About $12 is all I’m willing to spend per month given the much lower content consumption compared to even prime video for me, and that includes Amazon prime for about $12 anyway.
I bring this up because the article mentions Youtube seems to have killed that off, which I suspect will drive more ad blocker usage rather than more people switching to full premium.
Totally uninformed speculation: maybe they found that it was their most profitable viewers that were paying for YT Red? Which in turn would mean that any subscription program would be a net loss over relying on ads for income.
You could just say "charge more" of course, but maybe that higher charge is more than those customers are actually willing to pay for YouTube?
Which in turn would mean that ads will always be more profitable than subscriptions for Google.
In this model YouTube Premium, which includes Music, might be sufficiently expensive that it ends up profitable overall thanks to the bundling of YT & Music together.
Even at $15 it’s still by far the most expensive service I’d be paying for, and I only watch an hour or two a month, so it represents pretty awful value for me. It may be different for you.
i’d probably switch to tiktok or something tho
Now passive media consumption, my husband does all of that for us... we have a bunch of youtubers he puts on for us on Apple TV, but I would never type in youtube.com myself and browse around.
Any web experts know?
This makes being able to arbitrarily inject an ad video at a random point hard if there isn't an immediate full complete frame immediately after. You can't just fill the video with them, as that would make compression worse. You don't want to fully re-encode the video either, that takes up CPU time.
I've run into this myself using ffmpeg to cut out clips of videos. You can use the option of "-c copy" to copy a stream without re-encoding it, and it'll pick the previous full frame and be less accurate.
There's also web reasons with CDNs. Embedding in the video stream would require serving from the same server as the video. That would raise the costs of your CDNs. With targeted ads, you don't want to show the same ad to everyone, and you don't want to be limited to ads on that server when you do an ad auction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Seeking#Seekingwhiledoingacodec...
It's a cost that in my opinion is definetly worth it. Yes, it is not 'free', but at least the option is there, it saves our mind and it helps the actual creators of the videos more than watching ads would.
Suppose their was an option to pay for your family to have an ad free experience for the whole internet. What price would you be willing to accept for that?
IMHO, the current ad based model for online content is a lose/lose race to the idiocracy bottom for all.
I only used twitch for couple of times, maybe more dedicated users have better adblocking setup
Also people: "I'm not paying for that"
The continued escalating abuses of the advertising industry made ad-blocking more common. They have no one to blame but themselves.
shoving unrelated, unskippable ads is the reason people use adblock.
also content advertising, where the video is the advert. like biased tech "reviewers" only giving you a list of reasons to buy a product.
I’m still adblocking, YT has to offer a lot but somehow I feel like it should be cheaper. Maybe it was free for to long for us to adjust easily?
Invidious at least has no ads, and you can get rid of the recommended and related sidebar.
