I’m okay with seeing an acceptable level of advertisement. Content creators have ad reads within their videos which are skippable, and they’ve resorted to that because YouTube doesn’t pay very well. It used to be that you’d get a short ad at the start of every video or two, and maybe another short ad per 7 minutes or so. Now, it’s pretty common for every video to have at least 20 seconds of ad before starting and another 10-30 seconds of ad every 3-5 minutes or so. I like watching on my PS5 while doing chores, so I’m subject to all of these ads. I actually have fully abandoned videos halfway in because of ads that were 60 seconds before I would have the option to “skip” the ad.
I pay for enough things in my life that I was okay with the trade-off of the ads on YouTube. Now, it’s (no joke) about 5 minutes of ads interrupting a 20 minute video, and there’s usually a 2 minute ad read within that 20 minute video, so really 7 minutes of ads per 18 minutes of content. But it’s not really 18 minutes of content because there’s an intro, an outro, and a “remember to like, comment, subscribe, and smash that bell” bullshit too. It’s roughly 2:1 ratio of actual content to ads and fluff. I’m not fucking paying to take it from 2:1 to 3:1 and they can eat my entire asshole for even suggesting such a thing. Maybe instead of trying to hold eyeballs ransom with the choice of either subscription payments or and overabundance of ads, they should charge for uploading videos to their servers. Sound like a terrible idea? Then I’m sure they’ll do it within 5 years. Because fuck everybody, that’s why.
Yep. Google treats their service like television, but it’s not television. We all watch the videos on computers and computers are owned by users and each user gets to decide what their computer does, full stop.
The ad model for youtube will always be circumvented by the fact that our computers can run whatever code we want it to (despite Microsoft’s and Apple’s efforts). If that means that youtube goes subscription only, so be it. If that means youtube can’t sustain itself as a business with ad revenue, then so be it. It would mean that decentralized alternatives gain popularity and it would most likely be to the benefit of everyone who isn’t a corporation.
Youtube has a stranglehold on creativity, open speech, and fair use. Youtube will demonetize a video for saying too many swear words. They’ll demonetize or restrict a video for talking about non-sexual lgbt content. They’ll take down legal and legitimate videos for copyright infringement even though it’s fair use.
Youtube is bad for creators and it’s bad for users.