The word "admit" in a headline always raises my hackles. This wasn't a secret. Your reporter didn't wheedle the truth out of them. You sent an email, and they responded with what they had already said countless times.
Yeah, this is now as I count it the third or possibly fourth time this story about the 5 second delay has been recycled onto the front page of HN. I guess because the first analysis was incorrect (about user agent dependence) everyone feels entitled to try to re-jigger the spin to see what sticks?
I paid for the YouTube premium that came with the old Google Music subscription, and the problem was it regularly showed ads anyway, especially in the kids stuff.
So then we still needed ad-blocking, which broke Google in a way that it tried to show even more ads (ad blocking probably disrupting the ability to track a 'premium' user/client).
So we're back to relying completely on ad-blockers, and have completely cut out any Google or YouTube sourced content for the kids.
Maybe his account is not true premium as tied to old GM account. I had a few months last year. Quite pleasant compare to usual "naked" YT. But nowhere as good as vanced and then revanced, UBO, VPN+Adguard, pi-hole, and tonnes of fake Google account created from all over the world and outsourced the passworded access to 3rd world to be abused so to confuse Google algorithm. Since using all these to thwart Google tracking and ads, I stopped YT premium after 3rd months as really no point I can do better than their premium service - and cheaper too. I thought premium frees up my time to tinker but they still track and occasionally ads do get thru.
The free ride is over. I feel like the only reason this is upsetting to people is because it seemed to be free for so long. If you give someone a free meal every day for 15 years, and then suddenly take it away, they'll be pretty upset. But nobody ever asked why the food was free? It costs to make and it costs to deliver. Google have datacenters all over the world and we still expect the food to be free.
They literally created an entire market of content creators. We can't go back to torrents, we're addicted now.
Ah the fallacy of content piracy harm. If I steal content it doesn't cost the creator anything. I was never going to pay for said content anyway. If I enjoy content to to point of being willing to pay, I would do so anyway, even if I could keep getting it for free, if there is an agreeable way to do that.
This applies to software, books, video, music and everything else, and has been proven time and again.
Google has just taken advantage of network effects. To say that we wouldn't have it if not for Google is clearly wrong. The first internet content distribution networks (anon FTP and UUCP) were free and cooperative. If Google didn't exist we'd surely distribute video cooperatively too, and likely much more efficiently, they were just more convenient. If they stop ad blocking that's no longer the case.
The free ride is not over, it's never over. All that will happen is that business models will change as the market adapts to people's demands and behaviour. The internet has tipped market power in favour of consumers over corporations.
People quit their jobs and make videos full time thanks to YouTube ads. Those videos wouldn't exist otherwise, people would be busy working regular jobs.
> Or they might have just created the content and monetised it through their own site.
Assuming you could find it since discoverability would probably be lower. Then if a particular video 'went viral', it could cost them a lot of money in sudden and unexpected hosting and bandwidth costs. They would also now have to spend time on dealing with 'infrastructure' instead of focusing on creating content.
There's a reason why so many people use Youtube and Patreon instead of DIYing it: few folks are interested in re-inventing that entire stack on their own.
"the only reason this is upsetting to people is because it seemed to be free for so long"
The issue, at least to me, is that Google has a sort of monopoly on >99% of content on Youtube. They provide virtually nothing[0] to content creators other than free†⸸ video hosting, and in return they get to gatekeep the content itself. All of the cost is offloaded onto the consumer, and there is little to no incentive (arguably negative* incentive) for the people producing the value (videos) to move off youtube.
"It costs to make and it costs to deliver."
It costs to make, but it's not Google that has to pay. It costs to deliver, but why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content?
If the situation was "watch video on youtube with ads, or watch video on Peertube, or watch video on Odysee" I don't think many people would be complaining about mandatory ads on Youtube, but because it's "watch video on youtube with ads, or don't watch the video", people resent the dilema.
[0] The most tangible, by far, value Youtube provides is the huge audience, but that's just a feedback loop, not due to quality or effort. Actually, it's probably due to the fact that many people who make great content have historically only put it on Youtube, because of the huge... and so on.
