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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Considering those are people who only cost them bandwidth and provide nothing in return, that might actually be a net positive for their bottom line.
'Those people' are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.
They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.
They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.
Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.
Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn't actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn't interact with those ads.
In other words (as I agree with you): they don't generate direct profit for YouTube, but they generate value, or the long-term ability to generate profit.
And a long-term stable business should focus first and foremost on its value, because predatory profiting (i.e. profit obtained in a way that reduces the platform's value) doesn't last very long.
You're relying on a lot of assumptions, which even if true, still doesn't mean that the math works out in a way that means allowing ad-blocking users makes sense.
Netflix doesn't need a "healthy community" for people to use the platform. Shows do perfectly fine letting all the talking happen on other social media.
AND you're assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all, which with how hard they push premium, definitely isn't the case.
No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn't matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.
Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.
Further, this isn't a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don't want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.
Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.
This claim is opposite to their actual current behavior. This isn't a case where they made their ad-blocking slightly more effective, they added it to the terms of service. They changed their stance legally. To use ad-blocking on yt, is now legally the same as using cheats in competitive games. Which game publishers have sued over.
Blocking ad-blocking is not "trivial" from the software side, the arms race has made the work of both sides incredibly complex in some cases. It's "trivial" to block the video if the ad isn't served just as it is "trivial" to have the ad-blocker pretend to watch it if that's the requirement.
It's fairly clear to me, that YT has decided that whatever losses this incurs, outweighs the benefits. And I tend to agree. YT's business model never made sense, not after they began allowing basically infinite uploads.
YT doesn't charge for all the things that actually cost it money, no-one pays them to store the content no-one watches from ten years ago, or even six months ago. The rate at which their expenses grow is not coupled to the rate at which they charge. In fact, their income is constant, while their expenses have the potential to be exponential.
Compare that to Netflix, which has a fixed catalogue that they curate, and doesn't grow out of the blue as users throw more at their servers to ingest. And they are in a downturn, with subscribing users!
Even targeted ads stop working once an individual gets used to them, ad-based revenue only works for a while, per customer. It only works long-term on a subset of people, which isn't lucrative, nor ethical. That modern platforms are disproportionately subsidized by their most gullible users is a disgusting reality.
That makes data-mining and targeted advertising a huge business, but insufficient for running something like YT. Because it, is an even bigger business, one that has included all the people you can't advertise to. Streaming doesn't do "economies of scale" the way physical products do, servers and bandwidth don't magically become cheaper the more you buy. In fact in recent years the opposite has often been true.
YT will never make enough with ads. The math simply doesn't work out. I am very skeptical that it makes sense for YT to "allow" ad-blocking to "spread the message" of their product. If anything, to become solvent, YT needs to deliberately downsize their audience.
To grow and form a network, can be left to the communities that form around channels.
This comment is the equivalent of some guy telling you that you'll be paid in exposure and that the exposure is going to be worth way more than money in the long run, just trust me bro.
Yes, probably. But there are alternatives to circumvent their current restrictions and I think there will always be. If you add those methods, maybe the balance goes the other way around. For example, I'd go the Freetube way (invidious) instead. If they keep investing on preventing me to use Invidious, is it worth it for them? We will see.
If bandwidth was the problem, then they should allow Android systems to switch from video to audio-only when the screen is off or they could limit the resolution and fps to those using adblockers, without denying access to view. People using Firefox+uBlock already made a choice to not be their "clients". At this point they should just count their blessings, which are still a lot, and let Firefox+uBlock users be or just close their pitty platform to their users as Facebook does. It's here where their dilemma lives, are they gonna be another Facebook?