Anybody who watches much Youtube has surely seen the uptick in ads over the last year or so. That's clearly reflected in the increased revenue on that front.
jarjoura 1269 days ago [-]
Just FYI, this is mostly the content creators doing this. They pick the frequency and places in the video where they want the ads to play.
The reality is it takes so much time and energy to produce content and the bar is high that creators make it their full time jobs.
So either, they have YouTube monetization with ads or they do in-video ad rolls, "sponsored by Squarespace", yadda yadds. Or they literally include some product into their video and it acts as a hidden ad because they generate a story around that product.
stefan_ 1269 days ago [-]
Except for the part where YouTube at some point just enabled mid-roll ads for essentially it's entire catalogue, even if previously disabled:
This is of course an old classic with anything Google: yes, you can "opt out", but expect your choice to randomly reset at the whim of a PM looking to show "traction".
jacobolus 1268 days ago [-]
Also I have heard multiple youtube videos publicly state (maybe speculatively?) that opting out of mid-roll ads will make Youtube reduce the rate at which their videos are presented to the audience.
The Youtube ad experience has become almost intolerably bad in the past few months. I’m considering just always downloading their videos to my local machine before trying to watch them, even though it’s substantially less convenient.
xbmcuser 1268 days ago [-]
If you watch so much youtube consider paying the monthly subscription that removes ads which you hate supports the content creators which you seem to enjoy. From what I understand content creators make more money from that than ads. Once google gave the option to remove ads by paying for subscription anyone complaining about ads is wrong as now it's now about the ads but you not willing to pay for the content you want to consume.
ekianjo 1268 days ago [-]
Until they introduce ads again for paying subscribers. You never know what they have in store for you in the future when you subscribe.
I use ublock origin on Firefox and have never seen an ad on youtube. No idea why people don't do this. I will probably eventually pay for premium but would be better off just supporting people through patreon directly.
FractalParadigm 1268 days ago [-]
I swear I must be crazy, I've been using uBlock Origin on FF for years now and YouTube ads have never been blocked for me, whether it's Windows, macOS, Android, I always get them.
tortasaur 1268 days ago [-]
You might have disabled some of the default filter lists.
pixl97 1268 days ago [-]
Because only some of us can do this. If too many of us do it Google will work around it.
amf12 1268 days ago [-]
> Because only some of us can do this. If too many of us do it Google will work around it.
How do you expect Google to keep YouTube running if you don't want to watch ads AND also don't want to pay for premium? I understand using adblocker on shitty websites (and you could argue that YouTube is one of those with frequent ads) but then you should pay for premium. Just my 2 cents.
Izkata 1268 days ago [-]
They already have a few times - videos would just not play if an adblocker is enabled. Tends to only last about a week.
ekianjo 1268 days ago [-]
They will, and the day they make you watch 10 ads in a 5 minutes video the viewership will progressively drop to zero.
tobyjsullivan 1268 days ago [-]
Cable television proved this is not true. Viewership will drop to zero when something better comes along - and that something better may or may not have ads. But most people seem to have a very, very high tolerance for watching ads if there's no better option.
vmception 1268 days ago [-]
Which is still good, ad spots are like slots. Google increases the number of slots possible, and content creators choose how many slots they want.
This means more people trying to advertise things can buy those increased numbers of slots which get consumed more frequently and are.
yaboy 1269 days ago [-]
Don’t deflect here. Alphabet benefits as well.
kinkrtyavimoodh 1269 days ago [-]
What's to deflect? Duh that Alphabet benefits as well, it is not running a charity, nor are the content creators who spend countless hours and thousands of dollars creating content. They are doing it because they can profit from it.
It's important to know and point out that the UX of ads is in part chosen by creators.
loosetypes 1269 days ago [-]
I pay for YouTube Premium and find it and, especially, the content on YouTube to be indispensable.
I choose not to log in on my work machine though, and the YouTube experience there leaves me with such a bad taste in my mouth.
Most recently, adds that don’t go away without user input. Ugh.
I’m not ready to cancel my personal Premium subscription, but it does have my considering how I can decouple myself from the platform moving forward.
And yes, Adblock, but not the point here.
munificent 1269 days ago [-]
I'm biased since I work at Google, but, seriously, my YouTube Premium subscription is the most bang for the buck out of everything I subscribe to. My YouTube experience is delightful. I never see ads, and my feed is nothing but wonderfully enriching videos all tailored to my hobbies and interests.
lostsock 1269 days ago [-]
Couldn't agree more. YouTube premium and Google Music for the one price? Works on all of my devices, no ads, and totally seamless. Such good value for money.
Apotheos 1268 days ago [-]
Just a heads up Google Play Music is being shut down, of you have any uploaded music, download it!
mchusma 1268 days ago [-]
It's now youtube music, it's basically the same. Although you can watch videos in it, or just listen to videos as music? It's sort of odd and I half get it (lots of good audio content on youtube if you turn off the video).
So you still get music. But Google's branding strategy here is just odd and confusing. I don't really think they even known how this is going to shake up.
lostmsu 1268 days ago [-]
100% agree, except I don't pay anything and simply use ad blockers.
erklik 1268 days ago [-]
> my feed is nothing but wonderfully enriching videos all tailored to my hobbies and interests
The ad part I agree quite well with. However, I find that Youtube's recommendation algorithm is quite lacking. I mean this is also the case with Netflix and other social media I have used so not just Youtube's fault (only one that sticks out as better is TikTok).
For me, it tends to simply repeatedly recommend way too similar videos. If I somehow happen to watch a video about aa tech review, my feed will be tech reviews and that's it. Heaven forbid I make the mistake of clicking some random political video, and I am now in a hole where my feed is full of right-wing, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists and so on.
In general, it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it. This leads to very a insular and locked-in-your-own-box experience.
