Youtube Ads used to be for pizza restaurants and lawnmowers.
Now they want me to join a fucking cult that worships alphabeta-blocking milkshakes.
As a long-time user hearing YouTube wants to play ads when I pause a video
Submitted 7 months ago by GrymEdm@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dd28be5e-cfeb-4457-aaa6-5c9a1eaa9610.jpeg
Comments
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 7 months ago
DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 7 months ago
I was getting ads for a very blatant scam. They used extremely well known buzzwords for it too, it’s actually embarrassing that it could have passed even automated screening.
ICastFist@programming.dev 7 months ago
Sometimes I think they don’t even have an automated screening. Instagram/Facebook sure as fuck don’t.
LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Please tell me about this cult that worships alphabeta-blocking milkshakes. Sounds about intriguing.
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 7 months ago
Good point. The ad quality has dropped by so much, hard to imagine ads this bad are possible. Really shitty mobile games are a huge part of that advertisement. A lot of stuff that just seems scam my too.
volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I constantly see an ad by zeiss (which is a german company but they’re in california) and I don’t even know what they produce but I swear to God I’ll never get a Zeiss product. An acquaintance worked with them for a while and I have trouble taking him seriously now. (they’re pretty american in that way but they’re also very german)
I fucking hate zeiss after this ad.
MehBlah@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I watch one set of ads. As soon as the second ad starts I download the video and fuck youtube.
theshonen8899@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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 forgets, 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.
joneskind@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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?
spongebue@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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”
theshonen8899@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
daniskarma@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
ICastFist@programming.dev 7 months ago
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.
LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
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.
Aux@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Sounds like the public library system should host the peoples videos as a service, not for profit.
joneskind@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
papertowels@lemmy.one 7 months ago
Idk about your system, but mine is currently facing a massive budget cut
hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Hence why we need to remake the internet.
sebinspace@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Good luck with that :thumbsup:
PugJesus@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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 seem to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”
Aux@lemmy.world 7 months ago
No one will ever pay for services like YouTube. Thus ads is the only way.
Moneo@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 7 months ago
Similar story here, except I just stopped using YouTube.
Lemmy’s piping bots help with that.moon@lemmy.cafe 7 months ago
Wow, grandstanding over adblockers
AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Capitalists don’t care about making quality products/services.
They care about squeezing more profit out of you as time goes on.
Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com 7 months ago
Bad capitalists, yes. The trend of “maximize profit this quarter at the expense of everything else” is a recent (meaning a few decades old) idea.
Once upon a time the boards of publicly traded companies could think long term and sacrifice short term gains without getting fired by shareholders. When a large firm prioritizes long term success efficiency still matters but so do things like building reputation through quality and retaining talent - the things sorely missing from publicly traded firms today.
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The commodification of securities has been one of the most ruinous trends in human history.
unreasonabro@lemmy.world 7 months ago
There are only bad capitalists now, the good ones have been eaten.
eezeebee@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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.
ShadowCatEXE@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I was okay with giving the recovering alcoholic just a small drink but this, I can’t abide.
halvar@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I’m not here to defend the soulles 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.
sebinspace@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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”
orcrist@lemm.ee 7 months ago
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.
halvar@lemm.ee 7 months ago
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.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
jj4211@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 7 months ago
I accidentally watched a YouTube video on a browser without blocking. It started with an ad. I thought I’d just endure it this time. Then another ad. OK, just this time then. Suddenly, another ad in the middle of the video. I gave up. Who’d have the patience to sit through this?
Then there’s Google’s habit of completely ignoring the browser’s language settings so I have to sit though ads I don’t even understand.
spikederailed@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Then there’s Google’s habit of completely ignoring the browser’s language settings so I have to sit though ads I don’t even understand
I used to occasionally watch YouTube on my lunch break when I would go into the office. I loved getting ads in Spanish, the office was in Greenville,SC not a large Spanish native population. I have premium on my account but don’t like signing in personal account on work machines.
rasakaf679@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Ad blocker?
bane_killgrind@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
That is actually ideal
I had to tailor my do not recommend and not interested in this subject clicks until I was left with the one advertiser that I’m actually interested in, and that’s basically low voltage communication mux devices…
Belastend@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That feature still works for you? I used to be able to skip ads on the ad by blocking them. Now the ad just finishes playing AND pops up again during the next ad break.
volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 7 months ago
What I think is so unfair is that if I actually sit through one ad I don’t get rewarded and fast forwarded to the video, no. I’ll get a second ad that, if I am lucky, I can skip after 5 additional seconds. Or it’s an unskippable one. That’s not fair. I could have skipped the first one but I gave you that, I gave you that time of my life, now give me something back!
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
That, and the absolute curbstomping of creativity through their copyright enforcement methods has gutted the core of a once great service. We are simply watching this thing shamble on to find a place to die: like a heart-shot elk bounding off into the bushes
GrymEdm@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That’s an unexpectedly poetic and melancholic way of portraying some lamentable decisions.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
I have a lot of appreciation for writing, and do a lot of it myself (for reports).
drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Was YouTube ever profitable?
jose1324@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Fuck YT, but bad meme. YouTube has never been profitable
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 7 months ago
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.
theangryseal@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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 and blocker.
