Both sides income, like police

Speak only for yourself. In the meantime, I use uBlock.

- If they make it too hard I'll stop watching. I have no intention of watching their ads (ads are psychological abuse), and they charge way-yyy too much for premium.
- Knowing what people are like, that won't stop adblockers for long
Use third party clients
Speak only for yourself. I just don't use YouTube. Like, at all. /s but not /s

I'd pay YouTube if it were $5/month instead of $15.

In fact, a couple of my favorite YouTube creators are on nebula.tv and I pay them $30/year.

Nebula rules I always make a point to check there first. Great for treadmill shows and stuff
- Is a treadmill show just something you watch while you're on the treadmill?
I'd pay YouTube if it were $5/month instead of $15.
It's less than 5/month on the family plan IF you have 4 other people you'd like to share with
The family plan is the only reason I pay for premium lol.
I wish Nebula had official support for third party clients.
What I really want is a more decentralized approach. Hosting video is expensive so it would be idea if it could be offloaded to smaller community devices instead of huge server farms.
- There's Peertube but it's a model that requires a lot more people to work well. I tried to watch a video but nobody was seeding. That was my first experience with it.
- Doesn't Grayjay have Nebula support?
I pay $14CAD for Crunchyroll and I don’t even use it that much. I use hours and hours of Youtube content pretty much every day. I also had Nebula but need to get that sorted again now that they aren’t with Curiosity Stream.
People will pay for a lot of stuff but ask them to pay for Youtube and they will lose their damn minds.
- YouTube doesn't even produce their own content. I'd rather get it somewhere else, if creators offer that option.
I'd gladly pay €15 a month if they guaranteed not to track me on the internet.
Family plan is 5 or 6 google accounts for 22$ a month. That's what I do
They would lose money with every user if this was the case, UNLESS they stopped paying creators entirely

It's one or the other. If you pay YouTube for Premium and don't get any ads, advertisers don't pay for your ad impression.

wish there was an option for "pay the platform the few cents the ads make" instead of me paying the platform a wild and ever increasing amount of money
Tbh I feel like they should take a ~30% cut from the creator tips feature and add that to a "ad balance" which would remove ads and subtract the few cents they would've got from the ad. That way YouTube gets paid, the consumer doesn't get ads, and the creator gets encouraged to make good content.
Finally a non-braindead comment.

This can't seriously be surprising for anybody, youtube with its on-demand unlimited video storage and streaming has to be one of the biggest money sinks on the internet.

We all bought a free subscription to it for life with our data that they stole before we even had a sense of it being a problem.
And this is why peertube will never actually take off outside of a Utopian future of unlimited energy and a future where everything is perfectly distributed
Who is going to pay the hosting costs? Who is going to pay the bandwidth costs? Let's say magic happens and the users donate enough for that. Who is going to pay the creators who that is their main source of income?
Now what will happen when people demand 4k content everywhere, and then 8k after that? That quadruples the cost of the bandwidth and hosting costs.
I absolutely hate hate hate subscription models and hate ads. There has to be a subscription model for any video hosting platform, and YouTube doesn't split up into exclusivity deals like shitty steaming services to screw over the consumer for profit. So at least there is that.
Decentralized systems work extremely well for text and even audio-based services. Video is a whole other beast, especially long form video at high resolutions.
- If a subscription makes sense anywhere it is for something like YouTube, totally agreed. According to YouTube stats 4.3 Petabytes of new data get uploaded every single day to the platform. That's absolutely mindboggling.
This kind of pisses me off whenever people complain about YouTube pushing ads or charging money. It's absolutely insane how much storage and bandwidth the amount of video hosted and uploaded every second requires. How could it possibly free?!
Bundled with YouTube Music it's even extremely good value.
Spotify premium costs USD15.36 in my country.
YouTube premium, including YouTube music USD19.58.
That's USD4.23 for no ads where I watch the most videos. Absolute no brainer in my opinion.

*and we block YouTube ads to not show ads

Ever heard of Elsevier? You pay them for the privilege of posting your article, and then they charge other people for the privilege of accessing it.

And they don't pay the people actually proofreading/peer reviewing the stuff
- Now that's just comically evil. Who designed this system, Spez?

I scrape videos off of YouTube using Pinchflat which dumps them into a folder, predownloaded for me, which I then have connected to a Jellyfin server that splits each channel up as an individual series, ads and bumpers stripped entirely, and it automatically downloads videos as they release.

