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nerdsniper 6 hours ago [-]
I just pay for YT Premium. I’m genuinely curious why that option is so controversial? Happy to get people’s thoughts.
So I never see any ads and I feel like I get enough value for what I pay. It even helps me skip in-content ads with a single click.
legitronics 6 hours ago [-]
I also pay for yt premium.
Most people do not seem to like pay to play, pay to “win”, etc and this falls either very close or in that category.
The long term economics seem questionable to me. Google can always turn up the heat a bit more with ads, charge more for the ads, play more of them, etc when they need to be more profitable. The only way they make more from premium subscribers is charging more and they will lose people each time they do. I guess technically they could make more if premium watchers viewed less content but there’s a pretty hard floor and I suspect the economics of it are much like soda fountains.
I’m afraid ultimately if premium becomes too large of a user base Google would need to turn it into an “ad-lite” experience to increase profits. Then we’re in an even worse place.
steve_adams_86 6 hours ago [-]
> I’m afraid ultimately if premium becomes too large of a user base Google would need to turn it into an “ad-lite” experience
I wouldn't hesitate to cancel my subscription and stop using the platform at that point. Life can go on without YouTube.
karmakurtisaani 2 hours ago [-]
Or you could move on to the premium+ package, which costs more, but has no ads (yet).
kevinfiol 5 hours ago [-]
Where did you get the impression that it's controversial to pay for YT Premium? Most threads I've seen on this topic are composed of roughly half of the comments endorsing YT Premium, while the other half endorse adblocking from a privacy/autonomy perspective similar to the opening paragraph of the uBlock Origin manifesto [1].
What minor controversy I have seen is a small minority that argue either 1. You shouldn't pay for YT Premium because it enables user-hostile business practices or 2. You shouldn't use ad-block because it's effectively "stealing."
Quite a few of those threads have a sizable contingent of people who say they would pay for YT Premium if it removed all ads but since it only removes ads that YouTube puts in the videos they will still see any endorsements or promotions of sponsor's products that were put in by the content creator it doesn't really work.
manwe150 4 hours ago [-]
Many people I know are not technical enough to know about ad blockers, and refuse to admit to themselves how much YT they watch—eg that they would get value from either blocking ads or paying—when I mention the options
wolttam 4 hours ago [-]
I'd pay for YT premium in a heartbeat if they let me tune the platform to my needs: disable all recommends, disable all comments, allow only a whitelisted set of channels. That would be a "take my money" moment.
MrWiffles 6 hours ago [-]
Privacy rights. Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk, so I’ll not willingly reward this behavior.
gruez 5 hours ago [-]
>Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk
Is this a prediction about what might happen or a claim about what's happening right now? Also, there's plenty of reasons to object to government/adtech surveillance, but "youtube ads are going to help ICE deport people" is probably the worse examples that I can think of.
JohnFen 4 hours ago [-]
DHS has been very upfront about the fact that they purchase pretty much all the data they can get, including from ad networks, in order to keeps records on and track people.
Ferret7446 5 hours ago [-]
Seems like the opposite? You can choose to either have ads or a paid subscription service. If you don't choose premium then you are implicitly supporting the "ad surveillance"
flykespice 5 hours ago [-]
How much do you use Google services on your daily life (Google search, Gmail, Google pay..)?
You might have unaware handed more your personal info them than you know
mrguyorama 6 hours ago [-]
Because Google does not build a platform that is beneficial to the creators who make actually good and productive and positive content.
I don't want give Google money for building a Mr Beast platform. I want the stuff Nebula does.
So I pay for Nebula.
Paying an advertising company to not show you ads doesn't make that company not an advertising company, and the problem is being an advertising company. It's corrosive to society and people.
gonzalohm 5 hours ago [-]
I also pay for Nebula. I wish more content creators moved to that platform. It's so annoying to deal with YouTube's homepage to find the videos of the creators that are not in Nebula
clpm4j 5 hours ago [-]
YT Premium is my favorite monthly subscription - probably the highest value software that I pay for.
Nevermark 5 hours ago [-]
It is very high value.
I would be happy to pay even more for an experience without AI slop masquerading as something else, and obviously fake or misleading news sources.
