I’m not here to defend the soulless multi-million dollar corporation, but we don’t actually know how much money it costs for youtube to stay up. The scale they are operating on is immense, I wouldn’t be surprised, if they were still making a loss with 10 midroll ads.
Big businesses are perfectly capable of releasing financial documents indicating what branches are making and losing money. If they don’t do so, there’s a good reason for it. Often that reason involves them doing things that are either shady or lying to the public about what’s actually happening.
We should not give them the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, because we would only be feeding their manipulation tactics.
So they could either be making money in ways they are not proud of, or there is nothing to be (not) proud of in the first place.
Number of ads does not necessarily scale linearly to amount of income. If the ads alienate viewers, then they become worth less. I know I personally watch less when they started sometimes subjecting me to 30 seconds of unskippable ads to watch a 90 second video. Recently, I hit “skip ad” and it took me to another ad, which made me less likely. The other day whole watching a video someone told me to watch, I paused to look at some text. After a few moments it started rolling an ad while I was trying to read the text. The more this happens, the less likely I am to watch. Wild be interesting to know statistics on viewership versus more obnoxious ad behavior, but there’s likely at least some decline in per ad avenue versus number of ads crammed in the face of viewers.
It’s a fair point. The honest answer might be that with current technology there is simply no way to make Youtube profitable. If Google can’t pull this off I don’t think anyone can. In which case we will see a slow, but profitable death for Youtube as they make increasingly user-hostile moves, like raising prices, increasing ads, and eventually becoming increasing aggressive about deleting rarely watched videos. This will kill their user base over time of course, but they are still sitting on a massive treasure trove of content. The one thing in their favor is that storing and transmitting data gets cheaper every year. Maybe that’s what they’re holding out for.
They almost certainly are running at a loss. Same as Twitch, their parent companies are generally okay with it, because they also serve as pretty solid tech demos for other services they offer (YouTube runs on Google Cloud Platform, Twitch runs on Amazon Web Services), and that pays off indirectly.
Moreover, their parent companies can use them as free advertising. Google about to launch a new phone? Guess what you’re gonna see ads for!
I think the term for this is “loss leader”
Youtubes video platform’s annual ad revenues amounted to 31.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.
Costs are $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
Take off creators fees and you are still in the black.
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Mid to late 2000s adds were very easy to avoid
Didn’t have to pay to see much of anything.
Just every now and then a virus.
Soon we will return to that, except smarter and more adept at not downloading viruses and traps songs labelled as Linkin park
First, it was side banners that you could easily ignore.
Then, late 90s, early 2000s, popups that interrupted your attention. This was such a problem that EVERY browser added a “block all popups” setting, which never blocked the ads, but to this day may block stuff from sites you actually want to use.
Finally, it became javascript. Fucking javascript. “What could go wrong?”
Who cares about a privately owned platform? It was never ours.
Spending time there was always going to be a waste of time. Every business wants to grow like a cancer to consume us all. The next service that you use will want the same if you use another private platform.
You should consider using something that is open source and self hosted. Peertube right? Anyone got other recommendations?
Until the content I want is on another platform, I don’t really have a choice of what platform to go to. Of course, I can also just go outside which YouTube has made more and more appealing by the week, but telling people “just use Peertube” isn’t a solution when the content they want to see simply doesn’t exist there
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I suggest switching mobile browsers: Vivaldi has an integrated adblocker, Firefox can block ads via extension.
Just in case someone doesn’t know.
Is there a blocker I can use on the android YouTube app? I put videos when I’m doing dishes, and in the last year the ads have gotten so long that if you don’t skip em or can’t (cause you’re hands are wet) they go on for 10 minutes or more. The worst are the ads that end, but don’t leave your screen until you physically press skip.
Check out “ReVanced” YouTube.
It takes set up and maintenance but it is well worth the effort as you get all YouTube premium features, latest YouTube app updates, and other enhancements.
Direct link to GitHub- https://github.com/ReVanced
EDIT:
Removed the incorrect “.net” Link as mentioned below.
This is not their official website. Never download revanced from anywhere other than their GitHub repository or https://revanced.app
Yea dude so many people go to that .net site i don’t know whether it’s legit. But i search GitHub and open the link provided in the side bar
Thank you! I quickly (and carelessly) searched and pasted the link. Thank you for the correction.
YouTube revanced gives me ad blocking with sponsor block included
NewPipe app is a good one, or Tubular if you want sponsor block too (though you can’t comment or like videos etc. on either). But if you want to use the actual YT app, the solutions in the other comments are good.
