Was it easier, 10 years ago, to make money from a website, with just one single (non-animated) banner on top, than it is today with a website that's plastered with animated banners, link ads, and other stuff?
Was it easier, 10 years ago, to make money from a video platform, with just one single skip-able ad at the start of each video - than it is today with 10 un-skip-able ads in front of each video?
Was it easier to advertise your business 100 years ago, with a single poster on a street corner - than it is today with a huge ad-campaign consisting of TV-, Radio- and Newspaper-Ads?
The big question to me is: Does advertising become less and less effective the more people are exposed to advertisements?
Advertisers are measuring the actual effectiveness of their ads, and paying for that only. Therefore falling effectiveness means falling prices and you have to increase the quantity of ads, to earn the same money (and achieve the same effect) as before.
But increased quantity means people are exposed to even more ads, which means they become even less effective. Which leads to even lower prices and even higher quantity.
This can't go on forever... at some point the loss of effectiveness is going to be larger than what you can possibly make up for by increasing quantity. And there's an upper limit - you can't push quantity above 60 minutes of ads per hour.
This can only end with all users either signing up for premium, leaving the service all-together, or using ad-blockers. In all three cases, the ad-business looses.
Are we witnessing the slow death of (online) advertising?
Look at shows from the past, a "1 hour" program used to consist of what, 52 minutes? I know it's crept from 48 minutes to 42 last I checked.
I even remember reading about online advertising going on 20 years ago - the industry was adding animated or flashing ads - anything to get attention (which saw the rise of ad blockers) and the conventional wisdom was that viewers were like cockroaches; you spray them with a new formula, but eventually they become resistant so you've got to try something else.
If I remember correctly, when I went to university 20+ years ago, "animation blindness" was already a coined term. The idea is, that you can't use animated buttons or icons on your website, because people have become condition to completely ignore anything that moves, and consider it NOT part of the website. So if you do have an animated button, you risk that people will miss that, because anything that looks like an ad becomes sorta invisible to most.
Youtube will converge to something similar if they want to keep their monopoly status.
I also wonder:
- does the overhead cost due to the complexity of advertising (tooling, people, ...) weigh up against the benefits?
- isn't tracking and personalization meant to lead to a decrease in quantity and an increase in quality (in the eyes of the advertiser)? And doesn't that mean that the price of an ad placement should be going up instead of down, because the publisher can offer exactly the audience the advertiser wants?
It can't but all go up in flames one day. Or at least, that's my hope.
After all, ads are intentionally designed to drive compulsion and to manipulate your (purchase) behavior. And personalized advertising is all about knowing and exploiting everyone's weaknesses for more effective manipulations, isn't it?
few ads -> excessive ads -> ad-free options -> repeat
I think so. I don't believe it will die completely, but it will crash big time.
Note there are significant uncertainties in measuring the effectiveness of ads. Measuring click-through rate is comparatively easy, measuring things like brand-recognition doable, measuring how much a specific ad or campaign influences purchasing decisions is quite a hurdle. Predicting it even harder.
There have been success stories, but online, especially "personalized", ads might have been somewhat of a bubble. Appearing better than they are?
Even if the price adjustments lag significantly behind the actual decrease in effectiveness - the loss of effectiveness will still drive down prices.
As for personalized ads - I think the worst is still to come. Right now, most it is just about looking at a person's profile to decide which ad to show to them. But we are getting close to ML being used to actually create individual ads, optimized for each respective viewer.
Hope springs eternal, but we could also be witnessing the Bladerunner/Transmetropolitanization of advertising.
This would imply signing-in. I don't sign in and reset the cookies regularly because I don't want my history tracked and suggestions personalized.
But Okay, I would sign-in and pay, if every video page had a download button and the whole thing would give me an API exposing all the features reliably (so I could use it easily in 3-rd party players with search and suggestions).
I am genuinely curious, how do you find videos worth your time without recommendations? 99.9% of what’s on YouTube I have zero interest in, the recommendation engine is how I cull the noise and actually find things to watch.
YouTube is the only Google service that I haven't stopped using entirely. Getting rid of it would be good, but there isn't anything else I've found that can really replace it.
For me, its way overpriced, considering they are not creating any of the content and it doesn't actually cover all ads.
That's not true at all. I've been paying for Premium for over a year, and I can say with certainty that I have seen zero ads placed by YouTube. The only ones I've seen are ones creators put in themselves.
But most people who use ublock origin use firefox as it is the most effective browser for ublock.
[1] https://github.com/yattee/yattee [2] https://adguard.com/en/blog/how-to-add-a-shortcut-to-block-y...
While you're at it you may as well add Nitter [3] to make (a read-only version but who wants to write on) Twitter more palatable and, again, light enough to not choke out less endowed hardware. For Reddit there is libreddit [4], again read-only.
These three are written in newish trendy languages and as such can also be used to evaluate their pro's and con's. Invidious is written in Crystal ("compiled Ruby", sort-of), Nitter in Nim (Python-like syntax, compiles/transpiles to C/C++/Javascript), libreddit in Rust (no introduction needed...).