If Youtube or Meta spent a fraction of the effort identifying credibility as they do predicting user likes, they could do a passable job. I would especially like credible sources that express coherent viewpoints less correlated with mine.
Perhaps even a quality setting or settings so i could set my own thresholds of credible information and non-trivial entertainment.
Premium Quality Tier. Ad and Shit Free.
Like a beautiful statue in a simple block of marble, it is in there.
pirates 6 hours ago [-]
> So I never see any ads
> helps me skip in-content ads
So you get ads still! Whether or not they are from YouTube or the video creator is irrelevant. I thought paying was supposed to supplant needing to advertise to me during the actual video.
vizzier 6 hours ago [-]
Alas, tubers feel the need to add sponsorships these days through either greed or reduced google revenue. Premiums "skip frequently skipped section" is about as easy as it can be to skip over them without blocking them entirely, short of using sponsorblock.
I'm not sure where the legality lies with them being able to skip it automatically if you're a premium user, I'd imagine their uploaders wouldn't be happy though.
yifanl 6 hours ago [-]
You think explicitly highlighting that you're in the market segment that's happy to pay for online services will mean you will never see paid ads for online services again?
SirFatty 5 hours ago [-]
YouTube specifically? Yes.
downboots 5 hours ago [-]
It's a ransom.
YCpedohaven 6 hours ago [-]
I pay for YT premium, but it’s less because of the ads, and more because of the stupid restriction of not being allowed background play if my phone is locked.
rkagerer 6 hours ago [-]
Once upon a time we paid for features, instead of paying to remove inbuilt annoyances.
(In a sense, this is getting too close to paying a bully to stop harassing you).
ryankrage77 6 hours ago [-]
This used to work for free, they went out of their way to disable it so they could charge for it.
Havoc 6 hours ago [-]
Not controversial per se but it’ll go the same way as Netflix - once it’s got adoption they’ll crank enshitification up to 11
tzs 2 hours ago [-]
Note that this is talking about ads when you watch via their TV app, not when you watch on your computer in an ordinary browser.
The ad experience in the browser is interesting. I've watched several videos today withnoadblocking and have only seen a couple of ads which were skippable after 5 seconds.
For the last year I've doing this on YouTube.
• I start the day with ad blocking turned off.
• As long as all the ads I get are skippable after 5 seconds, and any ads that are not pre-roll ads are not too close to the previous ad, I just skip and my annoyance level stays low. I get annoyed if the ads during the content are not well spread out.
• If they put in a non-skippable ad but it is close to 5 seconds (6 seconds and 15 seconds seem to be the two shortest lengths for non-skippable ads) and it is not followed immediately by another ad I treat it like a 5 second skippable ad.
• If a 6 second non-skippable ad is followed immediately by a skippable after 5 seconds ad, my annoyance level rises some. If they only do this a couple times in a day I'll probably let it slide.
• Any 15 second or more non-skippable ad raises my annoyance level a lot.
• If my annoyance level gets too high, by either (1) a 15+ second non-skippable ad or (2) too many of those things that are annoying but not as annoying then ad blocking gets turned on any open YouTube tabs get refreshed so it will apply to them.
• Any ad they show me that is actually relevant and useful is not counted when evaluating annoyance level. This only happens rarely.
I haven't kept stats but it definitely feels like over the first couple of months of doing this they changed the ad lengths, intervals, and how often they show me non-skippable ads in a way that avoids annoying me enough to turn on ad blocking. I now sometimes go over a week without turning on the ad blocker.
ducktastic 6 hours ago [-]
They really are unbearable: I use Duck Player primarily to view Youtube, connected via city wifi and every so often, I receive a message saying that youtube thinks I am a bot presumably because they are not getting ad revenue. Of course I have a workaround for this but annoying nonetheless.
ajay-b 6 hours ago [-]
Does anyone have a good study as to how much advertising is too much advertising? There are some content creators on YouTube I enjoy watching but it's an ad every five minutes and it just ruins it all. For some, I've reached the point where I don't bother watching anymore because the ads are just too much. I sympathize with creators wishing to make money, but ... it's just becoming relentless. I'd love to see a study or even better YouTube internal analysis of how much viewers are willing to take before they just say enough.
