So many corporate bootlickers here, damn.
In the second quarter of 2023, Google’s revenue amounted to over 74.3 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 69.1 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.
But man if we don’t pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
The amount of money they made is entirely meaningless without knowing their spending.
Revenue isn’t profit?
that’s google not youtube though, is it? i think youtube is running at a loss still + in a normal country that shit should have been blasted apart already way too many shit is under google.
I think they have pretty recently finally become profitable thanks to the increased amount of ads. Although you could always make the argument before that the data YouTube provides to Google that allowed their ad and data empire to thrive is invaluable whether YouTube directly profits or not.
why would it be invaluable? I am guessing it’s valuable amd is valued at a very close estimate at least.
Invaluable
adjective
beyond calculable or appraisable value; of inestimable worth; priceless:
the richest country in the world is a normal country regardless of your xenophobia
I’ll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old “influencers” millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they’ve always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of “network decay” for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn’t expect something for nothing, as if we aren’t fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can’t get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It’s morally upright, it’s the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it’s all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it’s worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
While I agree, you shouldn’t underestimate just how fucking cheap astroturfing services are, and how much easier it is to generate astroturfing posts using the plethora of LLMs out in the wild.
I still think it’s silly to think they’re doing that here, but it should be considered.
True, but it doesn’t make sense to astroturf on a site with the tiniest fraction of users, most of which are already critical of mainstream centralized social media. Why worry about doing it here when a single comment on reddit can reach millions of people when lemmy doesn’t even have as many users combined as some of the subs over on reddit.
This guy is a clown, regardless. I had an interaction with him on another thread where he edited his comment to make himself look like he predicted my response lmao. He also refuses to elaborate on some of the good faith response comments from other users because he knows his viewpoint is indefensible.
Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
did you just tey to pre-emptively suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a google paid shill?
Because if so I would like to know where I can apply for my payment from Google.
I think any reasonable person knows by now that if you don’t “pay for a product you sre the product”, everyone knows youtube collects data and sells it and your eyes to advertisers that’s their business model, guess what those servers youtube runs on? aren’t free, as you yourself said, content creators aren’t free, the engineers working on YouTube aren’t free, so your suggestion is that despite this, youtube should still be free and ad/data collection free.
well do tell me, how long do you think youtube will last with your business model?
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I’ve blocked maybe eight people in thirty minutes who are implicitly demanding that corporations create the law.
And one of them immediately down voted you. I wonder why they’re here on Lemmy instead of continuing to support Reddit? They clearly like to be bottoms to corpos.
We must trust our corporate overlords who will use AI to guide us in their right direction.
Everyone I don’t agree with == bootlicker 🙄
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn’t make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It’s a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
But piracy has no impact at all. Pirates never wanted to buy your stuff.
Honestly, there is plenty of stuff I’d pay for but I pirate if it’s difficult to access.
I don’t know, I probably would have paid for at least half the things I pirate if I had to (especially books).
that only applies to p2p torrents where there aren’t infrastructure costs, youtube has infrastructure costs.
grabbing a torrent from the net and downloading it doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’s all volunteers providing their bandwidth for it.
youtube’s bandwidth isn’t free.
Another thing: footage provided em by content creators trains their LLM and it’s poorly paid, everybody seems to have a Patreon these days, every creator that wouldn’t be there if there was no money to be made (via said method and those live donations). So the apparent loss of money is more than compensated by the data usefulness. Then ads came. And they were few and it was fine. Then ads became insufferable. My presence there already guarantees creators output content that Google exploits for their AI. What else do I have to pay?
Let’s say I provide them with useful data with what I watch then. They know my age cos I log in and all my other info from Google services. That’s prolly why unblocked ads on the phone or tablet are always on point.
I don’t think it’s piracy exactly but I fully realize there would not be a huge video site like YouTube without ads or limiting it to paid subscribers.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he’s making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they’re doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he’s repeatedly flaunting credentials that don’t change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
You’re missing the point/s
- What they’re doing is illegal. It has to stop immediately and they have to be held accountable
- What they’re doing is immoral and every barrier we can put up against it is a valid pursuit
- Restricting Google to data held remotely is a good barrier. They shouldn’t be able to help themselves to users local data, and it’s something that most people can understand: the data that is physically within your system is yours alone. They would have to get permission from each user to transfer that data, which is right.