> It costs to make, but it's not Google that has to pay
Google pays creators 55% of the ad revenue, so yes Google has to pay for those videos.
> It costs to deliver, but why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content?
People upload to YouTube because YouTube gives them plenty of ad revenue. They don't upload to sites without a lot of ads since that would reduce their ad revenue.
"Google pays creators 55% of the ad revenue, so yes Google has to pay for those videos."
Google does not have to pay for videos. If a video brings google enough ad revenue, they willingly give some of it to the channel that made the video. They do not pay a fixed or up-front cost, and assume none of the risk/effort in creating videos. To be fully pedantic, Google doesn't pay for videos in any sense, they pay for the resulting attention.
"People upload to YouTube because YouTube gives them plenty of ad revenue. They don't upload to sites without a lot of ads since that would reduce their ad revenue."
The videos people want to watch are only on Youtube -> Viewers only use Youtube -> Content creators only upload to Youtube -> Repeat...
Google's centripetal force prevents competitors from competing.
The videos I watch are an extension of the forum posts and blogs that people have always done not because they are seeking "ad revenue" but simply because passionate people will make stuff about the things they like either for public good or simply because they like doing it.
YouTube was not supposed to be about people trying to make money. That's the old thing. The entire point of YouTube was normal people can upload videos and make channels. The money just attracted the same garbage content as TV had before.
> why should Google be the only party who gets to deliver other people's content
They're not? I don't know why you mention this. If the creator of a video decided to only make their video available on YouTube, that's their decision.
I was under the assumption that Google puts a large percentage of revenue into paying content creators and that YouTube is much more lucrative than Tiktok.
YouTube wasn't even profitable until relatively recently (2018?).
That's actually the really annoying part to me - I don't mind paying for content or for useful services, but if you operate one way for over a decade and use that time to consolidate the entire market and get in a position where you have no real competition, and only once you own the market do you drive up prices and make the free experience awful, than that does actually seem quite unreasonable (and in an ideal world, illegally anticompetitive).
Also, I would prefer to pay the content creators directly. Charge me for time spent viewing — give that portion of my subscription to the content creators I was watching.
At the risk of advocating for the devil, I think that's what YouTube Premium does? I don't know whether it pays out by time watched or per view or what, and obviously Google takes a (large) cut, but the biggest argument in its favor is that it does actually put money in the creators' pockets.
Sorry bud, Google makes its money spying on my email and my searches. Those are tradeoffs I’m willing to make. I absolutely refuse to ever watch ads, though.
You say we can’t go back torrents, and maybe you can’t, but I’ll go full Luddite mode before I start watching ads on anything. I haven’t had a television for 20+ years for this very reason.
Torrents and a seed box are about as easy as it gets.
Has there been any good work on solving that challenge? If I just watched a great documentary via Torrent and I want to watch another one in that vein or another one by that creator, how do I do that?
Why should we pay for the experience we used to have for free? It would be an easy sell if google offered some benefit to paying, but making the experience worse and then offering to put it back as a premium option rubs me the wrong way.
It was never free without ads. YouTube started showing ads within the first year of its existence. You've just been blocking them.
It's like you've been shoplifting groceries for years, and are now outraged that the shop hired a guard. "They let me shoplift for years just to drive the competing grocery stores out of business, and now they're abusing their monopoly by demanding payment".
That it survived 15 years without a crackdown on adblockers is the real story here. Most VC-subsidized too cheap to be sustainable services don't last a year.
The storage and bandwidth YouTube consumes must be extremely massive, and it probably only survived because Google made up for the loss in other places. Of course it has to pay someday, at latest when other revenue streams are drying up.
IANAL, but running a service at a loss until you have a monopoly position and then cranking up prices sounds illegal.
> Remind me to never invite you over for dinner. "Why should I have to split the check now? You paid for my dinner yesterday!"
I dunno; if for 18 years you give away free food, not to just to one person, but to an entire town, and then one day when nobody else is left selling food in town decide to start charging, I think it would be quite reasonable for people to be cross with you.
