https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/
Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.
Shareholders: you doubled your profit last year, so I expect you to do it again this year.
YouTube lost google -31.5 billion in 2023, approximately 10% of all of alphabet’s revenue.
I was genuinely confused by this statistic until I realised it was a double negative. YouTube losen’t Google a lot of money.
And as we know companies prefer to provide a service with a loss, for decades. Name a company that can make -31.5 billion and keep going. Or maybe the data went to google, where they made the money.
It’s funny that free third party apps literally have more features and are more user friendly than the official app with premium.
Why the fuck would I pay for less when I can get more for free?
Some years ago ago, I was a happy subscriber to Google Music. But, they added it to the graveyard, and instead grafted on some music playing functionality to YouTube and called it YouTube Music. So, I went back to Spotify.
Then I started paying for YouTube Premium Lite. It wasn’t unreasonably expensive, although it was a bit annoying I couldn’t just have “YouTube” in the household, like with Netflix. So if wife would cast a video to the TV, it would play with ads.
It was about a year ago, when Google starting cracking down on adblockers, that they also removed an option to pay for the service. I think YouTube Premium Lite wasn’t a thing in the US (correct me if I’m wrong), but they removed YT Premium Lite, and the only option left was a twice as expensive YouTube Premium bundle that included YouTube Music.
Tldr: fucked up Google Music, then removed an option to pay for YouTube premium, leaving a fairly expensive alternative with the pile of shit they replaced Google music with. It’ll be a rough time if they manage to force ads. I won’t pay for it, out of principle.
Edit: I looked at the numbers again. I’d have to pay more for YouTube than for the highest Netflix tier. It’s more than Prime and HBO combined. They also don’t have to front large sums to fund risky projects. If they didn’t include YouTube Music, I might have considered it. But with it, it just pisses me off, they can go get f.ed
I think there’s a couple things at play:
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You know enough to find a different app and make it do what you need it to. Not a hard thing, but something many non-tech savvy people could struggle with, or more likely–
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People often will just use what’s there. We know we have options, we are aware of the privacy concerns… but many people simply aren’t and/or don’t care enough to do anything about it.
We spend a lot of time here, so it seems to us like second nature to avoid intrusive apps… I find in my day-to-day life not many people are talking about that kind of stuff, or don’t have much knowledge/experience in that realm. (I realize that is anecdotal).
I 100% agree with your statements–just trying to rationalize how so many people end up using/staying with these ever-worsening services/apps…
To be fair, one of the apps mentioned, [Re]Vanced, is literally just the stock app with extra features patched in and the premium features enabled for free (like no ads and downloads). It makes sense that it would be more user friendly. Allowing that modified version doesn’t get them any revenue though while still costing them to host and serve the content to those users.
At least with NewPipe it supports multiple sites and is its own app with their own code and UI.
I pay $4/mo, mainly for YouTube music (I’m part of a friend’s family plan).
It’s pretty convenient since you can use the background audio on an iPad as well - I don’t use it often but it’s nice when I do. And there’s no ads there it’s pretty insane seeing the level of ads when I try and use my work phone which I’m not signed into.
Also, you can make channels within your single goggle account so I made one for my mom and bro so they get no ads aswell. They have to sign in to my acct which can feel a little sketch but I trust them since they’re just using the YT app on their TVs. They stay in their own user acct. and it doesn’t affect my history or anything
I’ll give up on YouTube before I give up my ad blocks or 3rd party apps. Fuck off Google.
That’s likely what they want. If you’re not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a ‘customer’. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you’re blocked or when you eventually stop using it.
Thing is you also stop sharing and commenting and engaging with other users. If it wasn’t useful they would pull the plug long ago, nothing technical is preventing them.
I recall Louis Rossmann saying something along those lines, and sounded perfectly reasonable to me.
OTA TV: with ads
OTA TV: if you record you are pirating
Cable TV: you pay a fortune to have no ads!
Cable TV: now with extra premium stuff!
Cable TV: now with ads!
Cable TV: if you record, you’ll be prosecuted
Cable TV: pray we do not alter the deal further
Cable TV: why is everyone moving away from Cable TV?
Youtube: your own videos!
Youtube: your own videos are actually ours
Youtube: our videos with ads!
Youtube: now pay a fortune to remove ads!
Youtube: pray we do not alter the deal further
Youtube: if you download or remove ads you’ll be banned
This isn’t the pattern you’re looking for. Move along.
Oh, we’ll see at that point I would just like stop paying for it. That’s how I deal with services that no longer meet my expectations.
If the price was even relatively sane I would be okay with that honestly.