- This legal route commits to personal permissions and is a step to maintaining user data within the country of origin. Far from being a “dead end”, it’s the foundation and beginnings of a sensible policy on data ownership. This far, no further.
the data that is physically within your system is yours alone.
Actually, ALL the data Google has on you is yours. Google do not own the data, neither do reddit, Facebook or anyone else. They merely have a licence.
Personally I think even that is illegal. Contracts require consideration, you exchange x for y, then you have details in the terms and conditions. This is like “come in for free!” and then everything is in the terms and conditions. If you look at insurance, they’re required to have a key facts page to bring to the front the main points from the terms in plain English. The cookie splash screen doesn’t really do this, as it obfuscates just how much data they collect, and is for the most part unenforceable as you can’t see what data they hold. Furthermore, the data they collect isn’t proportional to your use of the website.
The whole thing flies in the face of the core principles of contract law under which all trading is done. They tell us our data has no value and it isn’t worth the hassle of us getting paid, yet they use that data to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world. We might not know how to make use of that data, and you’ll need a lot of other data to build something to sell, but a manufacturer of nuts and bolts doesn’t know how to build a car - yet they still get paid for a portion of the value derived from their product through others’ work, as most of the value comes from what you can do with it. We’re all being robbed, every single one of us, including politicians and lawmakers.
Very good point.
How is it immoral? Is Google morally obligated to provide you with a way to use their service for free? Google wants YouTube to start making money, and I’d guess the alternative is no more YouTube.
Why is everyone so worked up about a huge company wanting to earn even more money, we know this is how it works, and we always knew this was coming. You tried to cheat the system and they’ve had enough.
I think it’s a question of drawing a line between “commercial right” and “public good”.
Mathematical theorems automatically come under public good (because apparently they count as discoveries, which is nonsense - they are constructions), but an artist’s sketch comes under commercial right.
YouTube as a platform is so ubiquitously large, I suspect a lot of people consider it a public good rather than a commercial right. Given there is a large body of educational content, as well as some essential lifesaving content, there is an argument to be made for it. Indeed, even the creative content deserves a platform.
A company that harvests the data of billions, has sold that data without permission for decades, and evades tax like a champion certainly owes a debt of public good.
The actions of Google are not those of a company “seeking their due”, for their due has long since been harvested by their monopolisation of searches, their walked garden appstore, and their use of our data to train their paid AI product.
Honestly if I were a politician I would support legislation restricting permanent bans from major websites from being given out willy-nilly because too many of them are ubiquitous enough to qualify as a public good.
A public good? Like roads, firefighters, etc? You want the government to pay for your Youtube Premium subscription?
Less snarky, if you’re arguing that Youtube has earned a special legal status, a natural consequence is that Google gets to play by a different rulebook from all other competitors. That’s quite a dangerous direction to take.
Your snark was actually closer to the mark than you think.
Let’s say YouTube vanished overnight, what would the impact be? Sarcasm might suggest “we’d all be more productive” but let’s take a deeper look.
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A lot of free courses (or parts thereof) would vanish. (A key resource for poorer learners)
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Most modern tech repair guides would be gone (no machine breakdowns, no guides on fixing errors on old hardware)
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A lot of people’s voices would be silenced (YouTube is an awful platform, but for some people it’s one of the only ones they have)
Seems to me, it would do a lot of public harm. Probably more harm than removing a freeway or closing a fire station.
As for letting Google “play by a different rulebook”, it does so already. The OP has indicated that they’re undertaking an action in an illegal way, and yet no-one much cares to stop them. Yes, they could do the same thing via legal channels, but that’s rather like suggesting there is no difference between threats of violence vs taking someone to court when trying to collect money.
Would you grant an insurance company similar legal indemnity? How would you feel about your local barber peeking in your window and selling what they see? Google has long played by a different rulebook, and thus different expectations are held.
Your arguments would only work if you’d argue for breaking up or nationalizing YouTube.
As long as they are a for-profit company you can’t deny them the right to legally earn money the way they see fit, doesn’t matter how big they are or what other revenue streams they have. Forcing them to offer a service for free is nonsense, and attacking them on a technicality that is probably easily circumvented is just a waste of everybody’s time and money imo.
