[CydeWeys]

Why would you be entitled to any level of service for a product that you aren't paying any money for? YouTube isn't free to run. All that bandwidth, engineering work, and creator compensation don't pay for themselves. You either pay with ad views or you pay with cash. YouTube doesn't owe anyone a free experience. They could lock the entire site behind a paywall to paid subscribers only tomorrow, and thus be exactly like Netflix, Disney+, HBO, etc., and they'd be entirely within their rights to do so.

[EamonnMR]

They have a social contract with the creators: you upload content for free and users will watch content for free. If they went fully paid creators and viewers would go somewhere else in Ain instant.

[CydeWeys]

I don't think that quite represents the existing social contract with most creators. I think the practical contract is in effect "I will upload content and you will compensate me fairly for it". If a subscription-only model led to increased content creator payouts I don't think you'd see a massive exodus from the platform. Regardless, I'm sure it's in the ToS and all that jazz that any of the terms can be changed at any notice and that your only recourse is to yank your videos and take them elsewhere if you don't like how things are going.

And, interestingly, the biggest exodus I've seen hasn't been to another free platform, it's been to a subscription-only platform (CuriosityStream). The documentary-style YouTubers didn't think they were making enough money on YouTube because of how hard it is to make their content vs your typical vlogging stuff, and they know their viewers are willing to pay more to access it, so they made a pay-only streaming site to earn more money from their product.

[causality0]

I didn't say I was entitled to it. I said they keep basic functions behind the paywall. They're equally within their rights to make non-Premium viewers watch all the videos in black and white or stop non-Premium viewers from using fullscreen.

[CydeWeys]

Yes, they would be within their rights to do all of those things. And ... ?

I can't even read Washington Post and New York Times articles without paying for a subscription. So what? They don't owe anything to me for free. Thus I have paid subscriptions with them, because I value their content enough to pay for it and that's the only compensation methodology they've found to be workable.

[causality0]

"and" that's the difference between Youtube and Quibi. Youtube was built as a free ad-supported platform for users to create content and present it to each other. Quibi was built as a paid streaming service where users watch professionally produced content for a fee. The track from non-user to paid user for Youtube is completely different than the one for Quibi. Youtube Premium targeted an audience that was already there. Quibi tried to get non-users to pay for the creation of the audience. It didn't work, and it will never work. Every successful paid-only streaming service has to target an already-existing audience. Netflix used licensing to target the fanbase of a broad swath of TV and movie viewership, fans who already existed. Disney did it by owning outright a broad swath of TV and movie material.

It generally doesn't even work in other media. CD sales were built on the back of free radio broadcasts. Pay cable and satellite subscriptions targeted an audience already exposed to television through free TV broadcasts. You have to offer a fundamentally better experience, on the order of "this new thing is the only way to experience non-live music" for people to pay for it sight-unseen.

[CydeWeys]

Your initial comment that I was responding to was:

> Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It's not a service it's a hostage negotiation.

To which my response was that it's a commonly accepted business practice to create free and premium tiers (it's so common it even has a name: "freemium"), and that this doesn't remotely constitute "gatekeeping" or "hostage negotiation". And it is common for companies to switch models over time, starting out with free in order to spur quick growth and then figuring out monetization later. Make no mistake, YouTube was originally losing catastrophic amounts of money, and what has happened to it is the only path that was even viable. You either need a lot of advertising or a substantial paid subscriber base in order to not suffer huge ongoing losses and be forced to shutter. Just ask every newspaper ever.

I just don't see what YouTube has uniquely done differently vs any other company that has a paid tier or that has grown over time and needed to find additional ways to make money because it turns out that you can't turn around a loss by scaling it.

I don't live advertising either. But I accept that it pays for the vast majority of the content that I consume online.

[causality0]

Yes, but my comment was making the point that "Youtube Premium has 20 million subscribers" is not a valid defense of Quibi's business model. Quibi is a paid-only service that doesn't have the ability to draw on a massive active userbase for paid upgrades and bonuses. Whether Youtube's tactics are or are not fair isn't germane.

[CydeWeys]

To the extent that it's not germane, you're the one who brought it up, and it was fair game for me to reply to. I really thought that was the main thrust of your argument (turns out it's not).

[Dylan16807]

The ability to do something like run with the screen off is not "premium", but it is being sold that way. "Hostage negotiation" is obviously hyperbole, but it gets the point across that it is neither paying for content nor paying for actual premium features. It's paying for them to stop being purposefully annoying.

[CydeWeys]

Au contraire, screen-off playback is exactly the kind of feature that is and should be premium, because the value of advertising that can be sold in this situation is significantly reduced, hence it only needs to be available to premium users who are paying for access and thus aren't showed ads anyway.

"Premium" doesn't mean "fancy" or "hard to implement", it just means "We aren't making money giving this away for free, so you have to pay for it".

[hansvm]

They had to go out of their way to prevent videos from playing audio in the background. They're objectively gatekeeping basic functionality behind a paywall, independently of whether anyone feels entitled to those features.

[manigandham]

Features aren't decided by the effort it takes to create them but rather the value they provide, offset by the revenue they generate.

