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The biggest issue with generic or burnt in ads is that they're not targeted ads. The value of an ad which isn't targeted is more than an order of magnitude less than one which is targeted. Traditional free-to-air broadcasting (mostly) works financially because they pay once for the transmission, it's a largely fixed fee to cover an area, and then they get paid for the audience they potentially reach. Even still the broadcasters have to pay to have market research agencies run surveys to figure out what's being watched and by whom. When pay TV providers became able to get telemetry from set-top boxes the value of the addressable market rocketed because the audience was no longer hypothetical, it could be measured, analysed and segmented. The reason you get crap ads when personalisation is turned off is because the advertisers who have money want their advertising dollars spent on addressable market, not on random NPCs. A non-addressable ad is cheaper, so that's the market for who's buying the ads. I hate ads, so I have YouTube Premium Family, that works great because I can see content without interruption and I support the independent content creators. I also run PiHole because some sites and services are just so loaded with advertising that it's annoying, so I might well be hypocritical here. But the biggest issue that people don't understand, or think they understand but totally under estimate, is the technical challenge of delivering every video on YouTube everywhere in the world with fair quality. I build streaming infrastructure at scale (not for Google) and I'll tell you that it's really expensive to do what they do and yet people take it for granted. They feel entitled to watch YouTube because Google represents the evil establishment, without recognising the challenges they face. I don't agree with the idea that it's good to write apps that mooch off YouTube just because they're a big corporation. Yup, it's not piracy, it's probably on the lighter side of the grey area of unauthorised API abuse. If you want to build a competing service to Google that comes without personalised ads and has great content, I wish you all the best but when you get the CDN bill, you'll understand. There's a cost per viewed minute that's probably unsustainable. Heck, even traditional broadcasters who have launched their own streaming services have struggled to make money, and that's with targeted advertising enabled. |