I can’t fucking stand it.
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.
LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
copd@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Objectively wrong.
YouTube could not be profitable showing one quick ad per video, especially if it’s longer content.
Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
You should consider using something that is open source and self hosted. Peertube right?
Jourei@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Passively?? Video streaming is anything but passive income.
Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 7 months ago
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
jaschen@lemm.ee 7 months ago
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.
Son_of_dad@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
Senokir@lemmy.world 7 months ago
As someone that has used ad blockers for just about as long as I have been able to, I would like to think that this is true. However, I’m not entirely sure that it is. I’ve heard that a surprising percentage of people just don’t even know that ad blockers exist. If that’s the case then they may be very well aware of what is happening. (Using made up numbers for the sake of argument since I don’t have real numbers) Like if only 5% of users use ad blockers and doubling the number of ads they show only brings that to 10% then it is certainly worth it financially. I doubt that if you were to graph that curve it would be linear - there is certainly a point where you inundate users with so many ads that even non-technical people will start learning about ad blockers. Regardless of what the real numbers are, I would be very surprised if they are making decisions this big without at least being aware of what those numbers might be. And if they can make a small amount of money indefinitely but they have evidence to suggest that they can make even more money also indefinitely then the financial motivation is obvious. Not all infinities are the same size.
LostWon@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
I was already blocking ads since long ago, so what really bugs me now is the heavily degraded and incredibly off-putting search results these days. (Fixed that godawful UI change right away too, and I’m just not over having to use an outside search engine for accurate results.)
TacticsConsort@yiffit.net 7 months ago
Adblock is a godsend.
Although I actually use Invidious for most videos these days. The only things Youtube has going for it are a decent autoplay function and a professional maintenance team. Invidious has things like ‘not aggressively selling my preferences to every algorithm under the fucking sun’ and ‘a functioning search bar’ and ‘not actively fighting against adblockers’
speaker_hat@lemmy.one 7 months ago
I also felt like lately there are too much ads on videos.
YouTube Ads alone yielded $31B profit for Google in 2023.
YouTube Ads is not going to disappear, unfortunately.
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The tears of people subsidizing my having never watched an ad (by having premium) fuels me for this week. Bring on the disagreement, but this is going to be a hard week, I’m going to listen to 2-3 hours of YouTube a day, and never have to pay attention to it to skip an ad. And my cats will listen to it ad free all day when I’m not at home.
Same with the dozen podcasts I listen regularly.
ninpnin@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
I don’t really see too many ads as I use Adblock, but on mobile they seem to creep in more and more ads every year.
michel@friend.ketterle.ch 7 months ago
cumskin_genocide@lemm.ee 7 months ago
If you don’t like ads then don’t watch YouTube.
JoShmoe@ani.social 7 months ago
Refresh, refresh, refresh…
nicerdicer2@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
**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 an 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.
tjhart85@kbin.social 7 months ago
Same with Google's ads in general. For a long time they were whitelisted by default on just about every adblock list out there because they were so unobtrusive it didn't make sense to bother blocking them, especially when you compared them to the other ads that were common at the time. They were also generally relevant ads, so people actually did click on them and use them since it actually related to the thing they were searching for.
They're obviously more profitable now, but you have to wonder by how much and if they'd be a more trusted company today (and what's that worth monetarily) if they hadn't gone down this race to the bottom.
Twitches@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Instead I’m putting great energy to get away from Google, along with a lot of other people
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
We are an insignificant amount. Most people likely don’t even know how to change the default search engine on their phones.
Gigasser@lemmy.world 7 months ago
To do that effectively, you’d have to make a popular movement for popular big name YouTubers to move away from YouTube and to some other site. Very hard.
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I tried Stadia. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I played Cyberpunk mainly and didn’t have 90% of the problems that other players had. It was very enjoyable.
I likely wouldn’t sign up for another similar service simply because now I have a library on my Steam Deck (purchased with the Stadia refund) and that’s how I’m used to playing at this point. But it sure was a nice service while it lasted. I thought they were selling it to someone but I guess it didn’t end up happening.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
You’re right, and now I’m dreading having to change my email address again after nearly 20 years. This one lasted a lot longer than the Hotmail account.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
The thing is, “trust” is hard to put on a balance sheet, and is also hard to make a KPI (Key Performance Indicators are an google innovation to help execs and c-suites feel better about the fact that the don’t do much real work) around, since it’s not really quantifiable in a traditional sense.
AeroLemming@lemm.ee 7 months ago
My concern is that this race to the bottom is so that they can intentionally become unsustainable due to ad blockers. From there, they may be able to get Congress to ban ad blocking altogether.
tjhart85@kbin.social 7 months ago
I, personally, don't see that happening, but I can easily imagine them making it a TOS violation to use adblock and then killing your account if you continue to do so :-/