Night_Thastus 4 hours ago [-]
>0 is too much, in my view.
Ads are a toxic weight on everyone who views them.
I use ad-blocking as much as possible, along with things like SponsorBlock to skip such content within the video itself.
hedora 6 hours ago [-]
On our TV, using the official YT app, it just rapid cycles through the first few seconds of each ad. As far as I can tell, this is part of a Google-operated display fraud scheme.
I wonder how the new standards will impact our user experience.
Will they just halve the length of time each video is run and charge for twice as many impressions? They could also just run the ads in the background (with the video displayed over it + ad audio muted).
rolph 7 hours ago [-]
google is seeing an uptick in viewing with a smartTV, so they think that means family time in the livingroom, thus 70s style TV is the model of the day.
have they considered home office, phones are just too small, and studios where you watch the screen and perform the "how too" from across the room are getting to be a thing [mancaves, shesheds].
i would definately have a curated, edited feed of YTz to a group viewing location, rather than a raw stream.
add-sub-mul-div 6 hours ago [-]
Since 1999 we've had the DVR and commercials have been effectively skippable if you want to avoid them. This is worse than that. Not having the freedom and control to seek through the video stream ("unskippable") was innovated by the streaming takeover.
rolph 5 hours ago [-]
back in the place between 70s-80s we used to identify commercials with an audio compression detector, blank frame detector, generally a device that detects artifacts of the ad process. then we could record on a VCR without ads as we went about our day.
it was a cat and mouse game eventually with programs being salted to spoof ad detection, regulations requireing a broadcaster to have some demarcation between ad and program, and on...
streaming has one fatal flaw, that decides final ownership, and that is eventually, the content is in the clear, in a space accessible to a technichal user, that can be replicated, and fitted with the requirements for a persistent file, and thus "pwnd".
at this point the ad can be snipped out, and is gone.
its a bad model, ads should be part of the content, depictions of product usage, and consumption, as part of the content seemed like an unobtrusive, actually pleasant association, every time ive seen it done, vs some screaming loud volume, shocking switch of subject and mood associated with a product that you dont need, and will subconsciously avoid as a result of the operant conditioning.
xedrac 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe this will help people kick their doom scrolling habit.
downboots 5 hours ago [-]
That's just doom scrolling on a different axis
ray023 5 hours ago [-]
Why are people even so dumb to use TV apps for a fucking TV? Just connect a "computer" to the TV and play YouTube with a mouse and KB and with Brave and Sponsor Block. If they ban adblockers and Sponsor Block there will be AI solutions that let you cut the ads out in the future.
Nobody should use shitty TV apps. It's like more convenient and practical to have some kind of PC like device attached to the TV for 100 other reasons as well. They are feeding this shit only to the dumb mass consumers who have no clue about anything.
"Just pay for YT premium" so that an evil megacorp is using your money against you, no, thanks! Donate to creators you like as directly as they allow it. They are also dumb and let Patreon or whatever suck large percentages off their donations for whatever retarded reason.
Night_Thastus 4 hours ago [-]
Most people don't care. What you're talking about is way more work than 99% of people want to put in. They have a TV, it has a youtube button on it. They click, they watch. Anything else is irrelevant.
michelangelo 5 hours ago [-]
> Why are people even so dumb to use TV apps for a fucking TV?
To address both the arrogant tone and the question itself: because sometimes people don’t have, don’t want to have or cannot use a computer connected to a TV.
Not everyone is a HN commenter with anger issues. Most of times these devices (TVs, streaming sticks and so on…) are used by normal folks that are not comfortable with computers.
UtopiaPunk 2 hours ago [-]
Lmao, this is an extremely HN post. 10/10 on the HN scale.
scblock 2 hours ago [-]
There are already minutes of unskippable ads when watching YouTube on a device like an Apple TV. And they come fast and furious, as bad as or worse than network TV.
And the best part is that many of the ads that show up are literally scams. YouTube has no ad standards that I can tell.
lofaszvanitt 5 hours ago [-]
Good, less youtube, more free time.
