pays for own domain/no ads
There is a 0% chance you were an adult in the early 2000s lol
Imagine having ads in things but instead of just being there, they opened in new windows, were loud as fuck, and opened by the hundreds. That’s what the Internet was like
Pop up blockers walked so ad blockers could run.
When I was 18 I was pretty dumb, yeah. I once totally destroyed a hard drive by corrupting a file trying to make my PC background the “Anal Destruction” website logo
Young people are dumb man.
Yeah, so you missed that what OP talked about was very real. We had much more of those sites based on sharing, and they were much more at the front of the internet.
There is a 0% chance you were an adult in the early 2000s lol
I’m 49, dude. And the meme isn’t about “the internet”. It is literally about the difference between people sharing stuff back then and “creating content” today. Shitty internet parts have always been shitty, but at least people didn’t try to monetize even their beloved ones’ death.
I’m 49 dude
Then you should remember these days more accurately.
People make social media posts instead of geocities pages these days. Content creators are more like the people who used to sell content online than they are the average chucklehead who made a geoshitty page.
People you see with lots of Twitter followers are exactly akin to people who ran pages on free hosting websites. When they link their merch, it’s exactly like how blogs and shit would sell merch.
Youre looking at this with glasses so rosy they’re completely blinding.
Then you should remember these days more accurately.
So should you. Remember when ads were just static banners? No, you don’t. Don’t pick a point in time that fits your bias and ignore the rest, mate. Might turn your glasses as brown as your take is shite.
It’s not all black and white though. People in the 2000’s didn’t know that you can make a living off content creation, but people who have adopted this style usually can and will (or should) turn more effort into creating high quality videos.
“High quality” can come in the form of investing time into research, or creating visual aids that present information clearly. But it also often manifests as flashy title cards, pointless special effects, derivative humor (like frenzied jump cuts to movie clips and memes every few seconds), unnecessarily rambling intros, superfluous wall-to-wall music. I feel like many of these features are borrowed over from classical TV, to give the veneer of a highly produced “professional” product, when democratized internet media’s greatest strength is to actually free us from these conventions.
Isn’t that exactly the point of the meme? Internet 20 years ago was about sharing mostly. Internet today is about monetization mostly. And content quality isn’t what makes you big, it’s your ability to game/abuse the system
The point of the meme is “How dare creators expect any sort of compensation for their work!? No ads! No subscriptions! Give it to us for the ‘exposure’!”
I don’t think most people have an issue with compensation for good content, it’s just there are not a lot of monetization schemes that support this. So what you get instead of quality content is stuff like 40 minute video tutorials with 5 ad breaks about a subject that could have been explained in 5 minutes. That’s also why people tend to put reddit at the end of a google search because chances are good you find a simple post with the exact information you need instead of all the blog sites that explain the same shit in only 5003937352729 words with 300 ads inbetween that show up at the first result page because they game the seo system.
Shut up old man.
Nailed it.
People seem to forget that before YouTube partnered with content creators people just kinda… uploaded stuff that they were passionate about. They didn’t do it for a living and they did not expect payment but might have asked for donations if their channel was costly to run. Sure, the production value and editing quality was a lot lower, but the core experience was still the same.
This is why I flatly reject the notion that me blocking ads on YouTube hurts content creators in any meaningful way, especially now that almost all of them are partnered with some kind of sponsor embedded in the video.
The core experience was definitely not the same, what are you talking about? Yeah sure if you just wanted entertainment maybe, but educational content for example requires so much research and double checking that it wouldn’t be possible without ad money.
I’m not saying that blocking ads makes you a bad person (I did it too before I could afford premium), but it does have a measurable effect and pretending it doesn’t is stupid.
Yeah sure if you just wanted entertainment maybe, but educational content for example requires so much research and double checking that it wouldn’t be possible without ad money.
Research did not begin when YouTube started paying people to upload to their platform. It was already being done. It might be more accessible to people who only do YouTube and do not get grant money for their research, but saying research wouldn’t be possible without ad money is nonsense.
Also, adding a financial incentive to upload as many videos as possible to get as many clicks and views as possible doesn’t sound like the way you encourage truthful, factual, and well-researched educational content to get shared. If anything, it would encourage a lot of low effort clickbait, misleading titles and thumbnails, opinion pieces, “edutainment” and poorly sourced material mass produced for a wide audience. Not saying that’s what happened, I’m sure there are plenty of channels that exist now thanks in part to ad revenue helping them get started and/or continue posting at regular upload intervals, but the Cobra Effect is real and people will always be finding ways to take the path of least resistance to getting their payout.
