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YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Production, sure. Operational costs, not so much zero. I don't understand how people think video streaming on any scale can be supported without any income. I don't think they're recent pricehike is reasonable, but to think anyone deserves to be able to stream 4k video (albeit low bit rate) without any sort of compensation is beyond me.
I pay for Youtube Premium, because I get a legit way to bypass ads and the creators I watch gets payed more than if I watched ads, but I also use an adblocker pretty much everywhere because they are intrusive and annoying. However I'm not under any illusion that doing so does directly hurt the income of the sites I visit.
People doesn't really seem to understand how costly and difficult it is to offer a service with 99.99% availability.
I mean that it costs them a lot of money? Yeah sure. But how much is that per viewer and per view?
Making a good youtube video can take hours, days and sometimes month, depending on the content and production effort. All of this labor is free for youtube and similiar to reddit i would say it is far exceeding the value provided by the company.
There is no guarantee that your video that took you days to make even gets 10 viewers. Even though, you don't pay anything for YouTube to make it available in different resolutions and to start playing within a second after the viewer pressed play. Also all of that at an service availability of 99.99%.
While there are creators that does quality content there way more junk creators publishing their work on YouTube.
If your argument was valid there would be competitors to YouTube that quality material creators would move to when they got demonitized by bullshit reasons.
Thats the problem with platforms. They tend to form a monopoly.
I'm completely aware of the financial issues YouTube is facing, but they got themselves into this mess (and most other companies as well, who provide a service for "free"). They make users accustomed to a level of service, build a userbase and ride on investments with the expectation that they'll figure out how to make money when they reach mass adoption.
The fact that youtube premium took years to even conceptualize is a massive failure on their part. Or how 1080p+ video wasn't a paid feature to begin with. Making your users get used to a level of service, then making their experience more miserable and selling a solution to the problem they made does not bode well with people who have been on the platform before "things turned to shit".
It also doesn't help that the first course of action was to increase the amount of ads, increase retainment, "enshifficate" the platform in order to increase the time people spend on the site (=more ad revenue). Now I'm at a point that I can't use YouTube without uBlock, sponsorblock, return youtube dislikes and Revanced (includes the latter two extensions for mobile), turning useless features off (or with the case of dislikes, back on) and stopping the bombardment of ads.
Youtube premium would still provide me with a worse experience, so why would I switch? They should figure out how to provide people additional value for their money, and shouldn't have accustomed people to a level of service that they 100% knew wouldn't be sustainable.
The same way Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse manages to stay functioning despite not generating any income other than donations.
Decentralization, open protocols, And many ulturistic tech savy sysadmin voulenteers in a well enough financial position to eat hosting+maintenance cost out of pocket so a social service can be provided for the many.
Peertube is the shining example here, many many many instances exist and many offer unlimited vido upload. Thoe instances work, they are out there, and video streaming from them is acceptable speeds usually. Two instances I've used personally are https://diode.zone and https://spectra.video and they are pretty good IMO
Now that isn't to say peertube is a perfect alternative, federation and decentralized hosting of many instances is its own can of worms. There are probably many Lemmy users who came from the reddit Exodus who still don't know how things work under the hood, nor should they have to. Peertube needs to become more fleshed out with a better user interface. It still works, though.
Just because services cost money to host doesn't necessary mean they need to make a profit to be viable. Only when you try to make a business out of them. The internet allows for individual provide services at cost, as hobbiest or utilitarian endeavors of passion and philosophy.
Most people admittedly dont care about any of that. They want a convinent service without and hassle or bugs on their part, and dont care about much else besides them and their precious entertainment.
The thing about social platforms is that you need users to attract users, its a vicious cycle of popularity. For an alternative service to attract enough users, another popular service needs to screw up royally enough that people start looking and trying alternatives in mass.
Before the reddit exodus Lemmy was mostly home to communist and hard leaning political extremist, people who are rejected by conventional platforms are the first to look for alternatives. Its only when reddit pissed the whole community of people off that Lemmy got enough momentum to attract normal people.
YouTube needs to piss EVERYONE off enough that the most diehard premium subscriber and most of the content creators say FUCK THIS! And they will most likely find peertube or Odessy.
Somehow I just dont see that happening, it feels like at this point people are so addicted to their YouTube that Alphabet could physically print out androids to hunt down every user to fuck them in the ass, and people would still shell out 10/15/30/50$ a month to daddy google.
Damn this got long, sorry.
Tldr: free decentralized video streaming service peertube exist, but currently has no users to attract more users. YouTube needs to fuck up atomically to push enough people to try out alternative services like peertube. Content creators should rely on growing their patreons/donators for money and not meager ad revenue from the streaming service.
The big issue I see with YouTube premium (though I'm a paid subscriber) is that the bitrate is still far too low. Vimeo provided much better quality a decade ago for paid users and so do Nebula, Floatplane and all the other competing sites nowadays