But it was never free. Ads have been on Youtube for years. From a 2011 article entitled "The History of Video Advertising on YouTube":
> In January 2009, YouTube started allowing ads in seven different formats. By October of that year, YouTube was counting more than one billion video views per day.
> The first targeted advertising on the site came in February 2006 in the form of participatory video ads, which were videos in their own right that offered users the opportunity to view exclusive content by clicking on the ad.[29] The first such ad was for the Fox show Prison Break and solely appeared above videos on Paris Hilton's channel.[29][30] At the time, the channel was operated by Warner Bros. Records and was cited as the first brand channel on the platform.[30] Participatory video ads were designed to link specific promotions to specific channels rather than advertising on the entire platform at once. When the ads were introduced, in August 2006, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley rejected the idea of expanding into areas of advertising seen as less user-friendly at the time, saying, "we think there are better ways for people to engage with brands than forcing them to watch a commercial before seeing content. You could ask anyone on the net if they enjoy that experience and they'd probably say no."[30] However, YouTube began running in-video ads in August 2007, with preroll ads introduced in 2008.[31]
Why are people upset about having to watch ads when they've been part of the terms of service and social contract for 'free' content since basically the beginning?
Giving it away for free if way below self-sustainability in pricing until cornering the market would be predatory pricing leading to monopoly.
I would have preferred that they made it a sustainable business unit/whatever from the beginning so that we could have had a competitive market. So, that seems like a legitimate thing to be angry about to me.
I'd rather stop watching YouTube than start watching ads. I disabled my adblocker to see how bad is it and it is truly disgusting, I cannot conceive how people can enjoy YouTube with so many ads.
And before you say "just pay YouTube Premium", no, the moment a majority of people start paying $10 (or whatever it is) for YouTube Premium, Google is going to add ads to it again and make you pay $20 for YouTube Premium For Real(TM) to get rid of the ads (and/or just make the free tier miserable to prevent people from stopping paying). Google has proven that it is not above abusing the user to get money and there's no reason not to abuse the user further once you have them hooked after all.
Is there any precedent at all for this? This feels more like a Netflix than a Google move. Google's consumer facing offerings have not really rubbed me the wrong way yet, except maybe the consolidation of music services into their worse one.
Ads pay near to nothing compared to a subscription. Why would they jeopardize that. Even someone who buys Premium in a country where it's exceptionally cheap makes them more money than an ad user.
I used to watch YouTube quite a lot on my TV without ad blocking, but over the past few years the quantity and duration of ads became so incredibly ridiculous that I stopped doing that. It's probably not what they intended, but the primary effect is that I drastically cut down on the amount of time I spend watching YT. Whenever I do watch videos it's now on desktop or mobile with an ad blocker, and it's not enough to justify the price of Premium.
I can't imagine the data scientists at Google haven't already regressed minutes viewed on frequency of ads and found a negative association, though. I wonder if they have a minimum threshold of y at which point they begin reducing the frequency of ads shown.
A friend of mine has recently subscribed to his first ever subscription, youtube premium, because of the increased amount of ads on his tv, so I'd say it's an overall win for google.
Pirating OS users tend to become paying OS users after a while, when they need to perform a job etc. Ad blocking users aren't becoming paying or ad-viewing users, they stay unprofitable forever.
They stay unprofitable forever individually but they stay on YouTube instead of making another video site popular, which on the whole is better for YouTube.
But that isn't an as big deal as it sounds. Many use TikTok for example, but TikTok barely pays anything to creators so anyone who gets big on TikTok moves to YouTube to make money. As long as you make the most money at YouTube that will keep happening, and all those ads is why people make so much money making videos on YouTube.
This leads to an Apple situation where Apple doesn't have the most users but most of the money goes to them since they can extract much more money per user. It isn't a bad situation to be in.
I would agree with that if most of the costs of YouTube were paying the creators, but my guess is they're not. If YouTube gives, for example, Vimeo the chance to become big enough and they just happen to be more efficient than YouTube and also decide to pay the creators just a little bit more than YouTube, isn't it even a tiny bit reasonable that maybe Vimeo could gradually replace YouTube in the future?