Background video lowers the value of ads which subsidizes free playback so it makes monetary sense to disable it. It's also a trivial amount of work done once.

[Dylan16807]

> Background video lowers the value of ads which subsidizes free playback so it makes monetary sense to disable it.

On the other hand, video is expensive to serve so the ad revenue per gigabyte should be higher, in addition to getting more hours of listening per user. So it makes monetary sense to enable it.

They're both valid options for making money. So it's fair game to analyze it as a matter of user preference, company preference, and level of rudeness.

[manigandham]

It's the same file being delivered, they don't switch to just audio.

Even if they did, the ad revenue without video playback is 0. Advertisers are paying for impressions and views, not sound only.

[Dylan16807]

> It's the same file being delivered, they don't switch to just audio.

Youtube has separate audio and video streams available on almost everything. I'd be very surprised if it wasted that data, and a quick search suggests it doesn't waste that data.

> Even if they did, the ad revenue without video playback is 0.

Sounds like they're doing something wrong in the sales process.

[manigandham]

What's wrong with the sales process? Do you have advertising experience or are you just guessing?

You're vastly underestimating how 10s of billions of dollars in advertising transactions are conducted. It's far more involved than just a "sales process".

[CydeWeys]

Yes, they are absolutely doing all of this, and it's entirely within their remit to do so because no one is entitled to any of it for free. Why should they offer all of their basic functionality for free if that means they're not making as much money as they could be if they charged for it instead? The only people they owe background audio playback to are those paying for it, and those people are getting it.

[hansvm]

What are you going on about? You have nearly a dozen comments where either I'm seriously misunderstanding everyone involved or you're hell-bent on believing that any description of YouTube's business practices must be a complaint that more things aren't free.

E.g.:

> Ancestor: [paraphrased] YouTube makes money by doing extra work to make a free service more painful to use and then charging to remove those annoyances.

> You: [paraphrased] What makes <ancestor> so entitled as to think that you deserve the free service without the annoyances?

> Me: [paraphrased] No, YouTube is definitely intentionally removing features from their free service and offering to add them back if you pay them. That's true whether or not anyone feels entitled to those features.

> You: [paraphrased] Well duh, it's they're right, and why should they offer those features for free in the first place?

[hombre_fatal]

It's a brilliant freemium model that still gives everyone access except those who want a bonus luxury.

You'll have to close the gap on why you think it's bad while still acknowledging that they aren't a charity instead of just leaving your point as an exercise for the reader.

So far it's like complaining that Netflix paywalls the "basic functionality" of being able to watch their videos. Or that a game demo only gives you part of a game when you actually want all of it for free.

[hansvm]

> You'll have to close the gap on why you think it's bad...

No, I don't. Whether or not I think that's bad is entirely orthogonal to what I actually said.

[input_sh]

Also the option for a picture-in-picture on a phone used to be free, then they've just decided to make it a premium feature.

Back when it was introduced on Android, it worked on YouTube just fine. Then it was intentially broken (hidden behind a paywall).

[CydeWeys]

Yes, companies purposely don't include all desired features in the free tier as an incentive to induce users to upgrade to the paid tier. And features are liable to move between tiers as they fine-tune their monetization strategy.

[ptero]

> YouTube doesn't owe anyone a free experience.

Then they should not advertise it as such. I have not looked at youtube ads for a while, but earlier it was definitely advertising "host your videos free, let your friends watch them free from anywhere in the world, yada yada".

If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.

> They could lock the entire site behind a paywall to paid subscribers only tomorrow

Sure they can. But that would likely drive most customers away and be a very bad business decision. My 2c.

[ponker]

Anyone should understand that every product has a business model, and if it's being given to you for free the company is going to be making money in some other way. I do support the company having to clearly disclose, on their home page or similar, the specific ways they make money.

[CydeWeys]

Obviously if they put it all behind a paywall then they would stop advertising it as free. My point is that it's their right to do so if that's their wont, not that it would necessarily be the best business decision.

> If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.

Show me a single freemium service anywhere that advertises itself using such exaggerated language.

I don't understand why people complain about free services like this. You can't eat your cake and have it too. Choose if you want the ad-supported free service or the paid service and then quit complaining about the choice you've made. You're not ever gonna get an ad-free free service that offers all the same features as the paid service. That would be corporate malpractice of the highest order; they'd have $0 revenue!

[Dylan16807]

> My point is that it's their right to do so if that's their wont

Nobody has suggested otherwise, so why do you keep hammering on this point?

> I don't understand why people complain about free services like this.

Free services are not immune to criticism.

If someone is suggesting an unrealistic business model, that's one thing. If they just say a feature is bad, there's no need to argue with them. They are not obligated to "quit complaining"!

[CydeWeys]

I'm tired of people whinging all the time about freemium payment models. It's bringing the quality of discourse down. If you don't have any sort of realistic alternative and you're just complaining about not getting a service for free and without ads, save all of us some time and just don't bother complaining. It's tiresome.

[anoncake]

Yes, Google could charge money for Youtube. But they don't. That doesn't give it any right to expose anyone to advertising. No one forces it to give away anything for free, it does that voluntarily.