GrantZvolsky 1268 days ago [-]
I couldn't agree more. YouTube et al gave me what I can only describe as recommendation anxiety, where I opt not to engage with content solely because I don't want similar content recommended in the future.
munificent 1268 days ago [-]
> Heaven forbid I make the mistake of clicking some random political video, and I am now in a hole where my feed is full of right-wing, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists and so on.
Yeah, every time I click some SNL clip on Reddit, YouTube decides I want all SNL all the time. But I find simply right-clicking a couple and telling it to stop recommending them is very effective at undoing that.
> it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it.
I've observed this too. Sometimes I feels like I have watched every single synthesizer video ever uploaded to YouTube. But I don't consider that an entirely bad thing. There's something to be said for a service with an engagement ceiling. If I find myself scrolling too far down to find an interesting video, that's a good signal that maybe I should get off YouTube and find something better to do.
us0r 1269 days ago [-]
Netflix and YT are hands down the best money I spend each month. I was a little annoyed they made me switch from play to yt music but that's grown on me now too.
GrantZvolsky 1269 days ago [-]
The volume of ads is lower if you're logged in, even without a subscription.
Orphis 1269 days ago [-]
Why don't you have a personal browser profile where you are logged in YT to watch any video?
dylan604 1268 days ago [-]
church and state. separate separate separate. pure and simple. don't do personal anything on corporate anything. BYOD and use your mobile with your personal creds. i don't even connect my personal device to corp wifi.
benhurmarcel 1268 days ago [-]
Youtube Premium is nice but it's priced fairly high. More expensive than a music subscription, just to remove some Youtube ads (it doesn't remove in-video ads, you need to use Sponsorblock for that).
I'd pay for Premium if it didn't come bundled with a music subscription (and the price reflected that).
warrenq 1268 days ago [-]
YouTube videos have a Trillions of hours of worth of videos, many of which of which will potentially change your life.
Comparing it to shitty Music Services is seriously underrepresenting it's value
ggggtez 1269 days ago [-]
I recently watched a 30 minute video on a non-adblocked browser. There was 2 ads every 3 minutes.
It's kind of crazy that this is likely the "normal" experience for millions of people. And that's even without considering how many channels also include "sponsored" content within the videos themselves.
sleepydog 1269 days ago [-]
I think it definitely depends on the channel. Most of the videos I watch only have one or two ads.
What I really hate are the very long ads that you have to skip manually. Sometimes we play something on the TV while we're cooking so we're not by the remote to skip them, and they can be really egregious, like 15 minute ads.
mcaravey 1269 days ago [-]
I had an hour long ad show up a couple of weeks ago. It was basically a film on some health/food product, but I had never seen something so over the top like that before.
dylan604 1268 days ago [-]
This needs to die in a fire. Like the parent comment said, I will sometimes allow ads to play through if I'm away from the remote expecting the actual content to continue after a 30 second interruption. When you suddenly have the "channel" changed on you from something like this it needs to stop. Hell, I can't even listen to a full album in YT without a "are you still here" after 4 or 5 tracks. That "are you still watching" should come up multiple times in the ad by itself. Maybe the popup should be "Are you still watching? Why?"
deeeeplearning 1269 days ago [-]
The iOS app has become unusable for me because of this. Not only are there too many ads but they are so poorly targeted to me that I have to seriously question the capabilities of Google's army of engineers...
ugh123 1269 days ago [-]
That could just be an ad inventory thing. If YT doesn't have a targeted/discrete audience large enough within a campaign window to fill out impressions then they likely widen the net to complete the run.
tpmx 1269 days ago [-]
I think they explicitly choose to run the same ad over and over again for 40-60 times to the same user to force that user to subscribe to Youtube Premium.
(Someone's evil A/B experiment resulted in such a high conversion rate they couldn't stop themselves.)
ugh123 1267 days ago [-]
I think thats certainly in their repertoire too. In fact, they're probably experimenting with a number of degrading user experiences to see what performs best
dylan604 1268 days ago [-]
Just play political ads from whatever candidate over and over. That'll get somebody to make the ads go away.
leesalminen 1268 days ago [-]
I literally converted today because of this. Damn you Dr Squatch soap company.
1268 days ago [-]
davidjnelson 1268 days ago [-]
If people would pay for content we might have less ads...
ugh123 1267 days ago [-]
I wish that were the case. I'm regularly served just as many NYTimes ads as before I became a subscriber.
CydeWeys 1268 days ago [-]
Wait till you see what TV is like these days. Ads everywhere.
phhlho 1269 days ago [-]
Not just more ads, but longer ones as well. We used to use youtube to put nursery songs on in the living room for our kids. All of a sudden we notice it's 15 minutes into an ad for the state of Ohio. So many less interruptions now that we play them off Spotify.
augusto-moura 1269 days ago [-]
I frequently get double ads nowadays, they are really pushing to a Youtube Premium signature
toxik 1269 days ago [-]
Honestly though, why not pay for premium? It’s a little expensive, but it’s a more sustainable ad free streaming. Seems like a win in my book.
Ads are going to be the end of us all if you ask me. Completely perverse incentives. Make people feel bad so they CONSOOM? Dark stuff.
dwaite 1268 days ago [-]
Different from the OP, but Youtube Premium now feels like "we will just make YouTube worse and worse to sell Premium".
Even with all of the pushing toward Premium they have done for me, the only values I even know are "you get the ad blocker experience without installing an ad blocker" and "we stop blocking picture-in-picture support".
I hate that ad blocking causes the channels I watch to not get financial support, but at this point I refuse to let Google be the middle-man and make money off of providing a purposely horrific experience.
CydeWeys 1268 days ago [-]
What if they just stopped the free version entirely and became paid-only like Netflix, Disney+, etc.? There's no reason they have to offer a free tier at all. To the extent that the paid tier makes them more money, I understand why they'd push people onto it.
benhurmarcel 1268 days ago [-]
> What if they just stopped the free version entirely and became paid-only like Netflix, Disney+, etc.?
