Look, my time is valuable. I decide what media to play based on my preferences. If I don't want to see ads, why would I instruct my browser to play them?
If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.
No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.
For being such a bunch of stingy capitalists, it's always surprising to see people defend businesses without viable models.
If hosting content online for free isn't working for you, maybe that's not a commercial space worth occupying. Not everything deserves to be paid for, "selfish" or not. Users, aka "the market," will decide if your product is usable despite the income generating parts.
Marginally related, if your business isn't profitable enough to pay your employees a livable wage, then maybe your business isn't actually profitable enough to, well, be "in business."
Dunno, what doesn't seem "viable" is serving ads that can be trivially blocked.
We haven't even reached the real arms race yet, and people are already talking like adblockers won.
Let's pick this convo back up at least when ad networks like Adsense let you proxy through your server, ending an entire class of adblocking at once. And that's not the end of the low-hanging fruit.
Are they giving out free videos? The content creator gets to choose how to monetize, right? The platform does allow for free, and the creator chose to get paid.
Clearly your time isn't valuable, as you spend it watching content you value at $0.
If the content you watched and hence the time you spent watching it actually held value to you, you would be happy to pay the meagre $10/mo subscription fee.
> I assume you spend most of your income of water, right? After all, it's the most indispensable element of out lives.
Water is a commodity, it doesn't require you to contribute for it to be available, it's ubiquitous and cheap. I pay less than I value it at, yes, as a price has been set and there's no method or reason to pay more for it.
YouTube content however is not a commodity and the amount of money that goes into it affects the quality and quantity of content available. Throw $10m at water, you get nothing meaningfully better. Throw $10m at YouTube creators, you get a new major original series or a few small ones.
> Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
And they can pay for it with ads.
The price for the content has been set. You can choose to pay for it or you can choose to essentially steal it.
You're right, and I already paid for it with my ISP. I only get a set amount of data each month, so you can be sure I'm going to block 100% of the ads I can to stop them from wasting my limited bandwidth.
> You're right, and I already paid for it with my ISP.
No, you paid for bandwidth from your ISP to you. Your ISP doesn't pay anyone else for traffic. YouTube also has to pay your ISP and that cost is made up from ads.
I don't see why it's my responsibility to see Youtube makes money. If they didn't want me to consume the content, they would have a model in which you can't view the content without subscribing for a fee. And yet Google knows about adblockers and continues this model, suggesting that they are fine with people skipping the ads. I assume you do not download things you do not want, so I am merely doing the same thing.
But even that is beside the point. I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release. I see no moral problem here, and I will choose what the bandwidth I pay for is spent on.
> I don't see why it's my responsibility to see Youtube makes money.
It's not your responsibility to make YouTube profitable but if you enjoy the content, it's in your best interest to contribute to it, whether it be through watching ads or subscribing. The service needs some amount of money just to cover bandwidth and maintenance but more importantly, most of the money from those ads/subscriptions goes to the people who make the content you watch, many of whom can't do so without that money. Those people also can't choose to block adblockers.
> If they didn't want me to consume the content, they would have a model in which you can't view the content without subscribing for a fee.
They do. It's called ads. You can't watch the video until you watch the ads.
> And yet Google knows about adblockers and continues this model, suggesting that they are fine with people skipping the ads.
Or they don't want to get into an arms race just yet.
> I assume you do not download things you do not want, so I am merely doing the same thing.
The download of the thing you don't want here is the payment, not the product. Most of us do pay for things we want.
> I believe it's fine for me to access whatever information that people release.
What's your profession? I believe it's okay for me to promise you payment in exchange for your work then take it without payment.
The supermarket is obviously not cool with you shoplifting beacuse they have security guards that try to stop you from doing it, and they call the police when it happens.
The problem is people can be an "asshole" with no repercussions and completely no way Google can stop them. Almost all business models rely on receiving payment before delivering product, simply because of the fact we can all revert to being assholes quite easily.
So Google and other companies that largely depend on online ads just have to accept the fact that some people are going to disable them. They have complete ability to do so and simply no way it can be stopped. It's inevitable.
If ad blocking becomes so rampant that businesses start to collapse, we'll likely see the internet really ramp up subscription models.
What I find interesting is that google/youtube doesn't circumvent adblockers, though they easily could, given that they own the whole ad supply chain. For example, they could make the ads indistinguishable from the actual video (in the html), or even splice the videos into one stream. My guess is they don't because a) they are wildly profitable anyway, and b) they don't want to alienate adblock users, especially the techies.
> they could make the ads indistinguishable from the actual video (in the html), or even splice the videos into one stream.
And make ads unsuitable for the most egregious attacks on privacy, simple plain tracking or even as distribution channel for malware. Curiously, this nuclear option will make things better than the current situation.
Ads embedded in the video stream (i.e. "burnt" as one with subtitles) can't be blocked but also can't deliver any active content (JS, Flash, etc) used for tracking or infecting users.
My phone has unlimited data (only plan advertised by T-Mobile) but it's possible for my home internet not to be (restriction removed on the gigabit plan, which I have).
Yeah we should probably whitelist youtube to sponsor the vids there. That's reasonable.
HOWEVER the real assholes are whoever is serving bloat and ads that will do anything to get malware onto your machine and track your every breath. This is really why we're blocking.
That's the actual problem with these ads: bloat, bandwidth usage, javascript, profiling, de-anonymization, tracking, attacks on privacy, sound, unskippable videos, etc.
I will feel no remorse for adblocking until advertisers go back to static, single-request, non-tracking, non-targetting ads.
Nothing's stopping Google from simply charging people to access Youtube. The reason they don't do it is because YT offers network effects and user lock-in that have significant economic benefits. I trust that a large corporation with some of the smartest minds in the world working there would have changed the YT business model if they were worried about their bandwidth costs.
Don't be an asshole.