split the check now? You paid for my dinner yesterday!" I dunno; if for 18 years you give away free food, not to just to one person, but to an entire town, and then one day when nobody else is left selling food in town decide to start charging, I think it would be quite reasonable for people to be cross with you.
    - _cenw 3y ago
      That it survived 15 years without a crackdown on adblockers is the real story here. Most VC-subsidized too cheap to be sustainable services don't last a year. The storage and bandwidth YouTube consumes must be extremely massive, and it probably only survived because Google made up for the loss in other places. Of course it has to pay someday, at latest when other revenue streams are drying up.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
- helph67 3y ago
  > Sorry bud, Google makes its money spying on my email and my searches. If only more users realised that's the case. https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-trackers-are-from-google https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-tra...
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  > I’ll go full Luddite mode before I start watching ads on anything. That's the spirit! Ads are cancer for clear thinking and create widespread harm.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Yeah, I cut the TV cord 24 years ago.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
That's actually the really annoying part to me - I don't mind paying for content or for useful services, but if you operate one way for over a decade and use that time to consolidate the entire market and get in a position where you have no real competition, and only once you own the market do you drive up prices and make the free experience awful, than that does actually seem quite unreasonable (and in an ideal world, illegally anticompetitive).
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  That's a legitimate point. Also, I would prefer to pay the content creators directly. Charge me for time spent viewing — give that portion of my subscription to the content creators I was watching.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    At the risk of advocating for the devil, I think that's what YouTube Premium does? I don't know whether it pays out by time watched or per view or what, and obviously Google takes a (large) cut, but the biggest argument in its favor is that it does actually put money in the creators' pockets.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      That would be cool. I suspect I would be unhappy with the size of the cut Google takes.
alex7734 3y ago
I'd rather stop watching YouTube than start watching ads. I disabled my adblocker to see how bad is it and it is truly disgusting, I cannot conceive how people can enjoy YouTube with so many ads. And before you say "just pay YouTube Premium", no, the moment a majority of people start paying $10 (or whatever it is) for YouTube Premium, Google is going to add ads to it again and make you pay $20 for YouTube Premium For Real(TM) to get rid of the ads (and/or just make the free tier miserable to prevent people from stopping paying). Google has proven that it is not above abusing the user to get money and there's no reason not to abuse the user further once you have them hooked after all.
- _cenw 3y ago
  Is there any precedent at all for this? This feels more like a Netflix than a Google move. Google's consumer facing offerings have not really rubbed me the wrong way yet, except maybe the consolidation of music services into their worse one. Ads pay near to nothing compared to a subscription. Why would they jeopardize that. Even someone who buys Premium in a country where it's exceptionally cheap makes them more money than an ad user.
theonemind 3y ago
Giving it away for free if way below self-sustainability in pricing until cornering the market would be predatory pricing leading to monopoly. I would have preferred that they made it a sustainable business unit/whatever from the beginning so that we could have had a competitive market. So, that seems like a legitimate thing to be angry about to me.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
Ah the fallacy of content piracy harm. If I steal content it doesn't cost the creator anything. I was never going to pay for said content anyway. If I enjoy content to to point of being willing to pay, I would do so anyway, even if I could keep getting it for free, if there is an agreeable way to do that. This applies to software, books, video, music and everything else, and has been proven time and again. Google has just taken advantage of network effects. To say that we wouldn't have it if not for Google is clearly wrong. The first internet content distribution networks (anon FTP and UUCP) were free and cooperative. If Google didn't exist we'd surely distribute video cooperatively too, and likely much more efficiently, they were just more convenient. If they stop ad blocking that's no longer the case. The free ride is not over, it's never over. All that will happen is that business models will change as the market adapts to people's demands and behaviour. The internet has tipped market power in favour of consumers over corporations.
- Jensson 3y ago
  People quit their jobs and make videos full time thanks to YouTube ads. Those videos wouldn't exist otherwise, people would be busy working regular jobs.
  - CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