[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[2] Since I do not have a Youtube/Google/Alphabet account and as such never tried to subscribe to anything I can't prove the veracity of this practice but I keep on hearing people complaining about their subscriptions disappearing
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
If you want adblocking youtube on iOS I recommend using Safari with the vinegar (paid) extension. (And wipr for general adblocking)
ETA: If I remember correctly, Brave Browser also has ad blocking built in. For youtube as well.
I set up a PiHole in the cloud and set it up so it requires VPN access so that nothing between my phone and the PiHole can fuck with the DNS packets. I VPN into it on my Android and get ad blocking almost* everwhere. I've also configured it to only tunnel DNS lookups, so I don't get charge egress fees for all my phone's traffic, which, granted isn't a lot, but whatever.
* Sadly, it doesn't block YouTube ads, but I rarely access YouTube on my phone anyways.
Your suggestion is like buying a record from Walmart to support the artist, instead of buying it directly at a show.
I assume most of us here have jobs. Are we ok with working for free? Many people on YouTube do it full time, with ad revenue and exposure being their primary source of income.
Somehow some people have it in their heads that if the job is entertainment then it’s not worth paying for, but is simultaneously worth consuming.
No, which is why I decided to pursue a career where I'm paid based on a salary, protected by employee rights (even if limited in the US), and not beholden to a single corporation's platofrm to perform my job.
Most of the youtubers I watch aren't making a living off of it, and the few that do are able to do so because they've monetized outside of the YouTube platform.
Nothing you say will make me feel a single twinge of guilt over using ad blockers.
Please tell me that I am a horrible human for defrauding the advertisers.
If I could get AR glasses which automatically removes any ad before I see it, I be a bad person too?
As the old saying goes, "your failed business model is not my problem".
Many, many people would like to make a living as performers, or creators generally, but very few succeed. If we want a world with more full-time artists, rather than forcing unwanted ads down our own throats to subsidize youtube video-makers, we'd be better off creating a basic income system.
They actually receive a lot more cash for per view from YouTube premium viewers compared to free ad-supported users. And it's not even close, we're talking an order of magnitude more money per view when it's youtube premium
Same. At this point, I'm making $XK/day and to think I can't spend some tiny fraction of that to support the people who create the content... seems morally wrong to me. YouTube made it easy.
One will never stop trying to outrun the other. Ever.
Malware is much more rare but also a lot more dangerous now.
Will we see some similar shift in advertising?
What happens when every e-mail provider has good spam filtering? Is the spam market going to collapse?
Etc.
History, however, teaches us that the ad companies will find some other sneaky and awful tactic instead.
Hopefully not off topic: I continue to be surprised at how many of my friends don't pay for an ad-free YouTube (virtually all of them!). For about $15/month my wife and I get YouTube Music that includes ad-free (but content creators sometimes embed their own ads) YouTube. A bonus: when listening to old music from my youth, I am surprised at how often they have old videos available of the bands playing.
Worse, there's whole cadres of reviewers, mainly in tech, who have created a weird feedback loop causing their entire videos to be subtle ads. Reviewer gets popular, reviewer quits job to youtube full time, reviewer needs to get early access to make reviews, reviewer is told what they can and can't say by mfg. Mess up or give negative review, they'll never get another early access from said company. So their entire job has become to basically advertise.
There's a few channels I'll watch that I trust, like Project Farm, VCG, a couple carpentry ones I don't remember the name of. The thing in common is they mostly seem to be older guys and/or people just making videos for fun.
If you have both adblock and sponsorblock you can pretty much have a completely ad-free experience.
But at that point, is it fair to the creators? I guess as long as not enough people are aware then it's not a problem; though obviously not a solution.
In reality, the whole "creator economy" that's based on using the creators influence to sell products (which btw are almost always unrelated to what the creator actually does) seems to me like a problematic way of finding art and content.
If the proportion of users leaving is lower than the proportion increase in income, YouTube wins.
Profiteering off of their established position.
Youtube PMs have OKRs
How do you know this?
> It represents 10% of Google revenue.
Revenue != profit. Storing zettabytes of videos across the whole world, with the massive CDNs required to be able to serve that whole world isn't cheap. I can easily see YouTube being among the most costly things Google do.
Someone pop this in a time capsule and label it "peak twitter, early 21st century"
"Wait, I just found a tutorial! I just need to skip the Intro! And the personal story behind this tutorial! And todays message from their sponsor!"
And since users are going to pay from their pockets anyway, I would seriously consider moving content away from youtube and hosting my own stuff. For example, if I am going to take a course, I'd rather take it on the creator's website, where I'll have an LMS with no ads and no thumbnsils with clickbait recommendations tempting me to move away from what I am learning. Youtube is nice if I want to watch a quick video while I'm running at the gym, but it does not create a protected learning path.
Most people offering courses already do this. So instead of useful information, they post spam videos to Youtube, atop which these ads will presumably run in the future.
