So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they’re finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren’t you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google’s monopoly! /s
i think people may have missed that you’re not serious
The problem with pretending to be a dumbass on the Internet, is it’s almost impossible to outdo the professionals.
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It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.
The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.
Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.
So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.
This is a good question.
Great, now it’s Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. <clickPause> ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
no because of sec 230 and publisher rights, they were still directly serving them before, the only difference now is that it’s tied into the video stream directly, rather than broken out as a second one.
In the past they have always said that they aren’t transmitting the content and so it’s the responsibility of the transmitter of the data. Now the content at least appears to be coming from youtube not the advertisers. So I’m curious if that’s enough to make it fall under section 230 which would require that they make a good faith effort to remove “objectionable” content.
legally that’s the same as far as courts care.
The only thing that would change this is a ruling on advertiser responsibility. Or something tangentially related that would force them to properly regulate ads for example.
Ultimately i’m guessing unless youtube rolls their own in home ads, instead of allowing other advertising agencies to run their ads on youtube, it simply wouldn’t apply here.
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
“Line go up” is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
All time high all time!
Machines could be doing all the work. We could have clean energy , air ,water and food and shelter for all…
If everyone were a paying subscriber we could actually do all those things. No one wants to be ad supported, including the people at YT. But there are bills to pay.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small
protection paymentsubscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations.
That’s fine. No one needs you to be.
If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
What are those? No, really, this is the crux here. The whole rest of your comment is about growth capitalism generally, and I agree it sucks in many ways. But until you can reasonably provide a working alternative to property ownership, we will continue to have things like rent and lending. Investment is a form of lending. And yes YT shareholders don’t give a shit about anything but more and more and MORE insane profit. Because to succeed, a company has to not only profit but profit above expectation, rewarding the speculative investments others have made in them.
It’s foolish though to think that YT’s management are the source of this desire for profit. It’s their shareholders. YT really want to deliver the best product while making a good living, and their staff are also minor shareholders to some extent.
But your problem is capitalism. And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism, then sheeit you are late to the game and I won’t wait up to hear what your alternative suggestions are going to be. I’ll just point out that you waved your hand at that subject and then moved on like we wouldn’t notice.
And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,
I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.
As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.
The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.
They’d have more paying subscribers if they didn’t charge more than Netflix for what amounts to user-generated content that they’re getting for free.
They’re not getting it for free. They pay video creators. And they know that the more they can pay them, the more and better content they will get.
And with any product pricing, there is always a balance between charging less to get more customers, or charging more to get more money per customer.
I’m pretty sure YouTube knows more about how to price their service than any of us.
Thy take as much as they can get and pay as little as they can, using AI for both:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
Quasi-Monopoly makes services worse for everyone!
Everyone in every aspect of this economy tries to get the most while paying the least. I swear people in here are bitching about absolute economic basics that they themselves are guilty of.
If you hate monopolies, go pay for Nebula and Curiosity stream like I do.
I do pay for Nebula, it is not the Solution to our Problem. We need regulation.
They’re not getting it for free. They pay video creators. And they know that the more they can pay them, the more and better content they will get.
barely, most of that payment is from premium subscribers and memberships, people who spend their own money on this, youtube gives them a share of the ads, sure, but ads are basically a fraction of the majority of most youtuber incomes these days.
It used to be free, it’s not like the majority of YouTube users voted yes to google takeover.
It’s not like YT is a democracy LOL
And YT was never free. It has had ads from the beginning. Perhaps not its very first months as a startup but those were supported by its seed investment capital so obviously a special and finite circumstance.
YT is ad supported. It always had been. Free services need to make money somehow and ads are one way. It is baffling watching people realize this for the first time because they’ve been shielded by their ad blocker for years, but dude, here outside that little bubble, in the real world, this is how things work.
Ads give more profit than subscriptions, since if you would adjust subscription price to match ad income, too less people would buy it at that price.
Source: Netflix and Disney Ad-supported tier analysis.
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They get loads in governments tax breaks and they data mine the fuck out of us so fuck them and their ads.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/19/social-media-companies-surveillance-ftc
I’ll continue to block them as long as we can and then move on to something else if we can’t. By paying you are just rewarding this exploitative behavior.
If you simply must pay for something then donate it to a charity instead. These companies do not need your money.
I did $390 in charitable giving last month and paid $23 for YT Premium. My priorities are just fine so please don’t lecture me on how to spend my money.
ah yes all you have to do is spend like 100 USD yearly, ever year, and pay for features you don’t want, just so youtube can maybe stop posting ads.
It’s not a “maybe” for me. I haven’t seen a YT ad in years. That’s Premium.
that’s great, how long until you think youtube makes a new premium tier that starts showing ads?
Or that one notable bug where premium shows you ads.
my point is that there is no guarantee in the quality of the service, they have no legal requirements for it (here in murica at least)
I have no thoughts on the hypothetical of what if YT starts showing ads on Premium.
I’m using lemmy right now and it’s not ad supported and I’m not the product.
It’s always weird to me when people post on lemmy and just assert something that implies lemmy is impossible, bro your using it right now!
LOL I donate to my instance, “bro.” Lemmy costs money. You’re just freeloading for the moment.
yeah, the admin of the instance chose to do so, they often accept donations, so you can stuff money there if you feel like it.
I’m not getting a “free lunch” the instance admin is giving me a free lunch at their own expense, and being compensated in other manners.