If we really want to do something about this then we have to break their monopoly, same as any other huge company that’s f*cking with consumers.
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Err, going through threads of conversations on both reddit and lemmy regarding YouTube, one would assume ad free access is the norm and Google even daring to offer Youtube Premium is a bad thing.
It’s all well and good that Google want to make money from my data - but they should be paying me for it. The value of my data isn’t from the data itself, but what can be done with it.
You can’t build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts.
They are. They provide you with a service for your data. It’s called YouTube. And if they don’t have a place to show you ads, the data is useless because no one will use it. It’s a closed loop.
And even if you don’t agree with it, it’s still a company selling a service and it can do whatever it wants to earn money from it. There’s nothing unethical about that.
No, it is not an exchange of data for access to the website. The website is provided completely free, and the data collection is the small print. A normal contract exchanges one thing for another, then the details are in the fine print. If it were an exchange of data for access, then the amount of data they collect would be proportional.
Why? Who made the rules about exchanging data? And it is an exchange of data for a service, it’s just not as obvious as you might want it to be. But nothing comes for free.
Hey I’m not saying I like the big company ethic scathing that’s been going on around the world, but it is how our society currently works.
Why? Who made the rules about exchanging data?
There’s a whole area of legislation called contract law. An exchange of value requires consideration, ie payment. They invite you in for free, then take your data without consideration. In particular, you only have use of the website while you visit it and so long as they host it in that current form, but they claim rights to your data in perpetuity. They have no obligation to continue hosting the website, because that is a separate arrangement to the data collection.
It’s how things have been going so far, but the law always takes a long time to catch up with new innovation. The law is not always right or comprehensive, which is why it has a facility to be changed. The GDPR cookie splash screen was the first real attempt at this, it falls well short but if everything works as it should then further laws should come.
Frankly though, I think what should happen is that businesses should be allowed to continue collecting data as they are, but their raw dataset should be publicly available for a small nominal fee. This way Google et al can still keep their proprietary data processing magic to themselves, but everyone can make use of the datasets and drive competition. It also gives people a reasonable opportunity to actually see their data, and act accordingly.
Businesses will complain about giving away “their” data, but the reality is that the data belongs to the users and the business merely has a licence. The cat is already out of the bag and it’s not practicable to put it back in, so the best choice is to embrace it openly.
Ah yeah the kind of hullabaloo that makes everyone accept cookies on every single website ;)
shoutout to Consent-O-Matic! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
It’s not even clear to me that the mechanism they’re using today is problematic. I don’t know what it is, but the author seems to think they do but aren’t sharing details beyond “trust me bro”. I agree that some kind of inspection-based detection might run afoul of the law, but I don’t see why that’s necessary. All you need to know is that the client is requesting videos without any of the ad requests making it through, which is entirely server-side.
Exactly.
But people are hell bent on “Google doing this, bad”.
Ha ha no. Google needs you more than you need google.
> but but but the ads moneh
If google made so much money from ads, they wouldn’t care if you watched it at all. They want your consumerist data and they can’t get it with adblock.
> but but but muh creators
Most major creators have complained about google shafting them with schizo rules about monetization. The biggers ones have started to sell merch and use other platforms as insurance. You watching those ads gives google more benefits than the creators.
Youtube is NOT essential. You can live without youtube. Simply follow the creators you like on other platforms. If you’re a creator, time to diversify your platform. The iceberg is sighted and it’s time to jump ship.
The guy really exudes “don’t you know who I am?” energy. Which is a shame since it detracts from the discussion.
Won’t cost them anything near weeks of dev time. They can just write it into their terms of service and prompt you to re-accept those next time you access the site.
Afaik you can’t bypass laws and regulations with ToS
Definetly not if you are not registered. And likely if you are not logged in. This is EU, not US.
And in the war you probably also sided with the Nazis because ‘well they invaded already, might as well give up’
Everyday I think the European Union for preventing the internet from being worse than it could be. It’s sad that back when the internet was a cesspool was so far the best age for it. Normies really do ruin everything
The same EU that threaten E2EE?