I think both options will be available as it is now. I personally don't like the idea of paying for every particular thing that I consume. (kind of whats happening with streaming services lately) Not only because it is a hassle but also those single payments quickly add up, ultimately hurting creators.
A lot of junk mail landed in my mailbox when I moved to a new place, until I put a red dot sticker on it. Within a week or two, they disappeared.
We should implement this "red dot sticker" feature in browsers (with optional exceptions), and pages, services and whatnot should respect it, or they will be facing fines. Fines that really hurt.
So I am curious what Google/Amazon thinks about this (not your personal opinion about PayPal if I should not have the choice to use anything else then VISA/MasterCard)
Looks really gauche and cheap, but then again so does most of the 'creator' economy.
Vinesauce has existed since before twitch, but a while back they moved onto twitch and it's been downhill ever since. It seems like you are required to aim your content more at 12 year olds if you stream, instead of a broad audience, because maybe 12 year olds are more susceptible to the weird mind game that streaming is.
If you've never watched a twitch stream, just say "poggers" to yourself for two straight hours for an accurate experience.
A significant portion of purchases are now made online, so if users don't click through an ad that directly means they won't be buying the thing being advertised.
TV didn't go away because of ads but because consumers shifted to a different model of consuming content.
> also harm user opinions of wanting to use youtube in general
Most people browse the web and don't even know about ad blockers. It's a very small bubble that's really loud and anti-ads. I hear from many people that actually like Instagram ads as they act as a recommendation engine for them.
> Why does youtube permit ads to run that not only are not effective
Advertisers test different ad copies and versions A LOT. You can be sure that if there's an ad running it's at least somewhat effective for the use case they are trying to achieve. Just like billboards an ad also can just increase awareness even if you don't click through.
Perhaps. But a nontrivial percentage of people I know stopped watching TV because of the ads (especially the overlay ads) well before there were any serious alternatives to TV.
So, at least some audience was driven away by them.
From my experience watching Youtube on a Samsung TV, the quantity are sometimes spread across an entire video, at intervals set by the creator. I.e. 8 adverts over a 1 hour video.
This is also no evidence that these adverts are not skippable.
I don't like Youtube's advertising, but this tweet is very low effort.
My guess is that since unskippable ads could already be a couple minute long, they are testing with shorter ads in that timeframe while still filling up the time block.
This isn’t very interesting without knowing how long the ads run.
The UI also looks exactly like Youtube on TVs, which from my experience, does this '3 of 10' for ALL adverts across an extended video.
This tweet has nothing to prove what they're saying, my guess is they're trying to stir up controversy.
edit: it's pretty clear that most here are more interested in sharing their dislike for ads or preferred adblocker solution, rather than even considering the legitimacy of the claims made in the tweet :(
The direction that tech has gone is starting to lose me.
Use a VPN, set it to Argentinia, go to youtube.com/premium, sign up with your regular credit card and use without a VPN as usual from now on while paying 2 USD / month.
More recently I have been catching myself mindlessly infinitely scrolling YouTube. And after I reach the bottom, I refresh YouTube only to find mostly the same recommended videos, and the cycle repeats.
With enough ads, hopefully I would finally be able to let go of YouTube.
Enjoying my library (ebooks and audiobooks) through the Libby app along with using the money I am saving from YouTube to instead pay for a news subscription.
I recently canceled my YouTube premium subscription and started borrowing ebooks and audiobooks from my library via the Libby, by Overdrive app and it works great! I took that money from YouTube and instead moved to to a https://ground.news/ subscription which helps me stay on top of current events going on.
I've been enjoying that setup better and I am glad I am slowly where I can taking control of my attention.
newpipe+sponsorblock. you can thank me later.
on desktop, firefox+ublock origin
Lots of music. Has vast library going back 15 years now. Creators can be supported (although the incentives are to make ad-friendly content, which usually disappoints) via Patreon (to incentivize content that isn't as ad-friendly).
Some will feign that people will want to deal with hosting video, decentralized, at scale. They won't. Only nerds will; you and me. Nobody else cares because it's slow and less convenient (not even throwing shade, that's just a good product). Plus less and less people can afford housing so that's less people affording PCs for their housing/hosting (nobody is going to host from their laptop on coffee wifi). We can be upset about that, or we can just accept it.
It needs some work, but it downloads a video locally, bypassing ads and great for offline use.
There are alternatives like Rumble that I would consider moving to if the difference is that I have to watch 1 ad instead of 5.
And remember that YouTube Premium also includes the music streaming service YouTube Music. No need for Spotify or anything else.
So now I don't have to pay 10 USD per month for Spotify anymore, there aren't ads anywhere on YouTube or YouTube Music – AND I have given all of this for free to the rest of my family and some friends.
And it keeps getting worse from the looks of it.
It feels like I get to watch 1 minute video between adverts now, and YouTube is nearing the point where I just don't give a damn about it anymore.
I worry that this is basically the end of YouTube
Sad truth about humanity is they don't care.