Of course Vimeo would have to fight off adblockers too to compete in money extraction with YouTube but that's not my point, my point is that YouTube now has a monopoly and any actions that threaten that, such as strongarming people into watching 3 preroll unskippable ads, are in my opinion silly and self-defeating.
They're just too greedy. If they made the price of YouTube Premium something reasonable ($1 or $2 a month instead of $14 or whatever it is) they would get a lot more subscribers and probably even get more revenue. $1 or $2 is not worth spending even 10 minutes digging in obfuscated JavaScript to fix an adblocker, so this whole thing would go a lot smoother for them if they charged that. Even if $14 is not a lot people just don't want to pay that much.
I've paid for content on YouTube before, through Purchases, and I won't do that anymore if there's even a hint they'll try to detect my adblocker in the future.
Thing is, I'm not going to pay their excessive and ongoing subscription fee under any circumstances. I watch maybe an hour of videos a week, but all of them are just to kill time, and they're not worth double digits a month to me. I was happy to have a transactional relationship with them for paid content, and they likely made a net profit from me even with an ad blocker, but if I can't trust them to provide ongoing access to the content I bought then I won't buy any more.
Even if I watch the ad nobody is making any money from it. I'm just saving their bandwidth. But even with the latest 'crackdown', I haven't seen a single advert or nag screen so I guess the crackdown isn't very effective.
Less use of Google = less chance of me seeing Google ads.
The analogy is more accurately this: McDonalds giving away ketchup--instead of selling it or providing with the order--but making you watch an ad first.
I pay for the ad-free versions of Hulu, HBO ("Max"), Disney Plus, and Paramount Plus. YouTube managed to sufficiently tick me off that I refuse to give them one penny.
I'm going same way too. When first speculations about ad-blockers being blocked on Youtube I started investigating alternative video platforms, and reducing video watching overall. Worst thing is that many public services and companies are still using Youtube as single available video repository, not considering that their website or service use instructions end up covered with annoying ads, that are distracting and time consuming.
Joining the Apple ecosystem makes a whole lot more sense than paying for Google's rubbish dump. I would not have imagined saying that a year ago. But if I was to pay, I'll pay for a quiet, satisfying life. Not for Google's cheapness - for sure, there is no actual value there for me. It's just a habit. The last fifteen years have been about a habit. Oh! I can choose something else! Wait until others get that idea.
What I wonder is who is pushing them to do this? Or is it coming from within? If they could somehow prove that everyone definitely saw each ad they played, what actual difference would it make? Is this a thing advertising companies compete with each other on? How likely it is people actually see the ad?
Over the past few months I’ve stopped using YouTube all together. The service is pretty bad without an ad blocker, and I wouldn’t pay $10 per month just to waste my time.
People here always suggest paying a subscription instead of viewing ads as a superior revenue model. Google introduced this and people still lose their minds.
I believe you missed/ignored a few facts in your screed:
1. Ads are a malware surface
2. Ads are used to pass misinformation and other harmful content
Google is failing to perform its due diligence as an ad platform for both sides of the ad two-sided market.
Ergo, my browser connection will continue to use its condoms.
--
Further, Google paid for little to any content creation that is loaded to YouTube. $14 subscription for hosting the median watcher's content is extreme. Charge the content creators for hosting as they are the beneficiaries with in-video subscription advertisements.
> Further, Google paid for little to any content creation that is loaded to YouTube.
That's not true. They've paid tens of billions of dollars to content creators. Just back of the envelope calculation YouTube probably pays out more for content per year than Netflix.
The in video sponsors are what I would complain about, but as long as Sponsorblock works I'm happy. Been paying for YouTube premium since before it was called that.
The misinformation is insane. Diet advertisements of don't eat this, etc are disgusting.
It follows the same pattern of those Google searches that pop up like 'what are some of the benefits of xyz' written by someone with 0 scientific knowledge, on a page with 0 references to studies. It is merely there as filler content to lure people to the website.