I assume that setting up a Pihole or some other ad-blocking DNS could also work.I assumed wrong. See reply.Pi-hole does not block content that is hosted on the same source as the ads. Youtube, hulu and friends host their own ad services (dont quote me on exactly which streaming platforms this does and does not work on, uBlock should also be part of this suite of ad-blocking) so it wont spare you from those. However people using ad services like google adsense on their website will have content blocked as DNS will resolve to the place your trying to go and the webpage asyn-loading its ads will not.
Thanks for confirming! I haven’t used the actual YT app in such a long time, so I haven’t been able to confirm whether my DNS solution works.
Brave or Vanced or Firefox with uBlock origin
The only reason Brave needs crypto at all is so the CEO can keep donating money against gay marriage without getting caught.
I don’t think the Brave CEO cares about getting caught
He cared when he was ousted from Mozilla for it.
Vanced is dead. Use revanced or revancify(requires terminal).
If you have a rooted phone and Magisk there is a module that essentially turns the stock YouTube app into the Premium version without adds and background play enabled.
Wow really? What’s it called?
Small correction it’s technically an LSposed/Exposed module, but everything I said previously still applies.
NewPipe
I’m a software engineer at AWS and work on video content delivery for services like Netflix. The idea that one single ad could cover the cost of delivering a video that’s been replicated in multiple servers, multiple regions, multiple countries throughout the world is pretty hilarious. No matter how much money you think YouTube is making I can almost guarantee it’s not enough. There is a reason there is no significant competition in this space, it makes no money.
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What’s less sustainable is centralized web. You must know that since you work for Amazon, right?
When PopcornTime was still a thing you could watch adfree any movie you’d like even in 4K because resources were shared through peer to peer.
Now, YouTube gets up to 12$ RPM, content creators get maybe 40% of that. With 2 prerolls and 2 midrolls + banners they get plenty enough money to make things work. Google has the most aggressive VASTs of the market. They are everywhere, called multiple times per pages.
Spare us your tears.
Besides, no significant competition? Is that a joke?
no significant competition? Is that a joke?
For the type of service they are (hosting random one-off videos and series that anyone can load and optionally kicking back a portion to the content creators) - who are they competing against? If you go on the street and ask random people to name 3 streaming services that do that, you’ll likely get YouTube, “ummm”, and “I dunno”
If you ask a 40+ year old maybe…
Content creators are flying away to TikTok or Snapchat. Gamers are on Twitch and Discord etc.
My nephew is 11 yo and has never watched content on YT.
None of those services offer the same kind of content though. Tiktok offers 30s - a couple of minutes videos (vines, essentially), streams are hours long and are fundamentally different because they’re interactive with chat. YouTube offers the 5min - 30min edited content, with exceptions here and there (1hr+ content).
Your 11 year old nephew doesn’t watch YouTube because he’s 11 and has the attention span of a squirrel. He’s not watching a 30 minute video about the Canadian housing crisis.
If you think it’s sustainable you can create a new service yourself, no one is stopping you. I’ve done cost estimations for projects with 1M+ customers and the margins are so tight we’ve killed at least a dozen services despite pouring months or years of effort into their designs and prototypes. It’s easy for you to complain about freebies from your couch but the reality is that if someone could make a better service than YouTube, they already would have. “Spare is your tears” lol.
Question that pertains to general hosting at those scales. In your opinion what costs more, distributing a piece of content that will get 1M views, or 1000 pieces of content that will get 1000 each? I know the math wont add up, but I dont know where the cost bottleneck is. Is hosting something even though it isnt used or that viral spike in views that kills attempts to make a smaller service like this?
Genuine question.
How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?
I doubt they had been just sinking money for the kind of their hearts.
I do not know how much it cost to run a service like YouTube. Or how much money they make by ads or other ways. But they have been running for long enough to be a successful business.
And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.
How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?
Investor money, then Google money. Video streaming requires fuckloads of storage and is a HUGE bandwidth hog, especially if people want to watch stuff at 1080p or higher resolutions. Youtube is a money pit, but it’s a major and nearly untouchable internet power, especially given its size and reach.
And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.
The “easy money” from loans with very low interest rates has dried up, also Google being Google.
There’s also the cost to transcode the video and audio streams into different formats so they don’t have to do it on demand whenever someone watches a video. That’s a lot of compute cost plus they have to store all of those additional transcodes which is more storage cost.
