“Why isn’t one of the most expensive to operate websites free?!”
There’s a reason there are zero actual competitors in this space (maybe TikTok but it’s full of its own problems). Only a company as big as Google can afford to run at this scale. Feel free to add your business plan on how to make YouTube free without ads and without it shutting down in 3 months.
Ads and subscription aside, any time there is a feature I like on YouTube, they remove it or change it. More often than not when they add a new feature, it makes the experience worse for me.
I understand they need to make money. I’m willing to sit through ads or pay a subscription for that. But the ads are constantly getting worse. Mid-roll ad breaks that are auto-generated into the video (for older videos, content creators would have to go through their library to manually change them, from what I understand). A push for censoring content to avoid demonetisation, even content not intended for children.
Yes, part of it is that I got used to YouTube in its early days when it was operating at a loss. When it was a wild west of content creation. But it just feels like it has become so unfriendly to users and content creators alike. It has become corporate and sterile, while trying to squeeze in revenue everywhere it can. (Likely to barely break even, sure, but they don’t have to make it crap to use to do that.)
Well you say that, but I feel entitled to free shit. - Common take on lemmy
This but unironically? One of the reasons there’s no YouTube alternative is because it’s not profitable, but the other is it’s a monopoly. If YouTube failed tomorrow I’m sure a lot of free alternatives (Odyssey, Peertube instances, etc) would blow up
Not a business plan because business=money, but how about creators host their own videos and share them through BitTorrent. No need to deliver real time video, users just download what they want to watch then watch them as they become available. Funding occurs through Kofi or Patreon etc. They’ll need to publish the magnet links somewhere but that’s a whole load cheaper than publishing RT video.
The vast majority of what YouTube does on a technical level is ingesting a ton of uploaded user video, encoding it in dozens of combinations of resolution, framerate, quality, and codec, then seamlessly choosing which version to serve to requesting clients to balance bandwidth, perceived quality, power efficiency in the data center, power efficiency on client devices, and hardware support for the client. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and there’s a reason why the user experience is much more seamless on YouTube on a shitty data connection than, say, Plex on a good data connection.
No, it doesn’t need to be realtime, but people with metered or throttled bandwidth might benefit from downloading just in time video at optimized settings.
Option 1: lose money
Option 2: more money
Google: chooses option 2
Internet: surprisedpikachu.png
Why would they release a product for free that costs massive amounts to run
…into the ground
I sure sleep better at night knowing that they put a little gradient on the playback bar that turns the tip of it slightly magenta, though.
Genuinely curious what parts of the UI have gotten worse. Open video, video plays, move on.
It’s obvious that Google would rather try to make money than bleed it into one of the most expensive websites out there, so the ads are a moot point. Pay or become the product.
Why does the video stop when you turn your phone screen off?
If the only answer is “so that people will pay money for it”, you are garbage.
Google has destroyed their own ads revenue by adding more and more ads. Imagine they’d have stopped with simple side banner and people would’ve not even bothered to use an adblocker because of it. This tiny little banner would’ve been worth as much as the multiple seconds ads now. The companies would pay as much, as there’d be no alternate.
Its crazy Ads are starting to show up on premium. Just Cable 2.0.
???
There’s a lower cost ad plan for YouTube music is that what you mean?
I thought everyone wanted YouTube premium without the music. That’s the ad plan: it shows ads on music because you’re not paying for ad free music.
YouTube is free, accessible and innovative, though? That meme doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Oh no, I didn’t pay and have to watch an ad! Literally slaves.
Just because it is a free innovative video hosting platform … it still doesn’t mean it is useful or beneficial. Thousands and thousands of hours of just useless junk content of idiots showing to everyone in infinite detail how stupid they are … and the worst part is, everyone loves it.
