Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.
All of these happen at the population level.
I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are probably bad for innovation and growth.
You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.
I derive incredible value from YouTube. It wasn't always great, but it is recently full of extremely good educational content, tech talks, independent journalism, how-tos, independent film and animation, and so much more.
I'd wager that you use and benefit from a lot of services that are paid for via advertising. Even public transit is subsidized by advertising.
The regulation was about unskippable ads, not ads in general.
I agree with the op and I don't agree that we are better off without YouTube. It's not hard at all to understand the op, so I'm not sure why you misread them and jumped to conclusions that all ads are parasitic and asked if we're better off without YouTube. Was that rage bate or did you really think the op was talking about all ads?
There was a fight back at Euston station recently
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2987kvp3no
I never get a taxi in New York thanks to the adverts. Sadly the general population thinks their time and attention is worthless and accept adverts. People actually watch commercial tv, which steals 20 minutes of your time every hour to brainwash you.
I say this as a proponent of antitrust regulation against tech giants and a privacy advocate against tracking, storing, and correlating user activity.
Everything needs to be kept in balance. Regulation is a blunt instrument and is better used to punish active rule breaking rather than trying to predict how markets should work.
Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads. They know their customers far better than old politicians do.
If ads become onerous, alternatives emerge. Different channels, platforms, ad blocking. It's a healthier ecosystem that doesn't grow ossified with decades old legalese. Regulations that actively stymie the creation of new competition.
Now every new video and social startup in Vietnam has to check a bunch of boxes.
IMO regulation never was or is going to force this shift: it's already happening in unregulated ad markets, and is going to keep evolving in that direction because it's simply more effective/lucrative than ads done other ways.
> Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads.
I'm all for breaking up megacorps, but there's no way a government like Vietnam can effectively accomplish that. The entire regulatory weight of the EU (90% of the non-US first-world consumer base) can't break up Google, so inflicting a series of wristslaps that hurt Google more than any small startup is the best way.
I'm no expert on the region, but I can't imagine a small video/social startup in Vietnam will be hurt more than Google by being forced to show a skip button after 5s on their ads — and generally speaking ads as a business model generally doesn't work all that well or mean much for small startups (<1M MAU), their survival and scalability hinges more on VC money and product-market fit than ad arbitrage.
At best, it's as you said, the platform and creator make less money (Youtube gives 55% of ad revenue to the creator). This would naturally lead to less content eventually.
At worst, video content becomes unsustainable without a subscription.
I, personally, am drowning in "content".
Until the content is utterly captivating and speaks to your soul in a way even your closest friends and partners can't, we haven't hit peak content.
You know that one movie you see every decade or so that you can't get out of your head? The one that left you flabbergasted, that you've watched at least half a dozen times, and that you frequently and fondly remember? It touched your mind and soul and fit your tastes like a glove.
THAT is peak content, and until we are swimming in it, we're not there yet. Most of what we have today is utterly disposable and ephemeral - transient dopamine activation instead of philosophically world shattering indelible experiences.
We have a long way to go.
If you, like me and most people I know, hate ads, why would it be a bad thing to limit it?
What are we expecting to actually accomplish with all this platform growth thing?
this all sounds great. ideal, even.
Great. Once that happens, we can work on regulation to kill even more advertising.