[CydeWeys]

So in your model of how the world should work, advertising is banned? Companies are only allowed to offer paid or donation-only services? And most content online ends up being locked behind paywalls as a result?

[hansvm]

Banning push-based advertising isn't without its merits. I'd be surprised if the majority of sales made via push-based advertising which wouldn't have been made in a pull-based system are actually beneficial to the end user (loosely measured by some combination of regret and opportunity cost), and a system that exists purely to extract value from the populace is not worth keeping around in my opinion, especially as a roundabout and inefficient method of payment.

I think most of the downsides would be in second-order effects (like the paywall bit you pointed out) and in effective enforcement (advertising dollars might just shift to realistic-looking review sites for example). I'm hopeful that free content would still be produced, especially given that for my own personal use I've noticed that ads correlate negatively with quality, and with a few exceptions like academic publishing all the best content is free and without ads even in today's world where it's easy to ad ads to a site.

[CydeWeys]

How exactly are you using the terms "push-based" and "pull-based" advertising here? Are you describing "opt-in" vs "opt-out"? I.e. all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly consented to seeing it, which could be done in exchange for free access to services?

It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).

And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.

[hansvm]

> How exactly are you using the terms "push-based" and "pull-based" advertising here? Are you describing "opt-in" vs "opt-out"? I.e. all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly consented to seeing it, which could be done in exchange for free access to services?

Slightly stronger still -- all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly sought it out (e.g. searching for things to buy on Amazon, searching for product recommendations, etc....).

> It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).

It might not be legally feasible. I know there are places (in the US, since we're invoking the first amendment) which ban billboards, ban specific kinds of ads (e.g. excessively misleading), ban certain ad-location pairings (e.g. no cigarettes targeting children), and so on, so I'm not totally convinced a motivated party couldn't push it through, but that's not my area of expertise.

> And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.

Haha, that system doesn't define how those services would work at all -- the idea is that from some kind of first principle (the hypothetical assertion is that push-based ads offer little societal value and large detriments above and beyond the effects of pull-based ads, so they're worth removing) we decide that push-based ads ought to be removed, and any second-order consequences are justified as a response. That's definitely the point I'd attack if I wanted to shoot this idea down, because even with seemingly clear-cut behaviors like killing people we still have to carve out exceptions in the law for all the unforeseen consequences of simply making killing illegal.

I hesitate to speculate too far as to how the market might react if such a law were enacted (and not easily circumvented), but some possible options include:

1. Some of those services (e.g., Snapchat seems vulnerable to that change) would cease to exist, and the companies involved would die or regroup around their other offerings. Not all products are viable in all market conditions.

2. Some others would probably be largely unaffected. Google might double down on "shopping" and other kinds of searches that are legally classified as pull-based and still offer a breadth of services to collect data on you (to offer better results for when you do make pull-based ad queries) and to keep you trapped in their ecosystem so that you can't go to a competitor. Their fee structure for results in those subsystems might change drastically.

3. Some businesses that have an ad-supported free tier _might_ keep that free tier as a way to entice users into paid offerings. E.g., YouTube would drop their ads due to the legal requirement but potentially also limit some other product features to try to convert more people to premium, above and beyond the pay-walling they already do.

4. Many smaller free services already only exist as a charity, a hobby, or some other kind of not-my-primary-source-of-income venture. At first glance I don't think those would be much affected, but if free tiers in AWS and GCP or github actions or whatnot are reduced then that could have downstream consequences.

5. If push-based advertising were banned cold-turkey then it's not totally implausible that we'd finally get mass acceptance around some workable micropayment solution. That _might_ even be integrated with a credit system from some pull-based ad behemoth.

6. Those services might well convert to subscription or pay-per-use. That's prohibitive now in many scenarios because somebody will produce an ad-based competitor, but if that's illegal then you only have to worry about competitors who are actually producing services for free somehow, not those who are producing services for <wink> "free" <wink>. If enough people actually want to produce free services then the ability to monetize goes away, but the need to monetize also goes away since the whole argument about monetization is that we need it to entice people to create stuff. Otherwise, there's still a monetization opportunity, and we can actually charge for the services we build.

And so on. It's really hard to speculate as to what might happen because we're talking about disrupting a $200B-$300B/yr industry. That'll have a sizable impact and quite a few ripples as we reach a new equilibrium.

[anoncake]

Either that or publicly funded. Giving customers the choice to opt into ads is another option – if those ads on provide value, as advertisers like to claim.

[manigandham]

The value those ads are providing - other than learning about the product - is the content they're subsidizing for you.

[anoncake]

That is not what I meant and you know it. There is nothing positive about ads – things don't even get cheaper overall, producers have to recoup their ad expenses by charging more than they would in an ad-free world.

[manigandham]

There are no absolutes. Things do get cheaper but you're ignoring several factors like scale, branding and just product awareness that make a difference for consumers.

[CydeWeys]

Well, good luck with all that. I can't say I think you'll be successful.

[anoncake]

So you don't have an actual argument but try to discourage me instead? That's actually pretty nice.