Razengan 6 hours ago [-]
Has anyone ever actually purchased anything because you saw an ad for it?
bgun 6 hours ago [-]
If you're asking whether advertising works, there is plenty of science making clear that it does, without fishing for anecdata.
As to whether every company buying ads is making a good investment, mileage may vary - but the blunt answer to your question is that yes, people do purchase things because they saw ads for it, the advertising economy is well understood. Companies like Google whose fortunes rest almost entirely on the known efficacy of advertising are not full of idiots who have never thought about whether or not ads actually work.
"Is an economy based on selling attention ultimately the most beneficial and productive one for all participants" is a separate question, but it's not the question you're asking.
Razengan 5 hours ago [-]
> there is plenty of science making clear that it does
Funded, ran, and interpreted by whom?
I can't remember the last time I bought anything just because of its ad, that I already did not know about or was going to buy anyway, nor I know anyone who did.
In fact, if I see an ad TOO often, it permanently turns me off the product or service.
The whole ads racket seems like a case of an emperor with no clothes at best, and a thin veil for mass surveillance at worst.
dingaling 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is, you don't realise that you did.
One day you'll need to buy something outside your sphere of knowledge; a washing machine, drain cleaner, car tyres, whatever. The seeds of biased selection have already been implanted by years of conditioning.
busterarm 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, specifically because of Youtube videos. Not "ads" specifically but sponsored videos.
So I never see any ads and I feel like I get enough value for what I pay. It even helps me skip in-content ads with a single click.
Most people do not seem to like pay to play, pay to “win”, etc and this falls either very close or in that category.
The long term economics seem questionable to me. Google can always turn up the heat a bit more with ads, charge more for the ads, play more of them, etc when they need to be more profitable. The only way they make more from premium subscribers is charging more and they will lose people each time they do. I guess technically they could make more if premium watchers viewed less content but there’s a pretty hard floor and I suspect the economics of it are much like soda fountains.
I’m afraid ultimately if premium becomes too large of a user base Google would need to turn it into an “ad-lite” experience to increase profits. Then we’re in an even worse place.
I wouldn't hesitate to cancel my subscription and stop using the platform at that point. Life can go on without YouTube.
What minor controversy I have seen is a small minority that argue either 1. You shouldn't pay for YT Premium because it enables user-hostile business practices or 2. You shouldn't use ad-block because it's effectively "stealing."
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/MANIFESTO.md
Is this a prediction about what might happen or a claim about what's happening right now? Also, there's plenty of reasons to object to government/adtech surveillance, but "youtube ads are going to help ICE deport people" is probably the worse examples that I can think of.
You might have unaware handed more your personal info them than you know
I don't want give Google money for building a Mr Beast platform. I want the stuff Nebula does.
So I pay for Nebula.
Paying an advertising company to not show you ads doesn't make that company not an advertising company, and the problem is being an advertising company. It's corrosive to society and people.
I would be happy to pay even more for an experience without AI slop masquerading as something else, and obviously fake or misleading news sources.
If Youtube or Meta spent a fraction of the effort identifying credibility as they do predicting user likes, they could do a passable job. I would especially like credible sources that express coherent viewpoints less correlated with mine.
Perhaps even a quality setting or settings so i could set my own thresholds of credible information and non-trivial entertainment.
Premium Quality Tier. Ad and Shit Free.
Like a beautiful statue in a simple block of marble, it is in there.
> helps me skip in-content ads
So you get ads still! Whether or not they are from YouTube or the video creator is irrelevant. I thought paying was supposed to supplant needing to advertise to me during the actual video.
I'm not sure where the legality lies with them being able to skip it automatically if you're a premium user, I'd imagine their uploaders wouldn't be happy though.
(In a sense, this is getting too close to paying a bully to stop harassing you).
The ad experience in the browser is interesting. I've watched several videos today with no ad blocking and have only seen a couple of ads which were skippable after 5 seconds.
For the last year I've doing this on YouTube.
• I start the day with ad blocking turned off.