Those are cheaper than Youtube Premium, for more exclusive content.
warrenq 1268 days ago [-]
Most YouTube videos are also exclusive
sdoering 1269 days ago [-]
I have two Chrome browser personas (actually quite a few more for work reasons, but two I have open permanently). One with adblock the other without (also due to work reasons). If I use yt on the adblock free one I am bombarded by ads. With adblock? All is fine.
saiya-jin 1269 days ago [-]
Exactly this. I never see ads on youtube from my desktop, and I don't use youtube on phone. When a friend wants to show me some youtube video they like on their phone, its always a bit of shock how annoying those ads are. I don't have any premium account, just usual set of blockers.
I've became super allergic to ads generally quite some years ago, not watching any channel on TV, just movies/tv shows streamed from PC. Can't and won't go back, ever.
robotnikman 1269 days ago [-]
I feel the same way about being 'allergic' to ads. In contrast, when my friend watches youtube on the TV, he is bombarded by ads and doesn't seem to care at all.
I don't mind the premium to pay for ad free youtube. Also the free Play Music (RIP)
TheGallopedHigh 1269 days ago [-]
I would recommend Firefox focus for mobile. When navigating to the YouTube site I experience no ads.
babesh 1269 days ago [-]
They will “optimize” for more ads till people stop going to YouTube for videos. As shown by search, Facebook, etc that limit is far, far higher than people expect. I am not sure if any of them have reached the limit yet.
microtherion 1269 days ago [-]
And they still don't seem to have given up the hope that I'll sign up for the YouTube f&*&(ing Music trial one day. Won't you have some dignity, Google?
sniperjzp 1269 days ago [-]
So many people complain about the mount of Ads, or the quality of Ads, but don't forget there's YT Premium. There's no free lunch, creators also need to feed their family. (it's your choice to use adblocker anyway)
NoodleIncident 1269 days ago [-]
If you only care about the creator's cut, sending them the cost of one month of premium directly would vastly outweigh any loss from your use of adblock. It's probably not even a dollar, across all the time you've watched their videos.
Now, does youtube also deserve a cut? Probably, that's up to you. I'm just tired of the guilt trips.
drewg123 1269 days ago [-]
I always thought creators made roughly as much or more from the promos they embed in the videos. See the LTT video about how they make money: https://youtu.be/-zt57TWkTF4?t=505
The time code takes you to a pie chart breaking down their revenue. YT ads are 26% and in-video promos are 27%
3guk 1269 days ago [-]
It frustrates me that they still haven’t figured out that perhaps a users language is not tied to their IP address and that perhaps other indicators should be considered.
Whilst I hate adverts - it seems like a waste of both advertiser spend and my time, to show me adverts that I do not understand....
kinkrtyavimoodh 1269 days ago [-]
Google makes ads generic: "Google is so dumb it doesn't even know my language"
Google infers your language and other information about you and serves specific ads: "omg Google is so creepy."
gerash 1269 days ago [-]
If they get too efficient with signals folks are going to push back because ads become too targeted and feels their privacy is at risk.
I personally feel the best solutions are either ad-free services that are paid for either one time or through a subscription.
If something is ad supported, then the way to guarantee privacy is to take a pool of candidate ads from an ad network and rank them locally based on a personal profile stored locally as well and pick the top ad to display. These locally stored personal profiles need to be also synced across personal devices with automatic merge conflict resolution.
As you can see it requires quite a bit of infrastructure that doesn't seem to exist
ogre_codes 1269 days ago [-]
I don't know, I'd almost prefer that. Gives you an easy signal to ignore.
3stripe 1269 days ago [-]
Tip for avoiding them (on my
Samsung TV anyway) - if you see 2 ads queued... hit back, then play again... often you get just 1 ad or even none at all on the second play
qz2 1269 days ago [-]
Yes. It got so bad it drove me to youtube-dl. No irony there.
benhurmarcel 1268 days ago [-]
If you're on desktop you can just install a couple of browser extensions (uBlock and Sponsorblock).
qz2 1268 days ago [-]
Yeah. I like to watch them on my phone in bed though. So I use youtube-dl and VLC.
no_one_ever 1269 days ago [-]
I have straight up gotten a 3 hour ad that was just a lo-fi beat mix but it was an advertisement! What??
mft_ 1269 days ago [-]
In amongst a music playlist I was served an ad that was (I think) a full Jeff Buckley song (or someone that sounded very much like him).
Made me wonder if someone had found a loophole and was somehow making money from it?
redorb 1269 days ago [-]
I had this happen - but I chalked it up to a punishment for using ad block, .. I got youtube premium for free when I bought Google Music (which is now youtube music?) ... it was a fair bundle for $10, all the music I want and no ads on youtube to boot ...
If they de-couple them I don't know if either is worth $10/mo indivdually.
augusto-moura 1269 days ago [-]
Lofi hiphpop radios got too far
steveklabnik 1269 days ago [-]
Pepsi, or something else?
tracer4201 1269 days ago [-]
Some of the channels I watch have so many ads that it reminds me of cable. Quite frankly I already have HBO and Netflix. If I also pay for YouTube and maybe even Disney Plus, it feels almost like paying as much as I paid for cable, except I also have to pay for faster internet — so at the end of the day, I’m not sure if I’m really better off as a consumer.
I’ve stopped using YouTube because of the crazy ads. And we tried Hulu but the forced ads were enough to have us immediately cancel the free trial. Thanks but no thanks.
halflings 1269 days ago [-]
> I’ve stopped using YouTube because of the crazy ads.
Why not pay for YouTube Premium?
