Revenue is down for YouTube, compared to last year. Maybe this explains recent increases in ad placement [1] and the choice to gate 4K quality behind the YouTube Premium subscription [2].
Could that have started a downward spiral? I noticed that when I am casually browsing Youtube that the increased amount and length of ads let me stop browsing Youtube quite often. Especially when a second ad starts at the beginning of a video or if a video is interrupted too frequently or at the "wrong" point, I close Youtube altogether at that point and do something else. And while the short occasional ads before the videos did not bother me much in the past, now I stop browsing Youtube earlier because it is no fun to watch the same stupid clip a dozen times. Thus, the increase in advertising on YouTube has probably led to my seeing less advertising there overall than I used to.
At a previous gig we had alarms that would fire when we were making too much money, because it probably meant something had gone wrong and we were over-serving ads, which was bad for long term user engagement.
Honestly this is what the canary in the coal mine was for me.
As soon as it happened I said to myself "This is juicing of short term metrics at the expense of long term success and goodwill, the final triumph of management over engineering."
It was obviously such a user hostile obnoxious move that I will never understand why no one ever pointed it out.
Googles hey day is past it may stick around for a long time but it has become the new MS, while MS is the new IBM.
It's funny I always assumed Amazon would become MS before Google.
Amazon is the new Google. Google the new IBM. MS seems to be doing fine. What is Google's next cash-cow? Google's Cloud pitch sure reminds me of IBM's "Big Data" push.
My biggest pain point is the ads at the end of the video (on TV). they are completely unexpected and hold the 'related videos' hostage until you finished watching so you cannot jump to next. sure you could hit back but then YT takes you to home screen and you've lost all history. overall a poorly designed navigation but agree that basically its not fun to watch on TV anymore. its too bad because YT's main selling point was casual viewing.
Of course, when I switched to the 13 pro max last year because my wife bought it for me I just didn't install the Youtube app at all, I understand that's how the creators make money etc. etc. but I just chose to not use it and it's ok...
Then switched to the Samsung z fold 4 last month and installed Vanced, first thing I did to be honest, got the apk from the wayback machine, then realized they offer 4 months of free premium if you bought a z fold or z flip so I subscribed and will cancel it 3 days before it ends.
Just put a cheap audio only plan without subscription, say pay 2$ for 1 month of audio without ads, and if video then 1 short ad at the start maybe, people don't want to subscribe, it's a commitment, and audio is cheap to stream, and people would pay for background play.
I use ad blocker on my computers so never have to see any ads. But on my TV, without ad blocker, YouTube is completely unusable. I have to sit through 2 unskippable ads just to watch a 2 minute movie trailer.
The alternative is to get YouTube premium, but that’s priced higher than Disney+Hotstar here (which has live sports along with Disney and HBO shows) and I just don’t see the value.
Brave browser does good ad blocking by default on iOS and desktop.
uBlock and uMatrix are unable to block ads on Chrome/Chromium, it only seems to work on FF. I can't imagine how much worse things will get once manifest v3 limitations kick-in.
The ads lately have been painfully excessive. I installed Brave on iOS just a few weeks ago to avoid the spam. I used the Youtube app for years and didn't have an issue giving them their ad revenue. Now I am gone forever.
Definitely. It's so much harder to watch now - seems like many companies have made myopic choices about monetization in the last year, making a plethora of services less useable.
I just assume the people who demand ad density increases don't even use Youtube, much less experience the ads. Out of touch upper management: a tale as old as time.
As someone who consumes a lot of YouTube and pays for premium, I could never go back to the ads. The experience of no ads easily justifies the cost for me.
I also am one of the rare people who uses YouTube music, so win-win
I personally feel that Google is letting us all down with the Youtube product. It works well, but its so behind what it could be. They could take a lesson from tiktok on how to actually surface content people want to see.
I’ve never seen that and I do it regularly, but I do know that if you cast to a device (like a Smart TV) with its own YouTube app it uses the recieving device app; it would make sense to get an ad if that app is not logged in to an account with Premium.
I don't know if that is what happens (and in my experience it does not - the receiving app takes its authentication from the source-of-cast).
Regardless, if it ever comes to that, we should ask for more as customers. It doesn't and shouldn't make sense if a paid / pro user had to watch an ad before casting (a fully supported functionality) to a new / unknown device. Corporations are fully allowed and equipped to make money, but the benefit of doubt in unexpected / grey situations should largely be with the user. The alternative allows any entrenched party to arm-twist users for even more money, and while market forces cause an eventual course correction, the interstitial generation has to suffer along the way.
It's a known bug that Google seems unwilling to address. This happens on a months old Chromecast v3 by Google. Unfortunately they disabled the (standalone) login feature on the Chromecast so you cannot prevent this by logging in.
Ads show on the next video when autoplay is on. Unless you play from a playlist. All in all quite annoying.
Frankly YT Premium pricing is ridiculous. It's not worth $23/mo for my family. That's way more than Netflix and Google doesn't even produce its own content... If it was cheaper I'd subscribe.
> Also the announced 50-200% price increase to Youtube Premium for most current customers.
Approximately half of Youtube Premium subscribers are in the US, which saw no increase for individual plans and a 28% increase for family plans. The increase in Canada was (as a percentage of prior prices) identical; in the UK it waa again no increase for individual, but only 11% for family plans.
So, no, it was not 50-200% for most current customers.