Paying sounded too involved. Make a google account, etc...

Who has the time?

Bro I think you just created a reason for me to build my next server. Thank you for this!
- Honest? Wallet was on the other side of the room.
  It was legit easier to run docker commands on my phone.
  lol, np

not the first time capitalism asks you for money to solve problems capitalism created...

As a highly experienced software developer, I'm available for not writing software at a reduced rate of $45/hr, and I can handle unlimited overtime.

As a highly experienced murderer, I’m available for not murdering you and skinning your family alive in front of you for a low cost of just $40/hr.
- You're gonna murder and skin me in front of myself? I'm intrigued and have 40$ to spare

The thing with advertising is that the advertisers make more money in product sales from people who watched ads than they spend telling YT to push their ads. That's just how the advertising business works.

In other words, either the viewers pay youtube not to show ads, or the viewers pay the advertisers to pay youtube (in a roundabout way).

So it's just you paying in both cases, unless you use an adblocker :)

PSA: firefox + ublock origin blocks youtube ads even on mobile (on android at least)

People on iPhone can use “Firefox Focus” it’s a browser with no tabs, just a single window with Adblock.

The bourgeoisie (parasites) pay the bourgeoisie (parasites) to make their service worse in an attempt to extract more capital from you. You give the bourgeoisie capital… to stop them from making their service worse in order to take your capital?

This is a lose lose for you and a win win for corpo scum. Use an Adblock, take to the seven seas, use platforms that are decentralized. Then it’s a win win for you and, added bonus, it’s typically parasite free.

Youtube sends me data, I simply do not accept it. Simple as. No higher argument is needed

You forgot the part where they pay the video creator 50% of the money and use the other 50% to run one of the most computationally expensive and complex services on the internet.

I had three adverts slapped on one of my videos on my crummy 4 subscriber channel and I don't get a single penny from it.
- It doesn't make any cents.
I don't know about computationaly expensive. Once video is processed, it's mostly just a fancy CDN.
- I was sort of lumping storage and compute costs together as "compute" but compute itself is probably astronomical too.
  Even if it was just a CDN, a cdn at that scale streaming that much content simultaneously would require a huge amount of compute just to handle the streaming request traffic.
  There's also the recommendation algorithm which is powered by ai and takes a shit ton of parameters, at that scale that would be a massive computational task in and of itself.
  Even video processing they probably send it through a couple Ai pipelines to add subtitles, make sure it's not porn, check if your discussing topics with high misinformation so it can put that Wikipedia link below the video, etc.
  All that plus probably another million other little problems that comes with running a service at that scale.
- Wouldn't serving video and bandwidth concerns count as complexity?

Meanwhile YouTubers don’t get paid enough so they still show you their ads.

Sponsorblock.

The US Postal Service should get in on this action.

So you're saying the audience for the ads have the people who are willing to pay for stuff, the very people the advertisers are paying to reach, removed from it.

I wonder how much longer this will go before the advertisers catch on to that.

"We"? Who's "we"? There is no "we".

Yes that's how a company makes money...continue, you can do this!

So anyways, I installed Firefox with ublock origin and Sponsorblock

Well yes, that's how they don't go out of business. In theory.

Advertising is a racket. Always has been.

"I"m playing both sides so that I come out on top?"

I don't pay YouTube shit

Remember if you're still using it despite that being the case: you're the product.

Yeah. That's how it works. They get money either from serving you ads or exempting you from the ad service. Either way they get money.

Back in the day most media was designed around commercial interruptions. Watch some old cartoons on Netflix, they often have "fade to black" moments after which the last 10 seconds are repeated. Nowadays commercials are algorithmically inserted into content to maximize viewership, meaning that more often then not a YouTube commercial will play right before the most important bit of the video.

I mean...yeah. Ads subsidize viewers that can't/won't pay. That's the whole system. Did you expect something else?

I'm astounded at how much is available on the internet at no/little cost. Think how valuable our data must be for them to continue providing it.

Moonoopooly babey

Yes, but also, running Youtube costs about 10x as much as both are paying.

Now that I don't believe
- 10x may be too much, but they're definitely ~~losing money with~~ spending money on it. Lots.
Only if you didn't count the data scraping for advertisement part.

y'know, it used to be that you paid money for things and there wasn't even an ad option.

Sucks but better than paying for cable to still see ads.