I mean, attempting to monetize every single thing in life is juvenile and short sighted as well.
How else do you expect a globally-accessible video hosting service that requires no upfront costs for users to upload millions of video files at the cost of several petabytes of data transfers every day to function?
On donations?
I mean the flip side of that is that youtube would be worthless without the content the users generate.
The users generating the content people actually want to watch wouldn’t be able to do so without the monetization that’s in place, though. They can’t make content for free, and shouldn’t be expected to. And not all creators can rely on sponsorships to subsidize themselves, either, so most creators rely pretty heavily on ad revenue in order to stay afloat on the platform and keep the lights on.
If the creators can’t afford to keep creating, then that also degrades YouTube’s service as a whole, as well.
“the price is what the market will bear” or whatever. I used to pay for ytp (red)/gpm. Paused for a month, went to resub, was like +$4 more a month. I don’t value yt at ~$16, not even at ~$12 really but hey, they wouldn’t fuck billions of users over in the pursing of profits, right? If yt/Google was a scrappy little startup, or a creator that I valued, sure, here’s $5 a month through patreon. But they aren’t, they bought a platform with no clear avenue to monetization/breaking even, and sat on it for 10 years, and then they want to be like ‘please we are the victim here, it’s the evil ad blockers that are forcing us into the streets!’.
G has, metrically speaking, fuck-tons of money. And if they so desperately need to clear their books, they can always close yt, anytime they want. Or they could let the customers pay what they think the service is worth. Hell, they could even shift the costs to the creators, which isn’t the worst idea in the world - it’d at least stop kids from uploading their fortnite clips with them screaming into their mics. Not everybody should be allowed in front of a webcam.
But as long as it’s [number higher than I value yt as] or [shitty experience], I will take option 3 and tell g to gag on my balls, and I shall enjoy my $5 and my ad-free experience.
Lots of options, but nah “fuck the users” came out on top. Acting like the users are the reason why they bought and operated a money pit for 15 years is just hilarious.
You say YouTube’s solution was “fuck the users”, but the solutions you offered are “fuck the creators”. I’m not sure how that’s any better.