I know that for many years in the 2000s and early 2010s- what many consider to be the golden age of Youtube- they were losing money. That’s what I think a lot or people don’t get when they claim “enshittification”- the services they are complaining about are unsustainable in their current form. That’s what it takes to establish a digital product- grow your base first while bleeding money, then figure out a way to monetize it later. As capital tightens up, the clock is running out for brands like Netflix, Discord, Youtube etc to start making money. That’s the part that sucks as a consumer but idk what else YouTube can do if it wants to be profitable. They offer a premium version for people that don’t want to watch ads.
I feel like I would need to see their accounting books to fully believe that narrative.
The lack of accounting transparency makes all a tale of “trust me I need this money to make this work”.
Yep. Hence why we need to remake the internet.
Good luck with that :thumbsup:
Sounds like the public library system should host the peoples videos as a service, not for profit.
Idk about your system, but mine is currently facing a massive budget cut
Unfortunately, YouTube exists because content creators make money out of the ads.
But free content video is possible with a peer to peer protocol. The content creator get the responsibility to keep the seed alive. The more popular, the more it gets shared, the more it’s available.
But content creators don’t work for free, and public libraries don’t have the resources to store all the dumb content people deem necessary to make.
Reminder: give money to Wikipedia. This thing is a miracle.
It’s not really a single ad though, right? It’s a single ad per view. I realize that each view costs money, but at some point you’re just paying for bandwidth, after paying the upfront replication costs right? Assuming replication is an upfront cost, I might be misunderstanding there. If that’s true though, then surely there’s a breakpoint where ads start making money. Though I suppose if that breakpoint is like a million views, your point basically still stands.
You’re forgetting amortization. You can’t copy a video file to a drive and expect it to last forever. It requires energy to run and the drivers break down over time. Google is one of the largest consumers of HDDs and SSDs in the world. Plus you need to pay engineers who maintain the whole thing, pay the finance team to make orders, etc. And then you have to have recycling and logistics. I bet they dispose of the whole truck loads of old drives every day, you can’t put that many in your recycling bin and call it a day.
Ads in, before, and after videos suck.
But wouldn’t be an ad, which is displayed during a paused video one of the least annoying? Because, when I pause a video, I’m usually doing something else (bathroom break for instance, or, when staying at the computer, doing something in another browser tab or in a different program) and I’m absent from the video. Also, I can mute sound easily (one push of a key on the keyboard - which is a workflow that has to be executed then in addition to simply pausing the video and therefore would be annoying).
Or did I miss anything else crucial? Do you pause videos and stare at the paused video without doing anything else?
Anyway, this probably won’t be a problem if you use an ad blocker. Or if you download the video.
The reason YouTube makes the ads so unbearably obnoxious is they want people to pay for premium. That’s all they’re doing is annoying people until they pay. I’ve been paying for premium since the beginning, I know it’s awful, but at least I have never seen any ads.
Tbf the only reason I know that YouTube has paid subscriptions is because of threads like this one, so it doesn’t seem like they’re really pushing their paid service.
Maybe they’re only targeting people who, for some reason, don’t block ads, and that’s why I’m unaware, but they should offer a little more than the things you can get for free already (no ads, downloading) if they want to draw in the adblocker crowd too.
Now people will start to google what’s up with all those ads and end up installing uBlock.
They definitely push it. The mobile app has popups advertising it etc.
I must be out of touch.
I didn’t think I’d need an app to visit YouTube.
youtube prem + youtube music family plan with 6 total users at $22.99 is pretty reasonable.
Per year?
Per month.
That’s not good at all.
Yeah, it’s really expensive.
I remember when YouTube was free, and ad-free. I’ve been posting videos to YouTube since 2005. Then a few years later they put a price on it, “Premium” became $9 a month. Something something Pepperidge Farm remembers
And I was grandfathered in at that price even after they raised their prices for everyone else, but then for some reason I got upset and I canceled YouTube but then I couldn’t live without it so I subscribed again and they put me back in at the regular price with all the new people 😡
I had the same deal, my comment is in regard to the family plan, which allocates 6 total accounts. I thought $3.83 per person a month was reasonable for the hd music alone, youtube prem was just a plus, but based on other comments I’m apparently a dipshit. 🤷
No worries they bumped up everyone that had a grandfathered in price after a year or two
aah 😭 sad for everyone
Yeah, at least i got both youtube and music, so far it’s worth my money. I’d love to get nebula + a music app but it cost way more.
Yeah premium makes 15 dollars per month. Ads for an average viewer makes dozens of cents per month.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and I don’t any ads either.
yeah I admire all of you who refuse to use the YouTube app and you watch YouTube through a browser, but in my opinion watching YouTube through a browser is clunky and tedious.