At the end of the day, you need to pay in some way to fund the creators making new videos for you to enjoy (+ YouTube for hosting one of the biggest services on the internet).
cobookman 1269 days ago [-]
You still have ads with YT Premium. Most creators place multi-minute ads in their content.
pengaru 1269 days ago [-]
In case you haven't noticed, most youtube content is marketing something.
Sometimes it feels like the overt ads trivially overcome by adblockers or youtube-dl are there just to be something extremely obnoxious you can circumvent and feel relief from while still consuming marketing that is only made desirable by contrast.
ByteJockey 1268 days ago [-]
Is this a shot at the ads being the majority of the content these days, or are you just watching kinda shitty channels?
Orphis 1269 days ago [-]
They're quite easy to skip on most content. Some even put a "loading bar" to easily identify when it's going to end.
d1zzy 1269 days ago [-]
So the content creator has decided to insert their own ad inside their content resulting in a worse user experience (since you seem to be complaining about it). Should Youtube ban in-content third-party ads?
cobookman 1269 days ago [-]
I believe YT makes a cut of this ad rev. It's also much harder for ad blockers to block these kinds of ads.
So why would YT block it?
halflings 1266 days ago [-]
How would YouTube take a cut of this ad revenue? It's not disclosed anywhere on the YouTube platform.
rajup 1269 days ago [-]
I think you mean sponsored content which is not quite the same as ads/
cobookman 1269 days ago [-]
When you're watching a video and there's a ~1min segment on squarespace...etc, its an ad.
lotsofpulp 1269 days ago [-]
>I’m not sure if I’m really better off as a consumer.
You can at least watch what you want when you want.
CydeWeys 1268 days ago [-]
And there's a lot more available stuff to watch now than ever before thanks to the likes of YouTube. I'm into some seriously obscure historical warfare stuff that no one has ever made a proper TV show about, but all it takes is one antique weapons dealer/HEMA practitioner YouTuber who already researches all this stuff anyway and you've got many hours of stuff to watch.
fossuser 1269 days ago [-]
And when you pay there's no ads (hulu has two options, but one is ad-free).
That's the biggest bit - with cable you pay a ton and still have to watch a crazy amount of ads.
I will never pay for a service that includes ads even if you pay.
lotsofpulp 1269 days ago [-]
I notice all the media that says no ads just included it as product placement. Sometimes it’s hidden well enough, but most time it’s a jarring shot of a logo or they talk about the product in a non natural way that takes you out of the story.
tracer4201 1269 days ago [-]
I don’t know. I really liked the Boys on Amazon Prime. Except they now release one episode at a time. And Disney did the same thing with the Mandalorian. So yeah - I can’t binge watch new series. Watch anytime is more like a DVR feature.
Netflix has other problems. If there’s one or two seasons of a show, you don’t know if the show had a proper ending or if it was just cancelled.
JakeTheAndroid 1269 days ago [-]
I personally don't mind not getting the entire season at once. While I do want to binge, I also like the delayed gratification you get from watching a series spread out. Part of the reason I want to binge everything is because there is no new content. It's self defeating insofar that new content becomes old the same day it comes out.
And for a production company, churning through years of work in a day only to start demanding a second season has to be rough. I can't imagine it's helped studios in terms of timelines.
lotsofpulp 1269 days ago [-]
You have the entire back catalog. Obviously if something hasn't been released yet, then you can't watch it. If you wait until the episodes are released, then you can binge watch it.
That situation is unchanged from cable days.
And the Netflix issue is also unchanged from cable days.
My point is being able to click on something or search it and watch it is most definitely better than flipping channels and dealing with tv schedules and all that crap.
brianwawok 1269 days ago [-]
Start the series the day before the last episode? I purposefully didn’t watch game of thrones until like the 4th season.
Consultant32452 1268 days ago [-]
It's an election year. I've heard multiple youtubers remark that the election ads have been a big revenue boost.
firecall 1269 days ago [-]
And yet earnings for YouTubers through ads have declined!
Apparently.
To the best of my knowledge anyway, and my own limited direct experience :-)
jarenmf 1269 days ago [-]
Kodi on Tv, NewPipe on the phone, I would have tolerated some ads if there weren't so intrusive
drewg123 1269 days ago [-]
NewPipe works on the TV too, if its AndroidTV based..
alexpetralia 1269 days ago [-]
Yes it is the first time the YouTube experience has become noticeably unusable for me.
blibble 1269 days ago [-]
youtube has ads?
augusto-moura 1269 days ago [-]
If you are using desktop and a adblock probably not, but if you are using the mobile app...
janhenr 1269 days ago [-]
LPT: firefox on mobile allows you to install extensions such as ublock
arminiusreturns 1269 days ago [-]
Thank goodness for Newpipe, even if they get broken way too often in between updates.
babas 1269 days ago [-]
If you use Android Youtube Vanced is really awesome. Removes ads and has function for skipping in-video annoyances (sponsors, intros, etc)
Seems really cool but it doesn't look open source, there's any security guarantees within the app? I'm really paranoid of where a put my Google account credentials
babas 1269 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure it's modded version of the official youtube app so no guarantees (Just use a dummy account?).
I'm actually very interested in how the vanced developer has made this. This app is pretty much identical to the youtube app with premium features enabled and ad/sponsor bocking/skipping.
city41 1268 days ago [-]
I never log into YT on any device. I still get great recommendations and easily stay on top of my favorite channels. IMO the only benefit to logging in is being able to comment.
frank2 1268 days ago [-]
--and access to my viewing history and ability to add easily a video to my "watch later" list.
blibble 1269 days ago [-]
I use a second account just for it
they're free to steal it if they want
Bjartr 1269 days ago [-]
Even then if you pay for YT Premium / YT Music
takeda 1269 days ago [-]
there are solutions to that too
orliesaurus 1269 days ago [-]
Well, not everyone runs an adblocker!
marta_morena_28 1269 days ago [-]
Sad for them. Seeing Youtube on mobile makes me gag each time. There is more ads than content, how can anyone actually bear this?
petercooper 1269 days ago [-]
Agreed, but I pay for YouTube Premium. Now it's one of the last things I would cancel. Instant videos on every single device I own including TV.