Yes, the same EU. The fact that it’s considering some poor choices doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s actions thus far have been positive and deserve appreciation. Real Life doesn’t split people neatly into heroes and villains.
Don’t be an asshole and blame regular people for shit like this. This is because of big tech
Actually I will, because big Tech used to be on the level because they knew they would be called out for fuckery. Then Facebook brought the Baby Boomers online and it was the Eternal September on steroids.
Those are still actions made by the tech companies. Blaming people for not complaining enough is not the best take on this. Just shifts the blame to the public, not to the people who made those decisions in the first place
Strictly speaking, management at Big Tech are all normies and they make the decisions.
I think the point is solid: non-tech-people sell capabilities to other non-tech-people to make money, and this forms a feedback loop and drives direction. A non-big-tech world is wildly different because it’s more like tech people building an environment for doing things with other tech people.
Management of big tech are excessively rich assholes. The rich, by the very definition, do not fall into the category of “normal people”
Strictly speaking, that’s nonsense. Is everyone that’s not you a normie? Or is normie a ‘normal person’, which then absolutely does not include rich managers of big tech companies?
Really strange point to make, man.
The normies support big tech, they love it. They probably work for big tech, or wish they did, or at least imagine themselves as the next Elon Musk.
Touch grass bud.
“Don’t be an asshole”? As a response to a short three sentence statement where no one was an asshole…
I think you’re the fucking asshole regardless of how much blame “big tech” and corporations in general bare here.
Slow the fuck down.
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Every tech article I read nowadays I feel like has the appendix, “which is illegal in the EU.” Lol
The only thing still preventing mayhem along with California
Seriously. Everything causes cancer which has the unfortunate effect of dulling the fear response but it is good to know. If you want to sell your product in California, which is where silicon valley is, you need to observe their safety standards.
And thank the EU we might actually get right to repair.
Elon can block EU for Twitter if he wants to but it’s probably going to cost him even more.
Fuck yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. California is the only reason we don’t have products giving insta-cancer ect.
Cool, so YouTube will start putting pop ups that require you to consent to the detection in order to watch videos. That’s what everyone did with the whole cookies thing when that was determined to be illegal without consent.
Nothing more fun than having to go through some websites shitty settings to toggle everything off.
Still a curveball. Collecting your data and having to say ot to your face are not the same.
A lot of the cookie notifications can’t collect data until you accept them (or follow their annoying “opt-out” workflow). If you install UBlock Origin and go to its settings > ‘Filter lists’ and enable the “EasyList - Cookie Notices” you can block a lot of cookies. If they can never nag you and you never opt in, assuming they’re following the law, you shouldn’t be tracked.
I only just posted a meme about the EU flooring companies for going against their regulations. It was my first post too :)
I’d really like to add YouTube to it. Godspeed.
The only government actually doing shit. *Also, California
Another three cheers for the EU! 🇪🇺🍻🥂
FUCK YEAHHHHHHHH. YOUTUBE IS FUCKED LMAOOOOOOOOOOOO
Don’t ask how, but my dad found out that at least with Ublock, cleaning the cache in the addon makes it bypass the stupid pop-up.
Because they updated their filters so you have to clear the old cached filters
I am not paying for Premium again until they bring the dislike button back.
It was pathetic for them to hide away this button with its statistics. Honestly it’s an valuable tool.
Too many big companies got their feefees hurtied because we downthumbered their stupid announcements. Think of them for once 😭
UP RYD!
As if it made any real difference while we had it…
Shouldn’t have been paying for it in the first place.
Not that the social media corps have ever given a shit.
Very much not true.
The app Threads from Meta had to be rewritten due to its extensive tracking in the US market. Not legal in the EU.
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How is YouTube detecting adblockers? Wouldn’t it be with the information the user’s browser is already passing to them?
It could check if the ad is present in Dom maybe?
Using javascript ofc.It checks if ads successfully loaded and showed to user if not showing banner to u.
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The only thing Google needs to do now to make it legal is to force a prompt asking for your consent where if you disagree you are completely blocked off from the site.
GDPR does not allow this.
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With gdpr that’s not allowed, either you don’t provide the site at all or you provide the site whether the user consents or not
uBlock Origin has no issues with blocking ads.
I get trying to fight it via legal means, but it is a solved problem.