You realize people watch youtube on computers not just phones right?
I have ad free YouTube on the YouTube app on Android. Just takes modding the app through a simple guide. Only works on Android though, not iOS IIRC. The tool is Revanced.
Also for Android Smart TVs, check out the TV app called SmartTube Next.
ReVanced, NewPipe, SmartTube. You’re correct that their mobile browser experience sucks.
Until they pull a Microsoft and start throwing ads into the paid model as well.
Or like all the other streaming platforms that you paid a subscription for to not see ads, but believe it or not you now have ads.
yeah I havent experienced it myself with YouTube, but I have heard some people say they pay for premium and they’ve started getting ads 😡 YouTube is a huge part of my life and I would be livid if this happened and I don’t know what I would do because I don’t know how I could live without YT I would love to say that I would abandon YouTube if they pulled this shit on me, but I just can’t even imagine my life without YouTube. I don’t pay for any other service, no Hulu, no Disney Plus, no HBO blah blah whatever the heck other people are paying for. when I’m craving watching something, I always go to YouTube. And I have several YouTube channels too, so YT is an integral part of my life 😭
Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly common. Amazon now also shows ads on the Prime streaming service even though you already pay a subscription fee for it.
Passively?? Video streaming is anything but passive income.
Ads never bothered me on YouTube.
They’re bothering me enough now that I’m going with an android phone after more than a decade on iPhones just so I can get back to YouTube the way it used to be with a decent ad blocker (better than it used to be actually).
I can’t fucking stand it, and again, it didn’t bother me before.
Want to show someone a short clip? Nah. Gotta skip two fucking ads first while you stand there looking stupid and waiting.
I’m fucking done.
The irony of a Google product pissing you off so you switch from iOS to Android
All to get those sweet sweet modified APKs
From very trusty Telegram sources no less!
On a more serious note, f-droid is where I got NewPipe. Also, you don’t need to own a fucking macbook and pay a fucking developer’s license to be able to develop for Android, which is good.
Telegram? F-droid? Just patch the original apk’s locally. Easy
What this commenter won’t tell you is that the patches are only for specific versions of the app, it’s what makes it a pain, can’t just patch the one that phone updates all the time from the store or the app will be quite bugged.
Who cares? You just don’t update it till something breaks. Which is not often. Small price to pay
So pissed at YouTube (Google) you’re switching to Android (…)? Was this their master plan all along?
I’m going to go with a degoogled version of the OS (LineageOS is my current plan).
The only way I’ll back out is if Apple allows an ad blocker that will cover any app I’m using. I’m currently paying for one that only works on Safari and YouTube videos take a thousand years to load up.
Now if a legit version of Firefox makes its way to iPhone in the US with ublock, I’ll be happy with that.
Whoa
Becoming ever more obnoxious with ad placement because your ad-supported service is losing money and you don’t know what else to do is a classic late-stage-enshittification step. It is usually the last one before the service becomes openly hostile to its users and partners and becomes a mostly-worthless relic. I did not think Youtube was at that stage or even close to it but maybe it is.
I can’t really tell if Youtube is losing money or not, but it creates about $8 billion per quarter, and Google’s overall operating expense is $55 billion per quarter, and I think it actually might be a safe assumption that Youtube is a pretty decent amount of that expense given its scale and its storage, bandwidth, and employee-resources requirements.
Here’s the thing about YouTube. From the very beginning, it was a video-hosting platform. Users create content. They upload the content to YouTube’s servers. Other users view the content, and upload their own. A simple formula, no? That’s why their pre-Google slogan was “Broadcast Yourself”. The thing is, storing video data long-term is expensive. This is where Google comes into play, because, unless you’ve got Google’s money, you cannot afford to store literally 100s of Yottabytes of video data, not for very long, anyway. Even if YouTube becomes a “mostly-worthless relic”, there’s nobody who can readily replace it. I suppose someone could create a fediverse version of it where you simply upload your own content to your own server and then sell (or give) access to other users, but it would be slow to start, and small as not everyone can afford their own server to host their content on. Or, a service that aggregates videos by scraping them from from video servers that it has access to, creating a hub for users to enjoy the content made by other users that is stored on their own servers.
Yeah. As with many things, “Can this make money?” is not the same as “Is this a nice thing to have around?” and the disconnect between the two when capitalism tends to assume they’ll be the same thing, is a source of unhappiness in many ways.
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Funnily enough, one of the things Reddit’s PCM community tried to push was the concept of nationalizing YouTube because “it’s a public service.”
