CileTheSane

If McDonald's started charging $100 for a cheeseburger, the response of "well who's going to pay for it?" Would not be appropriate.

The cost is too high and is only increasing because of greed.

Yup, and somehow Podcasts still manage to be successful.

Yet for some reason people expect me to believe YouTube will go out of business if the ad doesn't force me to stand up in front of my webcam and say "McDonald's" before the video resumes.

For context going to the movies is almost 20 euros per person just for the ticket, for 1 hour and a half of entertainment. Not including snacks, drinks, gas, parking… I wonder if people here also sneak into the movies because they are annoyed at the cashier.

The movie theater provides the screen, seating, AC, and Sound system. Not to mention that the movie theater does not stop the movie multiple times in the middle of a sentence to play an ad. People do sneak into movies, and strangely the theaters don't seem to be going out of business because of it.

I have no problem with ads. I listen to podcasts with ads all the time. I have an issue with how YouTube does their ads (and that it never seems to be enough). If YouTube wanted to it would be trivial to avoid ad blockers by making the ad indistinguishable from the rest of the stream: Comes from the same source, and does not modify the user's control of the page. But to do that YouTube would need to vet and be responsible for the ads they show (can't have that) and users wouldn't be forced to sit through an ad they aren't interested in (can't have that).

An ad before the video starts that is skippable after 5s is fine. But it's never enough, and Advertisers will always push further until people get sick of it and get an AdBlocker. This falls firmly into the territory of "Piracy is a service problem": They make the site shittier and shittier and there is an easy and free alternative to make the site significantly better. And you want me to feel bad for the poor Billion dollar company that is actively making its service worse to try to wring more money out of it?

I for one, watch like 3 hours a day, at least one hour of that is 4k on the TV. So I cost YouTube like 20 cents per day let’s say, 6 bucks a month, 72 bucks a year.

And for $130 a year you could get it ad free! Only an 80% mark up!

Bandwidth is expensive.

Google does not make a lot of information available on their operating costs, but from what I was able to find it looks like people are estimating Google spent over $2 billion for servers and bandwidth in 2018 for its network services including YouTube.

YouTube generated $31.5 billion in ad revenue in 2023.

YouTube is covering it's costs just fine and doesn't need to force more ads on everyone in order to turn a profit.

The enshittification will continue until we reach infinite profit.

It’s also a way to pay for providing a service

Yes, but that doesn't excuse trying to force an infinite number of ads on people.

Podcasts are supported through ads and you don't see people complaining about it, programs to block them, and Podcasts trying to subvert ad blockers. Why? Because they have a reasonable number of ads, with clear ad breaks, that are indistinguishable code wise from the rest of the podcast so you can fast forward through them. Oh, and when I turn it off it doesn't keep paying audio at me.

This is like a service charging 10x as much and you defending it saying "you have to pay for the service somehow." Yes, there's paying for the service, and then there's the service being greedy and milking every last bit of money they can out of it.

YouTube made $31.5 billion in ad revenue last year, and they're still demanding more. Will these "pause ads" reduce the number of other ads users see? Will it help find other improvements of the service? Or is this just an attempt to keep building infinite growth in a finite system?

At this point I would be thrilled if YouTube went out of business because too many people were using ad blockers.

My cat is on a raw food diet that I portion out once a week. Anytime I go to portion it out, it doesn't matter what I grab first she is immediately in the kitchen rubbing against the cupboards. (I let her lick out the empty containers).

Once I'm done and start putting things away she knows I'm done and wanders off

I have taught my cat that "Scootch" means "you have about 5 seconds to move on your own or I'm going to move you." It has been very effective.

Scissors beats paper for no good reason. What does it do? Cut paper? Now I have twice as much paper!

Do you realize how low quality your stuff would be?

YouTube makes $30 billion a year. They'll be fine.

Then people would bitch that they can’t get the high quality version for free

Reducing the max resolution for people who aren't on YouTube Red will come next once they stop focusing on AdBlockers.

"Service quality will continue to decrease until profits improve!"

Same way I used to pay for YouTube and currently pay for Podcasts: A small number of ads, at a designated spot, that I can skip through if I don't want to watch.

It would be trivial for youtube to stop adblockers by making the ads indistinguishable from the rest of the stream: Coming from the same source and behaving like the rest of the video (your controls don't get locked). But that doesn't grow their every increasing hoard of wealth fast enough. The product must be made worse for profits to grow more, and according to you I should be thanking them for decreasing the quality of their product for me. $30 billion is not enough! The company demands infinite growth in a closed system! (Or as biologists call it: cancer)