That's a false dichotomy. There are many monetizing alternatives besides advertising, or paying the platform to remove advertising they introduced in the first place.
It's not my role to come up with consumer-friendly business models, or to vouch for any specific ones. I'm just saying that, as a consumer, I don't want Google's business.
If someone is selling apples in exchange for punching me in the face (and actually watching me and doing that while I eat, for a more accurate analogy :), then I wouldn't like going to their store. I would prefer going to the farmers' market and buying directly from the farmer by paying for it with cash. Farm-to-table type of transaction. Would this make the farmer as rich as selling their apples to the face-punching store? Probably not. They would probably have to work harder for less money, because they would have to manage more of their business themselves, and their products wouldn't reach as many people. There would probably be less apple farmers overall as well. But would it be a more consumer-friendly business that is actually incentivized to put care in their product? Absolutely.
It's not my fault that there aren't more farmers' market equivalents on the web. I'll use them if/when they exist, but in the meantime I'll have to resort to acquiring my apples in alternative ways.
> It's not my role to come up with consumer-friendly business models, or to vouch for any specific ones. I'm just saying that, as a consumer, I don't want Google's business.
"The many monetisation models I claimed exist go to another school. In Canada."
In your analogy when you say buying directly from the farmer by paying with cash, what does that translate to in the real world? How are you supporting content creators on YouTube if you block ads?
You should feel guilty. It's no different than going to a restaurant and not tipping knowing full well that is the accepted business model. It's not illegal, but it's a morally reprehensible thing to do. And tipping one server $50 and the next 10 nothing is not worthy of praise either.
> It's no different than going to a restaurant and not tipping knowing full well that is the accepted business model.
That's a ridiculous comparison. To make it more accurate, though: if the restaurant was also storing a copy of my personal data, recording my every move, and interrupting my meal to shove food I didn't order down my throat, I certainly wouldn't tip anyone at that restaurant, and would prefer to eat elsewhere. The servers who choose to work there have no moral right to complain about me not tipping them, and eating food that is available for anyone to take without paying is certainly not equivalent to stealing.
Once, and if, I'm given the option to actually pay for the service I order instead of this insanely hostile experience, I'll happily tip for it as well.
>Once, and if, I'm given the option to actually pay for the service I order instead of this insanely hostile experience, I'll happily tip for it as well.
You do. It's called YouTube Premium and it has no interruptions. You can turn off activity history and no data will be recorded nor will you get personalized recommendations. You have the tools at your fingertips, but instead you've convinced yourself that you're the victim in order to justify shorting the creators on whom you rely.
With keeping the same old UX yes it is. What YouTube offers for free is very generous. There is unlimited uploads. The high resolution options are free. The site is not behind a paywall. You can make an infinite amount of playlists which each have an unlimited size. You can have unlimited tabs open. Videos get automatic transcriptions, subtitles, and translations. Your streaming does not get throttled. Every user gets their own personalized feed. etc
> What YouTube offers for free is very generous. There is unlimited uploads. The high resolution options are free.
"Allowing" people to upload, "for free", content for YouTube to monetize is "very generous" of YouTube?!? I think you've got that severely bass-ackwards.
You will be surprised to see how much money you need to pay in order to match the ads numbers. And running a global video platform needs very high CapEx/OpEx numbers compared to other web businesses. YT premium is very likely a much less profitable business, mostly meant for mitigating user complaints against ads + revenue diversification.
> You will be surprised to see how much money you need to pay in order to match the ads numbers.
I'm well aware of that. Advertising is clearly the most profitable online business model. It has a low barrier of entry for users, it scales with the amount of users, and is simple to implement. Companies can collect user data and use it in perpetuity to monetize it in infinite ways beyond just ad impressions. Data is gold.
My point is that it's all corrupt to the core. It's driven by generating wealth for companies over anything else, least of all the well-being of people. It actually relies on manipulating the human psyche, pioneered by the machiavellian mind of Edward Bernays nearly a century ago. It inserts itself as a leech between the goods producer and people, to not only connect producers with interested consumers as its proponents would like us to believe, but to create consumers out of people who wouldn't otherwise be interested. And then the internet came along, and made it more profitable than it's ever been. Oh, and it's also being exploited to spread propaganda, influence elections and topple democracies, but no matter, the charts must go up and to the right.
So, yeah, sorry for the rant, but my point is that there are plenty of ways that companies can monetize their business that doesn't involve advertising. It might not be as easy or profitable, but I have this silly opinion that the well-being of society should be higher priority than generating wealth for shareholders.
Explain what role advertising plays in you not paying a subscription to have access to ad-free videos.
You are using a lot of words to justify the fact that you would prefer to steal from the same creators that you rely on for information and entertainment. You do not care about their well being but you’re standing on that soapbox nonetheless.
And please, don’t tell me that you support them in other ways because I don’t believe you. People that are too cheap to pay for a service that all parties have agreed to the terms of are too cheap to support in other ways too. No to mention there’s no practical way to compensate every creator whose videos you may have watched.
> Explain what role advertising plays in you not paying a subscription to have access to ad-free videos.
Paying YouTube to not show me ads simply removes the inconvenience of not interrupting my watching experience. It doesn't get rid of any of the other issues I mentioned inherent to advertising as a business, which Google still is, whether I pay them or not. My data will still be used to show me ads on other Google sites, I'm still training their algorithms on how to keep me on their site for longer and how to better show me ads in the future, etc. And I'm supporting their empire, which I'd rather not do.
> And please, don’t tell me that you support them in other ways because I don’t believe you.
I don't care whether you believe me or not. The creators certainly don't get compensated nearly enough by alternative means, and I don't do regular donations or have any system to keep track of how much I've spent. It's surely a minuscule amount compared to what they earn from advertising. But it's not my problem they chose to rely on a business model I refuse to be a part of. If this bothers them, they're free to put up their content on other platforms, or behind a paywall. If, however, they upload their content on a public site, I have no qualms with accessing a public resource on my own terms. The fact you equate this to stealing is laughable.
As someone with a YouTube channel, from looking at my metrics it's pretty clear that YouTube is being held afloat by a) the fact that non-technical users can't easily block YouTube ads on mobile devices, and b) YouTube Premium.
A single user depriving YouTube of their revenue is inconsequential sure, but when hundreds of millions of people do it (like with blocking ads on desktop) it obviously runs the risk of making the entire company unviable. Hosting videos for free is a great way to lose a lot of money.