They thought the average browser was too stupid to ask why all these Nazis wanted that, where all of a sudden the 1st Amendment actually comes into play, and now you can’t take down their blatant misinformation and hate speech.
Hmm that’s pretty fucking clever for complete choads.
Idk. This was around all the drama of Trump getting banned from Twitter, so the separation between a company censoring things that might cost them money and the government doing it is pretty clear in people’s minds, and nationalization just isn’t something the forces of neoliberalism do, at least openly. It just never had a hope of becoming a real thing.
Good point, i never thought about that angle. Looks like the only option is self hosting then.
Objectively wrong.
YouTube could not be profitable showing one quick ad per video, especially if it’s longer content.
Im of the firm belief that youtube should make creators pay for storage of their videos.
Free teir for short videos, no monetization, YT places ads. Paid teir for longer form videos and monetization. This would ensure that long form videos should ideally be profitable for creators, or companies uploading their training videos etc pay a nominal fee for their storage.
This is the fairest way to keep youtube in the green.
Yeah it’s very clear to me the top creators make far too much money and I agree that business model bears fruit.
However, the cost of YouTube isn’t the storage, it’s serving views of the videos. That payment scheme you’ve suggested doesn’t scale well with number of views of single videos, that’s why they chose to increase income per view and not per video.
this process will cause most smaller creators to just leave the platform, it’s already super difficult to to get established, this would essentially force them to operate at a loss until they can get a foothold which concidering a lot of the time it can take months to years to get established? I can’t see that system being sustainable either.
I know this is a controversial opinion, but I dont think youtube should be a place where small creators should expect to make money from direct monetization. That model is what brought youtube to the state its in. Selling patron, merch, or driving traffic to their own website for services, yes. Direct monetization of ads on youtube, no.
I refused to use adblock for years. Not because I thought Youtube needed MORE money, but because I did realize that a business ultimately only continues operating as long as the business model is sustainable. I endured, through occasional ads, ads at the bottom, then through ads every time a video was watched, then ads in the middle of videos, and even two ads before every video.
But three unskippable ads was where I drew the fucking line. Now I use adblock for Youtube and Youtube only.
Wow, grandstanding over adblockers
Similar story here, except I just stopped using YouTube.
Lemmy’s piping bots help with that.I appreciate this point of view but I refuse to have my limited time and energy wasted as a form of “payment”. Ads degrade the user experience of everything they touch and corporations don’t limit their ad use to “continue operations”, they push it as far as possible to suck as much money out of the product as they can.
The only “TV” I watch is hockey and it’s depressing watching the product get degraded year after year as they continue to shove as much advertising down our throats as possible in order to make more money. Fuck ads.
That’s nice of you, but it appears that the ad-supported business model doesn’t work. It just results in enshittification and surveillance.
“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”
No one will ever pay for services like YouTube. Thus ads is the only way.
Plenty of people pay for cable and streaming services lol, what are you on about?
YouTube has a paid subscription which is ad free and with additional features. How many of you here, who complain about ads, use YouTube Premium? Mmm?
A friend of mine pays for it, yes.
“A friend of a friend”. Cool story. So far it’s just one person here who pays to get rid of ads. And 1.45k upvotes for the post.
No, a friend. Not a friend of a friend. And I’m sure many folks here she’ll out the extra few bucks on stuff like Hulu to get the ad free version. Not sure what the hell you’re on about.
Youtube is my main source of entertainment. I will pay for premium no problem. And yes, I totally hate ads. A music service for free with it that has a comment section so I can discuss the music with my peers. Also, it’s insane the amount of data YouTube has to serve.
I like to watch video game speedruns. I especially enjoy the really long, challenging ones. Watching a 2 hour video on YouTube without an ad block is basically impossible at this point.
My father in law uses the built in YouTube app on the TV. There were 3 ads that played. The first one was 15 minutes. The second one was also around 15 minutes. The third one was an hour. One fucking hour for a 5 minutes video.
It always makes me mad when somebody put a playlist on YouTube and out of nowhere a bad song starts playing because it’s an ad.
That’s exactly what he was listening to. I think it was a beetles playlist and out of nowhere an ad. I skipped and the next was another 15. Skip again and it’s an hour.
Yes fucking YouTube. When I skip a video, my intent is to see a longer ad.
I was fine with giving them 5 seconds of attention in exchange for a video. Then they added more and more, and moved the skip button SOMETIMES. It’s straight up disrespectful.
I also HATE that if you miss the skip button on the first of multiple ads, they disable the skip button for another number of seconds.
I was okay with giving the recovering alcoholic just a small drink but this, I can’t abide.