    Or they might have just created the content and monetised it through their own site.
    - throw0101b 3y ago
      > Or they might have just created the content and monetised it through their own site. Assuming you could find it since discoverability would probably be lower. Then if a particular video 'went viral', it could cost them a lot of money in sudden and unexpected hosting and bandwidth costs. They would also now have to spend time on dealing with 'infrastructure' instead of focusing on creating content. There's a reason why so many people use Youtube and Patreon instead of DIYing it: few folks are interested in re-inventing that entire stack on their own.
0b100 3y ago
"the only reason this is upsetting to people is because it seemed to be free for so long" The issue, at least to me, is that Google has a sort of monopoly on >99% of content on Youtube. They provide virtually nothing[0] to content creators other than free†⸸ video hosting, and in return they get to gatekeep the content itself. All of the cost is offloaded onto the consumer, and there is little to no incentive (arguably negative* incentive) for the people producing the value (videos) to move off youtube. "It costs to make and it costs to deliver." It costs to make, but it's not Google that has to pay. It costs to deliver, but why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content? If the situation was "watch video on youtube with ads, or watch video on Peertube, or watch video on Odysee" I don't think many people would be complaining about mandatory ads on Youtube, but because it's "watch video on youtube with ads, or don't watch the video", people resent the dilema. [0] The most tangible, by far, value Youtube provides is the huge audience, but that's just a feedback loop, not due to quality or effort. Actually, it's probably due to the fact that many people who make great content have historically only put it on Youtube, because of the huge... and so on. Edit: Formatting (hopefully) fixed.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  > why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content They're not? I don't know why you mention this. If the creator of a video decided to only make their video available on YouTube, that's their decision.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > It costs to make, but it's not Google that has to pay Google pays creators 55% of the ad revenue, so yes Google has to pay for those videos. > It costs to deliver, but why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content? People upload to YouTube because YouTube gives them plenty of ad revenue. They don't upload to sites without a lot of ads since that would reduce their ad revenue.
  - 0b100 3y ago
    "Google pays creators 55% of the ad revenue, so yes Google has to pay for those videos." Google does not have to pay for videos. If a video brings google enough ad revenue, they willingly give some of it to the channel that made the video. They do not pay a fixed or up-front cost, and assume none of the risk/effort in creating videos. To be fully pedantic, Google doesn't pay for videos in any sense, they pay for the resulting attention. "People upload to YouTube because YouTube gives them plenty of ad revenue. They don't upload to sites without a lot of ads since that would reduce their ad revenue." The videos people want to watch are only on Youtube -> Viewers only use Youtube -> Content creators only upload to Youtube -> Repeat... Google's centripetal force prevents competitors from competing.
throw0101b 3y ago
> The free ride is over. But it was never free. Ads have been on Youtube for years. From a 2011 article entitled "The History of Video Advertising on YouTube": > In January 2009, YouTube started allowing ads in seven different formats. By October of that year, YouTube was counting more than one billion video views per day. * https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/infographic-the-history-of-video-advertising-on-youtube/242836/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/infog... * https://archive.is/A17rT https://archive.is/A17rT Also: > The first targeted advertising on the site came in February 2006 in the form of participatory video ads, which were videos in their own right that offered users the opportunity to view exclusive content by clicking on the ad.[29] The first such ad was for the Fox show Prison Break and solely appeared above videos on Paris Hilton's channel.[29][30] At the time, the channel was operated by Warner Bros. Records and was cited as the first brand channel on the platform.[30] Participatory video ads were designed to link specific promotions to specific channels rather than advertising on the entire platform at once. When the ads were introduced, in August 2006, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley rejected the idea of expanding into areas of advertising seen as less user-friendly at the time, saying, "we think there are better ways for people to engage with brands than forcing them to watch a commercial before seeing content. You could ask anyone on the net if they enjoy that experience and they'd probably say no."[30] However, YouTube began running in-video ads in August 2007, with preroll ads introduced in 2008.[31] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube Why are people upset about having to watch ads when they've been part of the terms of service and social contract for 'free' content since basically the beginning?

