I don't understand why people are up in arms about this. It's as if people want their cake and eat it, too. Yes, I'm aware of questionable practices that YouTube does, such as monitizing off of dead people, but I'm still astounded that people are upset about this change. Specifically, I'm referring to the expectation that one can upload a video - for free - and allow it be distributed with millions of views to the world - for free - and without ads. Google's revenue model as always been ads so this change shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. And judging from Google's latest quarterly financial results on YouTube's ads success, I'm personally confused why this wasn't done sooner.
Google is using their vast profits from an unrelated market, tracking-based advertising, in order to subsidize their product in this market, that of video-streaming services. This is a textbook antitrust violation [1].
It is against the law to price a product below your costs in order to kill off your competitors and then jack up the prices later. This is what they have done by making it ad free for years, only to now force ads on everyone and upsell us to premium.
These laws exist to protect you, the consumer, by ensuring there is proper market competition for your goods and services. You should be up in arms about it because Google has illegally destroyed this market. This is why there are no competitors to YouTube.
Just tired of companies baiting users with free stuff to build market dominance and then dialing up profit extraction once they've killed off all possible competition. That's also your answer to why it wasn't done sooner.
This is not surprising at all, but not much you can do about it even if you see it coming, because other people don't see it coming or don't care. What are you gonna do about it as a user - all the creators are on YouTube. And as a creator - all the users are on YouTube. By design.
People expecting something that was free to remain that way forever were a bit naive. Getting upset that someone doing something for you for free is now "charging" is unreasonably entitled.
However. Ads are a blight. Sure, there's something to be said for brand awareness, but if I think back on my ad experience for the last 10 years (which is pretty easy because I haven't seen that many ads in that time) then I can safely say that my conversion rate is approximately zero for video ads. And there's several services/goods that I specifically avoid because their ads offended me.
Youtube thinking that they can fix their financial issues by summoning the ad fairy is just as naive and entitled as people who think that youtube should just be free and ad-less forever.
I'm sure it will work short term. But unless they've really thought out how this transition is going to work as well as how they're going to make sure the ads provide significant value to creators/viewers/advertisers, then I expect a slow decline.
With all of the cloud infrastructure providers out there, it's never been a better time to try launching your own video service. Setup some experimental payment options where the whole thing is paid for by an inventive combination of content creators, viewers, and ads. All tailored by the desires of all three. Want your video to be watched? You can pay to make that happen. Want to watch a video. Same deal. Don't want to pay (on either side). Well we can work out deals with advertisers.
I'm sure youtube can work something out to maintain market dominance. But they have to be paying attention to what they're doing and the announcement makes me wonder if they are.
It looks to me that they are ramping up YT ads because they performed well in their quarterly earnings. I think Google is more self-aware then you are giving them credit.
... I said that. Didnt I? <re-reads own post> Yeah. "I'm sure it will work out short term." That's equivalent to "performed well in their quarterly earnings" right?
YouTube has had a strangle hold on video content for over a decade. I'm sure this change will work out short term ... excuse me ... I'm sure this change will make their quarterly earnings look better temporarily.
Long term, however, I expect this direction to provide a foothold for competitors to take a bigger slice of the video hosting pie.
People are (fairly) annoyed because that was the deal Google offered when they were uploading videos.
And if the change shouldn't shock users, then it certainly shouldn't be shocking to Google... In which case maybe they shouldn't have presented it as an option in the first place if they knew they would have to renege on the deal.