What about the content creators dedicating intro/mid/outro to sponsors?
skocznymroczny 1268 days ago [-]
Do these dedications really help sales? I mean these kind of endorsements are so obviously fake, you know the content creator isn't using the product at all and is just reading the script.
datguacdoh 1268 days ago [-]
double tap to fast forward on mobile is the best feature; reminds me of the 30sec skip I had on my TiVO a decade ago. I tend to jump past the monologues that all creators seem to have nowadays.
elcomet 1268 days ago [-]
Until youtube adds a feature that enables creators to choose unskippable sections of the video, and sponsors will require this from youtubers.
lotsofpulp 1269 days ago [-]
It's amazing to me that anyone on this site would not be using ublock Origin or content blockers in ios/macos.
missblit 1269 days ago [-]
I'm not using any ad-blockers. Ask Me Anything.
smabie 1268 days ago [-]
How do you maintain the will to live?
irrational 1269 days ago [-]
Other than not knowing about them, why would anyone not use an adblocker?
Kiro 1269 days ago [-]
Your question is a bait since any sincere answer to that always gets downvoted. However, I've stopped caring so here goes:
I don't mind ads and have found many things I've bought through ads.
I don't want the page I'm visiting tampered with.
I want to experience the site exactly like it was designed, ads included.
I like to keep up with ad trends.
I'm afraid stuff will break and that I get a suboptimal experience without me even realizing it.
I want to support creators and certain sites.
I pay for YouTube Premium so not an issue there.
skummetmaelk 1269 days ago [-]
> I want to experience the site exactly like it was designed, ads included
> I like to keep up with ad trends
Do you work in advertising by any chance?
CydeWeys 1268 days ago [-]
I would guess website design/front-end development. If that's something you do on your site then you'd definitely want to see what it looks like on others.
Kiro 1268 days ago [-]
Yeah, you nailed it. I'm a front-end developer.
ogre_codes 1269 days ago [-]
> I want to support creators and certain sites.
Well at least we can all agree on this one thing. How we get there without dealing with sites that load slowly, look like hell, and track me wherever I go is the big question.
recursive 1269 days ago [-]
I think ad-blockers are bad for the web. Their proliferation will create an arms race that will end in more DRM.
That's my reason.
1268 days ago [-]
city41 1268 days ago [-]
I primarily watch YouTube on my TV via a Roku. It's probably possible to jailbreak it and install an ad free YT app, but that's beyond what I'm willing to do.
1269 days ago [-]
bittercynic 1269 days ago [-]
Some people feel that exposure to the ads is worth it to help the people who make videos.
It seems to me the ads do a dollar's worth of damage to the viewer while only giving a penny of benefit to the author.
actuator 1269 days ago [-]
Personal observations:
- No mention of YT subscription revenue? Does that mean it is low. Considering Netflix success, I am assuming there is a lot of ground to be gained there.
- GCP revenue at $3B seems quite low compared to even what MS reported. Their cloud(Azure + office?) revenue was $16B if I am not mistaken
- Dip in capital expenditure from $7 to $5 billion. I am assuming GCP and data center expansion went fine, but a lot of office related costs have been reduced.
Does that includes Youtube Music? Or is that a completely separate user count?
Spotify seems to be doing rather well in tough competition, I am happy :)
halflings 1269 days ago [-]
YouTube Premium covers both ad-free YouTube viewing and YouTube Music. (so that number is likely for both)
notatoad 1269 days ago [-]
you can't get a paid youtube music account without youtube premium, so i'd assume that the premium subscription numbers include all the music subscribers too.
mcintyre1994 1269 days ago [-]
FWIW AWS just reported $11.6 billion, so I'm guessing a big chunk of that MS cloud is Office. If they were very close to AWS with Azure alone then I think they'd split it out?
notyourwork 1269 days ago [-]
How much is office and how much Azure? I presume that’s a big part of the difference.
Regarding YT, it’s a different service than Netflix so not as comparable IMO.
actuator 1269 days ago [-]
YT is certainly different than Netflix but I would put YT above Netflix on potential.
I think YT is much more valuable to human civilization in general. If we consider it as a knowledge bank which has everything from learning a new recipe to something as specific as operating a drill to empowering content like lecture videos on coursework. Recently I saw professional quality BBC like nature documentaries on YT.
The importance of it is far more and that's why I think the subscription revenue potential is also far more.
Whether they can convince people to go ad free and pay for it is a different matter. My friend who pays for Apple Music, Netflix, Disney+, iCloud and a bunch of other subscriptions was complaining about YT ads. It boggled my mind that considering his usage, he didn't pay for the premium plan.
uniqueid 1269 days ago [-]
YT is much more valuable to human civilization in general
Netflix might be a safer bet, for that reason. I think many people, including people with standing and influence, would prefer Earth's public repository of historical video not be under the control of one amoral, ad-driven monopoly.
Netflix still has competitors, and the stakes are lower.
warrenq 1269 days ago [-]
sure, let me know when you can learn programming, build a house, fix a car, decide which product to buy, or some of the greatest interviews and infinitely many things that are only on YT.
Bottomline, people who don't like YouTube are seriously underutilizing it's potential to change your life, make money, learn something
uniqueid 1268 days ago [-]
"people who don't like YouTube"
Whether people like Youtube isn't that relevant to my comment. The argument for breaking up Bell's monopoly in the 1980s wasn't "I dislike telephony"
1_player 1268 days ago [-]
You have been shadow-banned, though your comment history is mostly OK. You might want to contact HN so they have a look at it.