geraldwhen 3y ago

VPNs are easier than ever, and so are torrents. Plex didn’t exist 20 years ago. Life is good.

avazhi 3y ago

Sorry bud, Google makes its money spying on my email and my searches. Those are tradeoffs I’m willing to make. I absolutely refuse to ever watch ads, though. You say we can’t go back torrents, and maybe you can’t, but I’ll go full Luddite mode before I start watching ads on anything. I haven’t had a television for 20+ years for this very reason. Torrents and a seed box are about as easy as it gets.

shadowgovt 3y ago
The challenge will be discoverability. Has there been any good work on solving that challenge? If I just watched a great documentary via Torrent and I want to watch another one in that vein or another one by that creator, how do I do that?
foota 3y ago
How do you think they make money off you without ads?
justrealist 3y ago
You could, of course, just pay YouTube $14/mo for the ad-free version instead of complaining.
- cocacola1 3y ago
  That’s not even the last resort.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Why should we pay for the experience we used to have for free? It would be an easy sell if google offered some benefit to paying, but making the experience worse and then offering to put it back as a premium option rubs me the wrong way.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    Because you aren't entitled to anything. It's someone else's service they ran at a loss. Remind me to never invite you over for dinner. "Why should I have to split the check now? You paid for my dinner yesterday!" Jesus christ. Grow up. Be an adult.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > It's someone else's service they ran at a loss. IANAL, but running a service at a loss until you have a monopoly position and then cranking up prices sounds illegal. > Remind me to never invite you over for dinner. "Why should I have to split the check now? You paid for my dinner yesterday!" I dunno; if for 18 years you give away free food, not to just to one person, but to an entire town, and then one day when nobody else is left selling food in town decide to start charging, I think it would be quite reasonable for people to be cross with you.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    That it survived 15 years without a crackdown on adblockers is the real story here. Most VC-subsidized too cheap to be sustainable services don't last a year. The storage and bandwidth YouTube consumes must be extremely massive, and it probably only survived because Google made up for the loss in other places. Of course it has to pay someday, at latest when other revenue streams are drying up.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
helph67 3y ago
> Sorry bud, Google makes its money spying on my email and my searches. If only more users realised that's the case. https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-trackers-are-from-google https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-tra...
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
> I’ll go full Luddite mode before I start watching ads on anything. That's the spirit! Ads are cancer for clear thinking and create widespread harm.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Yeah, I cut the TV cord 24 years ago.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

That's actually the really annoying part to me - I don't mind paying for content or for useful services, but if you operate one way for over a decade and use that time to consolidate the entire market and get in a position where you have no real competition, and only once you own the market do you drive up prices and make the free experience awful, than that does actually seem quite unreasonable (and in an ideal world, illegally anticompetitive).

JKCalhoun 3y ago
That's a legitimate point. Also, I would prefer to pay the content creators directly. Charge me for time spent viewing — give that portion of my subscription to the content creators I was watching.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  At the risk of advocating for the devil, I think that's what YouTube Premium does? I don't know whether it pays out by time watched or per view or what, and obviously Google takes a (large) cut, but the biggest argument in its favor is that it does actually put money in the creators' pockets.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    That would be cool. I suspect I would be unhappy with the size of the cut Google takes.

alex7734 3y ago

I'd rather stop watching YouTube than start watching ads. I disabled my adblocker to see how bad is it and it is truly disgusting, I cannot conceive how people can enjoy YouTube with so many ads. And before you say "just pay YouTube Premium", no, the moment a majority of people start paying $10 (or whatever it is) for YouTube Premium, Google is going to add ads to it again and make you pay $20 for YouTube Premium For Real(TM) to get rid of the ads (and/or just make the free tier miserable to prevent people from stopping paying). Google has proven that it is not above abusing the user to get money and there's no reason not to abuse the user further once you have them hooked after all.

_cenw 3y ago
Is there any precedent at all for this? This feels more like a Netflix than a Google move. Google's consumer facing offerings have not really rubbed me the wrong way yet, except maybe the consolidation of music services into their worse one. Ads pay near to nothing compared to a subscription. Why would they jeopardize that. Even someone who buys Premium in a country where it's exceptionally cheap makes them more money than an ad user.

theonemind 3y ago

Giving it away for free if way below self-sustainability in pricing until cornering the market would be predatory pricing leading to monopoly. I would have preferred that they made it a sustainable business unit/whatever from the beginning so that we could have had a competitive market. So, that seems like a legitimate thing to be angry about to me.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

Ah the fallacy of content piracy harm. If I steal content it doesn't cost the creator anything. I was never going to pay for said content anyway. If I enjoy content to to point of being willing to pay, I would do so anyway, even if I could keep getting it for free, if there is an agreeable way to do that. This applies to software, books, video, music and everything else, and has been proven time and again. Google has just taken advantage of network effects. To say that we wouldn't have it if not for Google is clearly wrong. The first internet content distribution networks (anon FTP and UUCP) were free and cooperative. If Google didn't exist we'd surely distribute video cooperatively too, and likely much more efficiently, they were just more convenient. If they stop ad blocking that's no longer the case. The free ride is not over, it's never over. All that will happen is that business models will change as the market adapts to people's demands and behaviour. The internet has tipped market power in favour of consumers over corporations.