I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It’s only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
[Enshittification intensifies]
Honestly, I’ve kind of always wondered why they didn’t just do this. It’s always seemed like the obvious thing to me.
I mean, I hope it doesn’t work, because screw Google, but I’m still surprised it took them this long to try it.
Because it’s much more expensive. What they’re talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.
This isn’t how YouTube has streamed videos for many, many years.
Most video and live streams work by serving a sequence of small self-contained video files (often in the 1-5s range). Sometimes audio is also separate files (avoids duplication as you often use the same audio for all video qualities as well as enables audio-only streaming). This is done for a few reasons but primarily to allow quite seamless switching between quality levels on-the-fly.
Inserting ads in a stream like this is trivial. You just add a few ad chunks between the regular video chunks. The only real complication is that the ad needs to start at a chunk boundary. (And if you want it to be hard to detect you probably want the length of the ad to be a multiple of the regular chunk size). There is no re-encoding or other processing required at all. Just update the “playlist” (the list of chunks in the video) and the player will play the ad without knowing that it is “different” from the rest of the chunks.
It wouldn’t cost any CPU with custom software that Google can afford to write. The video is streamed by delivering blocks of data from drives where the data isn’t contiguous. It’s split across multiple drives on multiple servers. Video files are made of key frames and P frames and B in between the key frames. Splicing at key frames need no processing. The video server when sending the next block only needs a change to send blocks based on key frames. It can then inject ads without any CPU overhead.
Wouldn’t it still need overhead to chose those blocks and send them instead of the video? Especially if they’re also trying to do it in a way that prevents the user from just hitting the “skip 10 seconds” button like they might if it was served as part of the regular video.
It has to know which blocks to chose to get the next part of the file anyway. Except the next part of the file is an ad. So yes there is overhead but not for the video stream server. It doesn’t need to re encode the video. It’s not any more taxing than adding the non skip ads at the beginning that they already do.
Compared to the cost of reencoding the video (or even segments of it) it would be basically nothing, though.
You’re forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn’t designed to do this
They’re already appending ads to the front of the video. Instead of appending an ad at key frame 1 they append the ad at key frame 30,000.
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Yeah, I’ve thought the same. It’s like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.
I also wondered why they didn’t do this, but I think it’s tricky because the ad that gets inserted might need to be selected right at the moment of insertion. That could complicate weaving it into the video itself. But I guess they finally found a way to do it.
If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I’d probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.
Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).
I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
I’d prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don’t watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I’m willing to pay to not see ads, but I don’t watch enough to be worth their asking price.
I would rather micro transactions. Like just load up a dollar and get like 1000 minutes ad free…with the ability to turn off and save for later.
Yeah, I’m guessing an ad makes them at most a couple cents, and I’m totally willing to compensate them for not getting the ad revenue. I just don’t like the current options: ads or tons of money per month for a service I don’t use enough to justify.
yep, we’re back at “piracy is a service issue”
I’m a bit surprised they don’t do this actually. Premium is good valued off you use the music side of it as well, which I do, but not for just ad free YouTube.
And then there are people like me, who aren’t opposed to paying for access in theory, but will never be okay with having the videos I watch be tied to an account. It’s inconvenient and I don’t trust Google with my watch history, even when the option is turned off.
Also I wouldn’t pay until: Youtube stops showing ads for hate groups; stops its manipulative recommendations and push towards right-leaning and extremist content; stops manipulating creators to all make the same kind of video in order to please the algorithm; removes hate content and extremist content; stops auto-flagging and removing fair-use content.
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The ones that pay are the ones running the ads. If the content creators have to pay, they will be the ones doing ads. This is how AV content has worked since the dawn of broadcast radio.
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Won’t happen. People are too addicted at watching"creators" talking shits.
The miracle of creation
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
The fucked up part is that I have to use SponsorBlock even with Premium. I thought I was paying for no ads…like wtf?
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Oh well.
YouTube can be past-tense. There’s a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.
Agreed, it’s just hard to find a suitable replacement for many things like tvs, since there’s a lack of alternative apps for other platforms on things like roku or LG tvs
It all sounds insane to me because I treat every TV like a computer monitor. Whatever I plug into it is what it displays. I usually ignore the onboard software as much as possible.
The arms race continues.
Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.
i would consider paying for premium if they broke out the payments properly, i don’t fucking want youtube tv youtube music or whatever other bullshit is attached, just fucking get rid of the ads and charge me like 5 bucks a month and i’ll fuck off.
I remember subscribing to YouTube Red when it first came out (and had a reasonable price), literally the first video I watched after subbing included an ad for YouTube Red in it. I was so fucking pissed lmao, thank goodness for SponsorBlock.
As a YT Premium subscriber I really don’t mind the sponsor sections. Money goes to the creator and a few taps and I’m back to watching. Also, I think outright banning sponsor segments is going to make creators more creative in a bad way…
I totally understand your views, although I’m paying this platform to not show me ads, that money should then go to the creators if they have to insert ads into their videos for some change. This is the platform’s fault.
I mean, it’s very easy money given you already have a channel and a name dor youself. What would YT have to pay creators to not care about such easy money?
On my phone I use youtube revanced and adguard dns, kiwi browser with ublock origin. On my PC I use just ublock origin. So far** I havent run into issues
AB testing, you probably haven’t been affected yet
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
I just want the Temu ads to stop
Most of the ads we see on our Roku Tv are political. I don’t know about Temu’s but I’d rather get non-political ads.
