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Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good. But this is because there is no viable monetization mode
by pembrook 1y ago
Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good.
But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create.
Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Search ads is now the most profitable monopoly business of all time.
YouTube is still young, but give it time. Google will eventually kill the golden goose there as well, by trying to harvest too many eggs for themselves.
The same will happen with AI results as well. Companies will be happy to lose money on it for a decade while they fight for dominance. But eventually the call for profits will come and the AI results will require scrolling through mountains of ads to see an answer.
This is the shape of this market. Search driven content in any form is and will always be a yellow pages business. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or some future AGI.
- jakebennet89 1y ago[dead]
- kelvinjps10 1y agoThere is filters links in unlock for these kind of things, they're called annoyances
- brokencode 1y agoYouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model. Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too. I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads. The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue? I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.
- philipwhiuk 1y agoThe advertising tier has gradually gotten worse on YouTube.
- Nicook 1y agoIts encrapification is real. It has been slow though, mostly affecting niche interests and smaller creators. And the ad experience has definitely gotten worse, but adblockers help. Try using youtube without and adblocker.
- brokencode 1y agoI pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.
- kylebenzle 1y agoIn the old days people would pay to host video content and now people pay Google to watch other people's hosted video content. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing. I'm still waiting for the first company to start selling bottled air next!
- tim333 1y agoI get a lot of value from youtube - hours of entertainment. Also I don't pay and use an ad blocker which is maybe a bit unfair but thanks to the people who do pay.
- afavour 1y agoYou're talking as if video content has no intrinsic value of its own. Of course it does. "Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."
- dingnuts 1y ago
- streptomycin 1y agoGoogle also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.
- claudiulodro 1y ago> Before header bidding, publishers sold ad space through a “waterfall” method, offering the space to one ad exchange at a time, typically prioritizing whichever had previously offered the highest prices. But Google made it so that its AdX got “first look” access through DFP by calling it to submit a real-time bid before other exchanges got the chance to take part in an auction. That meant AdX could buy up any inventory it wanted as long as it met the publisher’s floor price, then pass the less desirable space to other exchanges, according to the DOJ. [...] > But Google moved quickly to reestablish AdX’s power. It created a competitor to header bidding called “Open Bidding,” which let Google take an extra cut of revenue. And under the adoption of header bidding, Google’s AdX ultimately got a “last look” advantage when publishers chose to feed the winning header bid into their publisher ad server — which most often was Google’s DFP. That’s because AdX’s advertiser buyers would then have the option to bid as little as a penny more than the winning header bid to secure the most attractive ad space.[0] Google's header bidding-related shenanigans were a big part of the antitrust case against them, and they were found to be "monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets"[1], so I wouldn't say that it is mostly not controlled by Google. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24253293/google-ad-tech-antitrust-trial-doj-case https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24253293/google-ad-tech-a... [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-l...
- streptomycin 1y agoI'm aware of that stuff. That's why I said "mostly". That stuff is bad, but only somewhat impedes the effectiveness of header bidding. There still is bidding going on, there still are many bids being won by companies besides Google, and there's only so much that Google can do about that even with these shenanigans. It's a far cry from all ads being sold directly through Google like on AdSense, where they can simply take a giant cut off the top and call it a day.
- tempodox 1y agoIt's the usual enshittification. First they screw the end luser, then they screw their actual customers. If you depend on one platform as a member of either of those groups, you're screwed.
- fortyseven 1y ago> YouTube is still young I almost spit out my drink.
- DudeOpotomus 1y agoThere is no right to make money. Period. If you did, that doesnt mean you should. If you can, that doesnt mean you should.
- drewr 1y agoI spend noticeably less time on youtube than I used to because they keep shoving shorts in my face. I'm a premium subscriber, I click "fewer shorts," nothing changes. Maybe I should be thankful?
- EchoReflection 1y agoI recently quit YT premium after decades of having it, and now I actually (weirdly) feel good when I see ads bc it's a reminder that I'm not giving Googletube 20$/month
- namblooc 1y agoI wouldn't use the word decades to describe a time span of less than 11 years at maximum, but you do you!
- EchoReflection 1y agotouché, I suppose it was "more than 3/4/5 years" and my sense of time is, unfortunately, warped
- JoshTriplett 1y agoTurn off all the history options, and bookmark https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions , which shows you only what you're subscribed to, in reverse-chronological order. (It'll still show you shorts, but only those for channels you're subscribed to.)
- dbtc 1y agoHas there ever been an option to pay google $20/month for a better / add-free search? The current subscription situation for LLM stuff actually makes me hopeful.
- natebc 1y agomy kagi subscription is as valuable to me as my youtube premium sub.
- margalabargala 1y agoAI models will continue to improve, but open source models are, right now, good enough for plenty of tasks. If I'm searching "how to get an intuitive understanding of dot product and cross product", any open source model right now will do a perfectly fine job. By the time that the ad-pocalypse reaches AI answers, the models I mention will be at the point of being able to be run locally using consumer hardware. Probably every phone will run one. I suspect in the next decade we will see the business model of "make money via advertising while trying/pretending to provide knowledge" become well and truly dead.
- nativeit 1y ago> AI models will continue to improve… [citation needed] My intuitive sense—informed by media coverage, behaviors exhibited by AI companies and their investors, and a very foundational understanding of how it all works—is that AI models have largely hit a wall and have struggled to improve at all, in some very public cases the newer versions perform worse than their predecessors. The fact that most of the benchmarks are hardly more than internal tests designed to highlight very narrow performance metrics has made getting any reliable sense of the state of the art rather difficult. They do indeed have some extremely useful purposes, but I have yet to see anything that broadly justifies the expense of it all (in plain economic terms, but also in sociopolitical and environmental terms) and a lot of indications that they have recently reached some very firm limits.
- margalabargala 1y agoI certainly agree that we're at diminishing returns but I suspect there are a lot of data sources left untapped; audio recordings, etc, that would improve the models. Or just some other math improvement. But in a world where they do not improve, that actually just strengthens the point I made in the rest of my original comment :)
- cyanydeez 1y agoBasically, if we are smart Software as Public Infrastructure will take root and basic search and publication will be seen as ordinary government operations, like public parks and national forests.