Unless they totally remove the ad-free tier, I don't see how this is different than any other price hike. Or do you think that companies shouldn't have the right to hike prices?
We had the "old" internet and we had ads... a text banner here and there, and then an image or maybe a gif banner on the other side. Noone really cared, sites got ad views, users got content.
Then ads moved to flash (security issues), popups, popups when you close the first popup, video was added, with sounds, two banners became 20, fixed location floating divs were added, and in the case of youtube, a 3 minute video of something contains 3 minutes of ads.
So yeah... they had a chance, went way overboard, and now they complain that people block ads.
> We had the "old" internet and we had ads... a text banner here and there, and then an image or maybe a gif banner on the other side. Noone really cared, sites got ad views, users got content.
The "old" internet was also run by hobbyists without a profit motive, and did not have sites that hosted your videos for free. A few static banner ads might be able to keep the "old" internet afloat, but it certainly would not be able to keep today's internet afloat.
The "old" internet was full of people fighting hot linking because a JPEG being embedded on a popular forum took down your website for a considerable time.
Then the internet ran on an investor bubble that let companies serve content at a loss in hopes of a future acquisition.
Now ads are proving to be the only reliable way to get income out of videos. There are affordable options out there, but because these services were once free everybody feels like they're entitled to free hosting and media.
and the ones, where you click on a link, it openes in a new tab and the original tab gets replaced with an ad.. so you close an ad, and lose all your "back" history.
Also, real-life ads need regulation too... like some limits of X square meters of ads per 1 km^2 of area... preferably X going slowly towards zero.
Let content creators figure that out with their audiences. YouTube should just be a batteries included public video hosting service, with video creators as the customer. Creators with video views passing a threshold would need to pay google or have their videos downgraded to 240p, then temporarily disabled if they continued not to pay. Users would get some amount of space and bandwidth as part of a free tier to help them get started. It'd be like AWS but for video content creators, instead of like a shitty cable network.
Can you imagine some small time Roblox Youtuber blowing up and ending up with a sudden bandwidth bill in the hundreds of thousands? Popups with "this month's watch count has been reached, please ask @contentcreator to pay for more views"? Making uploaders pay would absolutely destroy the platform.
The only person hurt under that scheme would be just that, people who go viral out of nowhere. Other users could re-upload the video to mirror it though, so there's an easy workaround.
Seems like a small price to pay for a YouTube with integrity that respects both creators and viewers and treats both fairly without trying to exploit anyone.
But if a creator I like gets a big bill, I’ll take their video and re-upload it without their permission to mirror it and cut down their bandwidth bill.
I’m fine paying for content (I subscribe to Nebula and Spotify, for example); I am not fine paying to enrich organizations that engage in widespread surveillance and ad technology. Ads make the world worse. Creators make it better.
Google’s problem is that their mission statement is fundamentally misleading. They aren’t here to organize the world’s information and make it accessible, they are here to maximize ad revenue. The information thing is a means to an end. For them, ads are the point, because content doesn’t generate revenue - ads do.
That’s a fair position, but shouldn’t you simply shorten it to not using YouTube? Your activity helps their ad system and using it tells creators that they get more views by putting things on YouTube.
So because a company sells ads and you don’t like that, you refuse to pay them to not see ads?
Only ensuring that they will try to show even more ads since not enough paying customers exist?
Don’t you think that maybe if all the people in this thread being really righteous about not paying and “ad company“ or to actually pay it might show them there’s a better way?
They're a "give away a product for free for 15 years to gain market share then act indignicant when people won't pay whatever price you ask" company. I think that's what people don't want to support.