>Revenue is down for YouTube, compared to last year.
Maybe this has something to do with becoming the defacto censorship arm of the government and banning/blocking/demonetizing/driving away many customers and viewers.
Downvoted, but seems like a reasonable comment to me. YouTube is still king, but their policies are unfriendly to creators and viewers alike. Over time, that will eat away at your audience.
The main negative I have is just the opposite: YT’s algorithm persistently pushing crazy alien theories, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson garbage into my feed, or worse. I wish they would censor that stuff more, because I’m not interested and no matter how many times I say “not interested”, it finds its way back in.
I either get "<Ideogogue> destroys <ideology>" videos or some really insane things, my favorite being videos from instructors who say they can teach you to fly if you give them thousands of dollars. By fly, they mean levitation and not airplanes.
To clarify, I don't consider YT's algorithmic choices to be "censorship" one way or another. Censorship is blocking, banning and/or demonetizing videos and preventing consumers from proactively deciding what they want to watch. I fully agree that allowing users to curate what Youtube suggests to them would be a massive improvement over the current system. If you are interested in learning more about actual Youtube censorship, Matt Taibi has been covering the issue for almost 2 years.
To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants?
Because the evil censorship that you believe the government is forcing does not exist. There is no legislation and there is no planned legislation from any us political party banning content, but there’s a hell of a lot of “conservative” legislation aimed at forcing YouTube etc to host racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, and literal nazi content - in other words the exact BS the 1st amendment is meant to prevent the US gov from doing.
Wait I lied, I forgot the GOP has got huge amounts of legislation that tries to ban acknowledging that LGBT folk are human, that slavery happened, that conservative states are to this day doing everything they can to limit which Americans get to vote, etc
Given every time I see you commenting on HN it’s the same bigoted BS, that you then try to pass off as caring about treating things “fairly”, im going to stick with what I thought initially: you’re a bigot, and any time you claim that you are just interested in fairness it’s just another bit of bad faith BS rather than owning up to you being a bigot.
It’s America, and HN has no rules against being a bigot, but I’d rather you just preface your arguments with “I don’t think lgbt people deserve equal rights, I believe that anyone that doesn’t let people use their services to spew forth claims of straight white Christian superiority is is somehow censorship violating the 1st amendment, and I think anything that counters this view is propaganda”
>To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants?
I don't have a favorite political party, they are all trash (in the United States). But that isn't what I was saying. What I was saying was very straightforward: If you are a corporation that wants to maximize profits, driving away a segment of potential customers is a poor strategy.
Unless that serving that segment drives away another.
For example: I could be a shop in LA and say "I'll happily serve the nazis", but I'd be dumb if I thought that wasn't going to result in other potential customers going elsewhere.
> I don't have a favorite political party, they are all trash (in the United States)
This is BS - you can say that neither party is great, but this is acting like they are equivalently trash, which is objectively false, regardless of your politics. If your politics are "LGBT people are not people", or that only a specific type of person should be allowed to vote, then the liberal parties are trash, and the GOP is your savior. If your viewpoint is that all people should have the same basic rights then there is no way you can look at the GOP as being an option, no matter how fiscally conservative you might be.
But as I said later on, you have repeatedly taken the stance that LGBT folk aren't human, and then proclaimed you don't have a political viewpoint, which is BS that I'm tired of putting up with or ignoring.
Look, I do not care if you're an asshole in real life or just online, as we are unlikely to ever meet in real life. Even if we did, we are unlikely to agree on this topic because you've repeatedly taken the position that you think that "should this group of people have the same basic human rights as other humans" is a reasonable question, and that is only the case if you've already decided that that group is subhuman.
Like I said, I am just tired of reading your BS comments in which you try to act like you don't have politics, or that you aren't at the very least transphobic, when that's very clearly BS.
HN needs a way to "fork" branches of comments that have clearly gone astray, but have value on their own. Maybe turn comments into a red-black tree of some sort: black for regular comments, red for semi-related thoughts, collapsed by default.
>This is BS - you can say that neither party is great, but this is acting like they are equivalently trash
In my opinion both the Democratic and Republican parties are so worthless that they are indistinguishable. From their uniform support for endless war, US global military empire, the police state, ubiquitous surveillance and the endless transfer of wealth from working people to Wall Street rent-seekers, the two parties are the same in substance.
>you have repeatedly taken the stance that LGBT folk aren't human
This is a slanderous statement. I welcome you to quote and link to any comment where I suggested any such thing.
We have a serious mental health crisis post Covid lockdowns, and I hope you can get the help you need.
That's too simplistic of a statement. Sometimes you have to drive some segments out to keep others or to keep advertisers happy. If HN didn't put effort in curating the community would a lot of us still be here?
The limited, mostly consistent curating done by Dang and the staff from HN bears absolutely no resemblance to the widespread censorship on Youtube. For example, many interesting and substantive discussions about various Covid issues happened in HN comments that were completely banned on Youtube, Twitter and other government-compliant platforms in recent years. Certainly it is beneficial for a commercial platform to drive off those who are so offensive that they actively reduce demand from the network by driving away users, but it is absurd to think that has been the rational for Youtube's censorship policy. I would suggest that if HN implemented a Youtube-like censorship policy they would lose far more viewers than they would gain.
YouTube’s customers are mostly advertisers and their clients. And advertisers don’t want their adds next to content that will drive away their customers.