But no, they need to keep driving the price up and up. I have to pay my part so that little Jimmy can host 297 hours of white noise on his account that no one wants to watch.
They simply need to change their tactics a little. It cost you some small sane amount to host your videos there. If your videos don’t g gather watches and make money you should be the one paying for them.
I want to pay about nine bucks a month for a family account it’s just b-f rate content. You can pay less to get actual well rated movies from other services.
Also give me the option not to throw in Google music I don’t give a s*** about Google music.
No ads? What is with sponsor #1-#5 planted all over each video?
You’re just paying premium for free content, that doesn’t go away.
Weird to see this downvoted. Youtube is actually a good service that also isn’t cheap to run, and it also pays good(?) money to the people producing popular content on the platform so why not pay for using it? Or, you know, live with the ad infestation. Businesses need money to run, and if you don’t pay for the content, then either it’s the ads or eventually the whole platform needs to be shut down.
It is a separate discussion if Premium pricing is appropriate etc. But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
More things used to be free on internet 10-20 years ago.
Also the rich used to be less rich, and the poor less poor.
So clearly paying overpriced services for everything is not making anything better.
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free”
Maybe the businesses shouldn’t have created the expectation that everything was “free” then.
YouTube used to be 1 skippable ad at the start of the video. Now it’s multiple unskippable ads throughout the video. If the 1 skippable ad wasn’t a viable business model then they shouldn’t have been pretending it was and then changing things later once people have gotten used to the “free” system.
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
That is exactly the issue, but you are placing quite a bit too much of your disapproval on the audience.
Google (and others) have built business models off of data mining because so many people didn’t give a shit for so long about it. They have monetized their users for the entire time they have owned the platform. They have trained their own users to feel like the product was free while using those people for advertising dollars.
People have always hated ads, but you had generations of folks who were born before the internet who mostly just accepted the ads were going to be there, and also have never given a single thought to privacy. That slice of the pie is getting smaller, for various reasons.
Now Google have decided since they can’t reliably exploit enough of their users, it’s time to start charging them directly. They are fighting against their own inertia. It is they who have trained users with “we aren’t asking you for $$, so don’t worry about how we’re paying for all this, trust me bro.”
The modern audience is increasingly made up of people with both the will and capability to set up ad blocking and/or privacy protecting measures. Sorry Google, we aren’t going down quietly.
Stuff should be free. We live in an age where every one of us could be living a life of comfort and reasonable luxury with a modicum of work. In the meantime those of us who aren’t being showered by the excesses of capitalism are fully entitled to stand in the splashes.
Is it downvoted? I’m on kbin so I can’t see anything but kbin votes and I have nothing but upvotes. lol
Edit: downloaded to downvoted
It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.
was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers.
I had not heard of Manifest v3 and actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. I guess you are.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/
They’ve been trying for years to implement this at a large price to the users. They always try to hide under the guise of security.
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/16/google-intensifies-fight-against-youtube-adblockers/
They’re not being sarcastic, they are repeating Google’s (bs) justification
They are being sarcastic, with the emphasis on “purely”, while saying Google’s justification. It’s exactly to point out it’s bs.
firefox!!!
firefox and ublock origin has existed all along cmon, ditch that spyware already whats the holdup, what makes people so damn allergic to using anything other than chrome
There are a ton of other WebKit/Blink based browsers to choose from! Safari, Vivaldi, Brave… not to mention good old Firefox and Gecko!
Are there any semi-popular alternative browsers still based on WebKit? I thought most of them like Brave and Vivaldi were based on Chromium’s Blink rather than WebKit.
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
And all of those come down to money
Search shows you random videos because “the algorithm” is hoping to drive you through to videos that are the most monetized and the most likely to keep you on the platform based on their data
The shorts thing is because they can pack more ads into 15 second bits of content while using less bandwidth and they’re hoping to hijack your attention with an “endless stream” of short clips a la TikTok or instagram reels
The video bandwidth drops to low every time because they’re hoping people will still watch, see the ads, and not bump the quality up, saving Google on bandwidth costs
The live streams thing is just more advertising revenue again
None of that applies if you’re a paying customer like me, and I see all the same bs. So no, it’s really just bad design, it’s not trying to do any of the stuff you mentioned.
Even that’s just a monetary decision. They are choosing not to spend money to build a custom “premium” experience for paying customers and instead just stripping ads, keeping the existing engagement/monetization driven UI in place. A customized UI takes more dev time, costs more in engineering labor, etc
They already do but it’s pretty restrictive in what can be changed about the experience:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies-guide#examples_3