• As long as all the ads I get are skippable after 5 seconds, and any ads that are not pre-roll ads are not too close to the previous ad, I just skip and my annoyance level stays low. I get annoyed if the ads during the content are not well spread out.
• If they put in a non-skippable ad but it is close to 5 seconds (6 seconds and 15 seconds seem to be the two shortest lengths for non-skippable ads) and it is not followed immediately by another ad I treat it like a 5 second skippable ad.
• If a 6 second non-skippable ad is followed immediately by a skippable after 5 seconds ad, my annoyance level rises some. If they only do this a couple times in a day I'll probably let it slide.
• Any 15 second or more non-skippable ad raises my annoyance level a lot.
• If my annoyance level gets too high, by either (1) a 15+ second non-skippable ad or (2) too many of those things that are annoying but not as annoying then ad blocking gets turned on any open YouTube tabs get refreshed so it will apply to them.
• Any ad they show me that is actually relevant and useful is not counted when evaluating annoyance level. This only happens rarely.
I haven't kept stats but it definitely feels like over the first couple of months of doing this they changed the ad lengths, intervals, and how often they show me non-skippable ads in a way that avoids annoying me enough to turn on ad blocking. I now sometimes go over a week without turning on the ad blocker.
Ads are a toxic weight on everyone who views them.
I use ad-blocking as much as possible, along with things like SponsorBlock to skip such content within the video itself.
I wonder how the new standards will impact our user experience.
Will they just halve the length of time each video is run and charge for twice as many impressions? They could also just run the ads in the background (with the video displayed over it + ad audio muted).
have they considered home office, phones are just too small, and studios where you watch the screen and perform the "how too" from across the room are getting to be a thing [mancaves, shesheds].
i would definately have a curated, edited feed of YTz to a group viewing location, rather than a raw stream.
it was a cat and mouse game eventually with programs being salted to spoof ad detection, regulations requireing a broadcaster to have some demarcation between ad and program, and on...
streaming has one fatal flaw, that decides final ownership, and that is eventually, the content is in the clear, in a space accessible to a technichal user, that can be replicated, and fitted with the requirements for a persistent file, and thus "pwnd".
at this point the ad can be snipped out, and is gone.
its a bad model, ads should be part of the content, depictions of product usage, and consumption, as part of the content seemed like an unobtrusive, actually pleasant association, every time ive seen it done, vs some screaming loud volume, shocking switch of subject and mood associated with a product that you dont need, and will subconsciously avoid as a result of the operant conditioning.
Nobody should use shitty TV apps. It's like more convenient and practical to have some kind of PC like device attached to the TV for 100 other reasons as well. They are feeding this shit only to the dumb mass consumers who have no clue about anything.
"Just pay for YT premium" so that an evil megacorp is using your money against you, no, thanks! Donate to creators you like as directly as they allow it. They are also dumb and let Patreon or whatever suck large percentages off their donations for whatever retarded reason.
To address both the arrogant tone and the question itself: because sometimes people don’t have, don’t want to have or cannot use a computer connected to a TV.
Not everyone is a HN commenter with anger issues. Most of times these devices (TVs, streaming sticks and so on…) are used by normal folks that are not comfortable with computers.
And the best part is that many of the ads that show up are literally scams. YouTube has no ad standards that I can tell.
As to whether every company buying ads is making a good investment, mileage may vary - but the blunt answer to your question is that yes, people do purchase things because they saw ads for it, the advertising economy is well understood. Companies like Google whose fortunes rest almost entirely on the known efficacy of advertising are not full of idiots who have never thought about whether or not ads actually work.
"Is an economy based on selling attention ultimately the most beneficial and productive one for all participants" is a separate question, but it's not the question you're asking.
Funded, ran, and interpreted by whom?
I can't remember the last time I bought anything just because of its ad, that I already did not know about or was going to buy anyway, nor I know anyone who did.
In fact, if I see an ad TOO often, it permanently turns me off the product or service.
The whole ads racket seems like a case of an emperor with no clothes at best, and a thin veil for mass surveillance at worst.
One day you'll need to buy something outside your sphere of knowledge; a washing machine, drain cleaner, car tyres, whatever. The seeds of biased selection have already been implanted by years of conditioning.