For now I've restored your comment, I can't do much more than that.
1268 days ago [-]
lokar 1269 days ago [-]
I think it's safe to assume that Office is much much more than Azure, or they would break it out to look better.
marcinzm 1269 days ago [-]
Does GCP revenue include G-Suite subscriptions?
edit: Googling indicates it does which would means like Azure you don't know how much is from GCP vs. office suite.
elorant 1269 days ago [-]
Microsoft has a strong foothold in corporate services. Google will need decades to build something similar, if ever.
nogabebop23 1269 days ago [-]
Google will need to learn what customer service is to get any traction in corporate land. I can get decent support from an actual person with a single MS subscription. With google for business we can't even get an email address.
kenhwang 1269 days ago [-]
More importantly, they need to understand legacy support and deprecation. AWS and MS have seller track records on backwards compatibility and EOL policies, while Google's feels worse than a garage startup at times.
secondo 1269 days ago [-]
Yes, and that’s what they’re doing through education with Chromebooks.
stingraycharles 1269 days ago [-]
Education with Chromebooks is their strategy to get a foothold in corporate services? Seriously?
I can’t tell if this is a joke or serious.
thomasrognon 1269 days ago [-]
Wasn't that a large part of Microsoft's strategy? I remember taking an "IT" class in high school in the early 00's that was 100% focused on learning MS Office. People bring what they know into the workplace.
colinmhayes 1268 days ago [-]
It absolutely is. I started using google suite in 5th grade when my school district gave everyone an account. There's effectively 0 chance of me switching to Microsoft now. They're creating life long customers before the customers are able to think for themselves.
numbsafari 1269 days ago [-]
It’s a disaster though, honestly. Their partners are not very good and the support is really weak from Google. And ChromeOS, as much as I wanted to love it, just isn’t very polished. I spent a year with it and really found it lacking.
The volume purchasing story is a mess when compared to Apple’s offering.
martin_bech 1269 days ago [-]
My kids school has chromebooks, but according to the kids, they are always out of power, and they suck, so all the kids bring their own iPad instead.
numbsafari 1269 days ago [-]
The Chrome Enterprise sales team basically forced us to work with a third-party reseller. I won't name them, because they were nice enough folks, and it's not their fault that Google hates their customers.
The forums for the reseller were full of school IT folks trying to figure out how to provision hundreds of machines at a time. You can pay the reseller $15/device to have them do it, but it adds and indeterminate delay in receiving your devices. Many of the staffers were talking about having in-service days where they brought in as many teachers and staff as they could get to do the provisioning part. Ridiculous.
I know a lot of people are upset about the changes that Apple is making to "lock down" Mac OS. However, in my opinion, the more Apple makes Mac OS locked down like Chrome OS, the better. Leave VMs as the "escape valve" for developers who need a CLI or POXIS apps. Parallels and VMware are a better, and more consistent experience than Mac OS anyway.
In an enterprise environment, Apple Business Manager volume purchasing hooked up with a device management solution like JAMF is just a no-brainer. The hardware is far more reliable, the purchasing and provisioning are dead simple, and there's no third-party resellers unless you really want to work with one.
ed. Also, ChromeOS is still lacking critical productivity tools. Someday we'll get there, but not just yet.
dmead 1269 days ago [-]
it's not that low. GCP is a distant third, nothing surprising there.
jhatax 1269 days ago [-]
Revenue growth across the board: advertising (YouTube) and other properties, Google Cloud leading the charge.
Based on Pinterest, FB earnings (and Twitter soon), it looks like ad sales have rebounded in a strong way.
actuator 1269 days ago [-]
I wonder what's replacing the ads from travel(hotels, flights, packages).
Stock seems 6% up after hours, that does make sense. It had relatively gained less compared to FB from pandemic lows.
pgoggijr 1269 days ago [-]
My youtube experience has consisted of about 50% political ads for a while now - would be interesting to see some insights into their total share of the pie.
jeffbee 1269 days ago [-]
The experience of ads on youtube must be misery. A YouTube sub is the best $15 you can spend.
eznzt 1269 days ago [-]
Or an ad blocker...
Nemant 1269 days ago [-]
They don't work, do they? I tried a few but nothing works. I'm on Chrome on Mac.
gpm 1268 days ago [-]
Unlock origin works for me, on chrome and firefox, Linux and windows.
1268 days ago [-]
andrewprock 1269 days ago [-]
You must live in a swing state. I get zero political ads in CA.
strulovich 1269 days ago [-]
Some people not in swing states such as I are getting endless ads to donate to campaigns.
mwambua 1269 days ago [-]
I've gotten quite a few political ads in the last few weeks. (CA with ad personalization turned off)
pgoggijr 1269 days ago [-]
I'm in New Jersey which is pretty consistently and firmly blue. Hammered with ads from both sides.
takeda 1269 days ago [-]
You don't get ads asking for donation?
CA appears to be politicians' (from both parties) ATM.
lern_too_spel 1269 days ago [-]
Proposition 22 ads everywhere.
grandmczeb 1269 days ago [-]
I just opened the YT app and a Joe Biden ad is literally the first thing I see at the top. I’m in CA.
1269 days ago [-]
city41 1268 days ago [-]
And it seems the number of ads has increased a good deal. I tend to get a 2 ad block about every 4-6 minutes now.
elorant 1269 days ago [-]
I wonder what's replacing the ads from travel(hotels, flights, packages).
e-commerce, cooking apparatus and whatnot. Tupperware's stock has increased x15 since May. People spending more time at home leads them to cook and store food more often.