Jensson 3y ago
People quit their jobs and make videos full time thanks to YouTube ads. Those videos wouldn't exist otherwise, people would be busy working regular jobs.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  Or they might have just created the content and monetised it through their own site.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > Or they might have just created the content and monetised it through their own site. Assuming you could find it since discoverability would probably be lower. Then if a particular video 'went viral', it could cost them a lot of money in sudden and unexpected hosting and bandwidth costs. They would also now have to spend time on dealing with 'infrastructure' instead of focusing on creating content. There's a reason why so many people use Youtube and Patreon instead of DIYing it: few folks are interested in re-inventing that entire stack on their own.

0b100 3y ago

"the only reason this is upsetting to people is because it seemed to be free for so long" The issue, at least to me, is that Google has a sort of monopoly on >99% of content on Youtube. They provide virtually nothing[0] to content creators other than free†⸸ video hosting, and in return they get to gatekeep the content itself. All of the cost is offloaded onto the consumer, and there is little to no incentive (arguably negative* incentive) for the people producing the value (videos) to move off youtube. "It costs to make and it costs to deliver." It costs to make, but it's not Google that has to pay. It costs to deliver, but why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content? If the situation was "watch video on youtube with ads, or watch video on Peertube, or watch video on Odysee" I don't think many people would be complaining about mandatory ads on Youtube, but because it's "watch video on youtube with ads, or don't watch the video", people resent the dilema. [0] The most tangible, by far, value Youtube provides is the huge audience, but that's just a feedback loop, not due to quality or effort. Actually, it's probably due to the fact that many people who make great content have historically only put it on Youtube, because of the huge... and so on. Edit: Formatting (hopefully) fixed.

Ferret7446 3y ago
> why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content They're not? I don't know why you mention this. If the creator of a video decided to only make their video available on YouTube, that's their decision.
Jensson 3y ago
> It costs to make, but it's not Google that has to pay Google pays creators 55% of the ad revenue, so yes Google has to pay for those videos. > It costs to deliver, but why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content? People upload to YouTube because YouTube gives them plenty of ad revenue. They don't upload to sites without a lot of ads since that would reduce their ad revenue.
- 0b100 3y ago
  "Google pays creators 55% of the ad revenue, so yes Google has to pay for those videos." Google does not have to pay for videos. If a video brings google enough ad revenue, they willingly give some of it to the channel that made the video. They do not pay a fixed or up-front cost, and assume none of the risk/effort in creating videos. To be fully pedantic, Google doesn't pay for videos in any sense, they pay for the resulting attention. "People upload to YouTube because YouTube gives them plenty of ad revenue. They don't upload to sites without a lot of ads since that would reduce their ad revenue." The videos people want to watch are only on Youtube -> Viewers only use Youtube -> Content creators only upload to Youtube -> Repeat... Google's centripetal force prevents competitors from competing.

throw0101b 3y ago

> The free ride is over. But it was never free. Ads have been on Youtube for years. From a 2011 article entitled "The History of Video Advertising on YouTube": > In January 2009, YouTube started allowing ads in seven different formats. By October of that year, YouTube was counting more than one billion video views per day. * https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/infographic-the-history-of-video-advertising-on-youtube/242836/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/infog... * https://archive.is/A17rT https://archive.is/A17rT Also: > The first targeted advertising on the site came in February 2006 in the form of participatory video ads, which were videos in their own right that offered users the opportunity to view exclusive content by clicking on the ad.[29] The first such ad was for the Fox show Prison Break and solely appeared above videos on Paris Hilton's channel.[29][30] At the time, the channel was operated by Warner Bros. Records and was cited as the first brand channel on the platform.[30] Participatory video ads were designed to link specific promotions to specific channels rather than advertising on the entire platform at once. When the ads were introduced, in August 2006, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley rejected the idea of expanding into areas of advertising seen as less user-friendly at the time, saying, "we think there are better ways for people to engage with brands than forcing them to watch a commercial before seeing content. You could ask anyone on the net if they enjoy that experience and they'd probably say no."[30] However, YouTube began running in-video ads in August 2007, with preroll ads introduced in 2008.[31] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube Why are people upset about having to watch ads when they've been part of the terms of service and social contract for 'free' content since basically the beginning?