SpicyLemonZest 1269 days ago [-]
Although it's worth noting that Tupperware is also an MLM, so a lot of that 15x might not have much to do with their products as such.
howlgarnish 1268 days ago [-]
Comparison of the big three cloud players' earnings:
MS "Intelligent Cloud" $13.0B (Azure up 48% YoY but not broken out, rest is "server and cloud services" up 22% YoY)
AWS: $10.8B (up 28% YoY)
Google Cloud: $3.4B (up 45% YoY), includes Workspace (fka G Suite)
TL;DR: AWS is still #1, but Azure is catching up fast and Google is growing faster too.
donor20 1268 days ago [-]
Half of the GCP revenue may be workspaces / gsuite - which would make GCP tiny by comparison to AWS. I'm really surprised at how low those numbers are for google cloud.
oyra 1269 days ago [-]
so how much revenue of this 'tech' giant come from the tech? 1% or 1.4%?
gigatexal 1269 days ago [-]
Anyone spot the line item where they pay Apple the billions for default placement on iOS?
gundmc 1269 days ago [-]
I'm not sure if you're just trying to stir the pot, but it's included as TAC (traffic acquisition costs) and has clearly been reported every quarter for years.
totalZero 1269 days ago [-]
Pretty sure it's just an attempt to stir the pot. The user made a similar comment on the submission for Apple's earnings.
Not trying to stir the pot just not so great at reading financial statements. Seriously not trolling here I was merely trying to verify the news headlines in the financials
donor20 1268 days ago [-]
The news is making a big deal about "secret" traffic aquisition costs - but the financials have covered these costs in a lot of detail over time - so it's not really new news. All the other players do / have done the same thing.
Bing is probably paying Duck Duck Go? Yahoo may have paid mozilla for firefox traffic etc.
Rendered at 12:58:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006
The reality is it takes so much time and energy to produce content and the bar is high that creators make it their full time jobs.
So either, they have YouTube monetization with ads or they do in-video ad rolls, "sponsored by Squarespace", yadda yadds. Or they literally include some product into their video and it acts as a hidden ad because they generate a story around that product.
https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1280566684483543043
This is of course an old classic with anything Google: yes, you can "opt out", but expect your choice to randomly reset at the whim of a PM looking to show "traction".
The Youtube ad experience has become almost intolerably bad in the past few months. I’m considering just always downloading their videos to my local machine before trying to watch them, even though it’s substantially less convenient.
How do you expect Google to keep YouTube running if you don't want to watch ads AND also don't want to pay for premium? I understand using adblocker on shitty websites (and you could argue that YouTube is one of those with frequent ads) but then you should pay for premium. Just my 2 cents.
This means more people trying to advertise things can buy those increased numbers of slots which get consumed more frequently and are.
It's important to know and point out that the UX of ads is in part chosen by creators.
I choose not to log in on my work machine though, and the YouTube experience there leaves me with such a bad taste in my mouth.
Most recently, adds that don’t go away without user input. Ugh.
I’m not ready to cancel my personal Premium subscription, but it does have my considering how I can decouple myself from the platform moving forward.
And yes, Adblock, but not the point here.
So you still get music. But Google's branding strategy here is just odd and confusing. I don't really think they even known how this is going to shake up.
The ad part I agree quite well with. However, I find that Youtube's recommendation algorithm is quite lacking. I mean this is also the case with Netflix and other social media I have used so not just Youtube's fault (only one that sticks out as better is TikTok).
For me, it tends to simply repeatedly recommend way too similar videos. If I somehow happen to watch a video about aa tech review, my feed will be tech reviews and that's it. Heaven forbid I make the mistake of clicking some random political video, and I am now in a hole where my feed is full of right-wing, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists and so on.
In general, it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it. This leads to very a insular and locked-in-your-own-box experience.
Yeah, every time I click some SNL clip on Reddit, YouTube decides I want all SNL all the time. But I find simply right-clicking a couple and telling it to stop recommending them is very effective at undoing that.
> it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it.
I've observed this too. Sometimes I feels like I have watched every single synthesizer video ever uploaded to YouTube. But I don't consider that an entirely bad thing. There's something to be said for a service with an engagement ceiling. If I find myself scrolling too far down to find an interesting video, that's a good signal that maybe I should get off YouTube and find something better to do.
I'd pay for Premium if it didn't come bundled with a music subscription (and the price reflected that).
It's kind of crazy that this is likely the "normal" experience for millions of people. And that's even without considering how many channels also include "sponsored" content within the videos themselves.
What I really hate are the very long ads that you have to skip manually. Sometimes we play something on the TV while we're cooking so we're not by the remote to skip them, and they can be really egregious, like 15 minute ads.
(Someone's evil A/B experiment resulted in such a high conversion rate they couldn't stop themselves.)
Ads are going to be the end of us all if you ask me. Completely perverse incentives. Make people feel bad so they CONSOOM? Dark stuff.
Even with all of the pushing toward Premium they have done for me, the only values I even know are "you get the ad blocker experience without installing an ad blocker" and "we stop blocking picture-in-picture support".
I hate that ad blocking causes the channels I watch to not get financial support, but at this point I refuse to let Google be the middle-man and make money off of providing a purposely horrific experience.
Those are cheaper than Youtube Premium, for more exclusive content.
I've became super allergic to ads generally quite some years ago, not watching any channel on TV, just movies/tv shows streamed from PC. Can't and won't go back, ever.
I don't mind the premium to pay for ad free youtube. Also the free Play Music (RIP)
Now, does youtube also deserve a cut? Probably, that's up to you. I'm just tired of the guilt trips.
The time code takes you to a pie chart breaking down their revenue. YT ads are 26% and in-video promos are 27%
Whilst I hate adverts - it seems like a waste of both advertiser spend and my time, to show me adverts that I do not understand....
Google infers your language and other information about you and serves specific ads: "omg Google is so creepy."
I personally feel the best solutions are either ad-free services that are paid for either one time or through a subscription.
If something is ad supported, then the way to guarantee privacy is to take a pool of candidate ads from an ad network and rank them locally based on a personal profile stored locally as well and pick the top ad to display. These locally stored personal profiles need to be also synced across personal devices with automatic merge conflict resolution.
As you can see it requires quite a bit of infrastructure that doesn't seem to exist
Made me wonder if someone had found a loophole and was somehow making money from it?
If they de-couple them I don't know if either is worth $10/mo indivdually.
I’ve stopped using YouTube because of the crazy ads. And we tried Hulu but the forced ads were enough to have us immediately cancel the free trial. Thanks but no thanks.
Why not pay for YouTube Premium? At the end of the day, you need to pay in some way to fund the creators making new videos for you to enjoy (+ YouTube for hosting one of the biggest services on the internet).
Sometimes it feels like the overt ads trivially overcome by adblockers or youtube-dl are there just to be something extremely obnoxious you can circumvent and feel relief from while still consuming marketing that is only made desirable by contrast.
So why would YT block it?
You can at least watch what you want when you want.
That's the biggest bit - with cable you pay a ton and still have to watch a crazy amount of ads.
I will never pay for a service that includes ads even if you pay.
Netflix has other problems. If there’s one or two seasons of a show, you don’t know if the show had a proper ending or if it was just cancelled.
And for a production company, churning through years of work in a day only to start demanding a second season has to be rough. I can't imagine it's helped studios in terms of timelines.
That situation is unchanged from cable days.
And the Netflix issue is also unchanged from cable days.
My point is being able to click on something or search it and watch it is most definitely better than flipping channels and dealing with tv schedules and all that crap.
Apparently.
To the best of my knowledge anyway, and my own limited direct experience :-)
https://vancedapp.com/
I'm actually very interested in how the vanced developer has made this. This app is pretty much identical to the youtube app with premium features enabled and ad/sponsor bocking/skipping.
they're free to steal it if they want
I don't mind ads and have found many things I've bought through ads.
I don't want the page I'm visiting tampered with.
I want to experience the site exactly like it was designed, ads included.
I like to keep up with ad trends.
I'm afraid stuff will break and that I get a suboptimal experience without me even realizing it.
I want to support creators and certain sites.
I pay for YouTube Premium so not an issue there.
> I like to keep up with ad trends
Do you work in advertising by any chance?
Well at least we can all agree on this one thing. How we get there without dealing with sites that load slowly, look like hell, and track me wherever I go is the big question.
That's my reason.
It seems to me the ads do a dollar's worth of damage to the viewer while only giving a penny of benefit to the author.
- No mention of YT subscription revenue? Does that mean it is low. Considering Netflix success, I am assuming there is a lot of ground to be gained there.
- GCP revenue at $3B seems quite low compared to even what MS reported. Their cloud(Azure + office?) revenue was $16B if I am not mistaken
- Dip in capital expenditure from $7 to $5 billion. I am assuming GCP and data center expansion went fine, but a lot of office related costs have been reduced.
Spotify seems to be doing rather well in tough competition, I am happy :)
Regarding YT, it’s a different service than Netflix so not as comparable IMO.
I think YT is much more valuable to human civilization in general. If we consider it as a knowledge bank which has everything from learning a new recipe to something as specific as operating a drill to empowering content like lecture videos on coursework. Recently I saw professional quality BBC like nature documentaries on YT.
The importance of it is far more and that's why I think the subscription revenue potential is also far more.
Whether they can convince people to go ad free and pay for it is a different matter. My friend who pays for Apple Music, Netflix, Disney+, iCloud and a bunch of other subscriptions was complaining about YT ads. It boggled my mind that considering his usage, he didn't pay for the premium plan.
Netflix still has competitors, and the stakes are lower.
Bottomline, people who don't like YouTube are seriously underutilizing it's potential to change your life, make money, learn something
For now I've restored your comment, I can't do much more than that.
edit: Googling indicates it does which would means like Azure you don't know how much is from GCP vs. office suite.
I can’t tell if this is a joke or serious.
The volume purchasing story is a mess when compared to Apple’s offering.
The forums for the reseller were full of school IT folks trying to figure out how to provision hundreds of machines at a time. You can pay the reseller $15/device to have them do it, but it adds and indeterminate delay in receiving your devices. Many of the staffers were talking about having in-service days where they brought in as many teachers and staff as they could get to do the provisioning part. Ridiculous.
I know a lot of people are upset about the changes that Apple is making to "lock down" Mac OS. However, in my opinion, the more Apple makes Mac OS locked down like Chrome OS, the better. Leave VMs as the "escape valve" for developers who need a CLI or POXIS apps. Parallels and VMware are a better, and more consistent experience than Mac OS anyway.
In an enterprise environment, Apple Business Manager volume purchasing hooked up with a device management solution like JAMF is just a no-brainer. The hardware is far more reliable, the purchasing and provisioning are dead simple, and there's no third-party resellers unless you really want to work with one.
ed. Also, ChromeOS is still lacking critical productivity tools. Someday we'll get there, but not just yet.
Based on Pinterest, FB earnings (and Twitter soon), it looks like ad sales have rebounded in a strong way.
Stock seems 6% up after hours, that does make sense. It had relatively gained less compared to FB from pandemic lows.
CA appears to be politicians' (from both parties) ATM.
e-commerce, cooking apparatus and whatnot. Tupperware's stock has increased x15 since May. People spending more time at home leads them to cook and store food more often.
MS "Intelligent Cloud" $13.0B (Azure up 48% YoY but not broken out, rest is "server and cloud services" up 22% YoY)
AWS: $10.8B (up 28% YoY)
Google Cloud: $3.4B (up 45% YoY), includes Workspace (fka G Suite)
TL;DR: AWS is still #1, but Azure is catching up fast and Google is growing faster too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24936191
Bing is probably paying Duck Duck Go? Yahoo may have paid mozilla for firefox traffic etc.