Don’t assume Google et al. will ever consider enough people buy their subscription. There’s never enough money for these people.
A company isn’t successful in hyper capitalism unless they are accelerating the growth of their profits every year. They have to sell more products to existing users, acquire new paid users, charge more for their existing products, or they’re considered unsuccessful. The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth of the human race where success can only be achieved if every human alive is paying for every product offering possible, buying every upsell and microtransaction, freely giving their data to be sold so that more useless products can be created at minimum cost and sold at maximum price. But also hyper capitalism lobbies for less benefits, lower pay, etc. It inevitably collapses into neo-feudalism or just slavery
The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth
Cancer. Capitalism models cancer.
Google asking me for €13 a month? Their empire is built upon selling user data. Fuckers should be paying us.
And if you’re a content creator, you can opt in to allow your content to be used by AI… Without compensation. 🤡
At least that’s opt-in, unlike them using your Wi-Fi SSID to fine tune their location settings. Not only was that opt-out but you had to change your router settings (either change your SSID, which isn’t hard but shouldn’t be required, or hide your network, which alienated guests when mobile data wasn’t so ever present). I don’t even know if there’s still a (simple) way out.
But yes. The option you describe is clearly ridiculous.
The funny thing is, I’m nearly certain that it’s opt-in for their benefit (i.e. legal reasons) and not because it benefits the content creator, because it really doesn’t benefit the content creator at all! “Here’s my work. Do what you like with it, and don’t worry about paying.”.
I suspect any time Google gives you a choice about anything, especially anything regarding data, it’s not for your benefit. With that in mind, you’re likely right.
I thought it was based around BSSID which cannot be changed on most devices. Changing SSID helps?
Well, last time I looked was many years ago, so it might no longer be true. However, supposedly, adding
_NOMAPor something like that would prevent your network from being recorded. As I said, though, that was a long time ago and, of course, trusting Google to not record anything at your request was always a fool’s game.
I was happy to pay for youtube as a service until they broke the shit out of their algorithms and started shoving ads to my face in premium. Did a chargeback and got my money back. Fuck these monkeys.
That’s a nice way to lose access to all Google products, including your email account.
So far so good. The fuckers at youtube support acknowledged serving ads to me even with my premium membership, so they can suck a big fat dick.
Assuming they use Gmail in the first place
I got the 2 month free trial recently and have yet to see an ad with it. Don’t plan on continuing the service if I do see one.
Watch out for the “video suggestions” in your home feed with the title “introducing ….” These are product placements they make even with the premium subscription. I HATE ads so I pulled the plug.
I don’t care that enhanced Bitrate is premium only. I do care that you still need to click “advanced resolution settings” to access this even for premium users on mobile.
ReVanced :)
Grayjay.app :)
NewPipe :)
PipePipe :)
SmartTube :)
And even if you select high resolution preferred in settings, they will absolutely serve that shit at a low resolution forcing you to manually select the resolution every damn time.
Yes YouTube my connection is absolutely fast enough to watch at the max resolution you can serve, don’t pretend it’s my connection to cover for your intentional bumping down in resolution.
This has been a thing for a while now, hasn’t it? I remember trying to watch the Noseferatu trailer a few months ago and seeing how shit it looked. Tried to up the quality only to see that it was paywalled
trailer
I mean, that’s an advertisement. I feel like if you’re going to watch an ad, that the company trying to sell the product should find a way to have the ad in full quality themselves.
It looks like the official website does use YouTube, though.
At least according to YouTube, the enhanced bitrate option is higher than 1080p normal has ever been
But what about the new normal 1080p? Has it been reduced?
No, at least according to YouTube
It’s obviously noticeable from the ones they don’t pull this shit on.
Personal experience, but I feel like it has. Especially on videos with a lot of still frames like 3blue1brown, you can see the still images become slightly better quality after all the animations stopped. I noticed a few months ago and saw 1080p premium as an option.
I’ve just seen it for the first time now. Might be because I’m situated in Europe? Or because I mostly don’t give a damn about the pixel count.
Possibly, I don’t think its on every video
Thought it was always that way.
It’s a year or two old at the most
Yes. And I thought that’s how it always had been.
They finally shut off my premium account in Argentina for $3 and now I’ve been blasted with ads so much it’s unbearable. Like 3 ads every 3 mins pretty much.
Maybe I can try again in another country but I’m pretty sure they’re wise to it and demand a card used be of the same country too.
It’s fine on my phone but on the tvs where I mostly consume it’s hell on earth!
God damn YouTube. Why do we like it so much.
I am seriously thinking of cobbling together a cheap pc just to plug into my TV to watch things like YouTube without the ads.
I know right. I have Apple TV because it’s awesome and doesn’t have Ads everywhere like Google and fire tv.
I’m thinking an android tablet with revanced or similar and casting to the tv…
doesn’t have Ads everywhere like Google and fire tv.
yet.
I’m not sure if it counts as an AD but seems like an AD, many many moons ago (I think when Apple TV+ was introduced), they changed the “home screen” with the apps in your Apple TV to an Apple TV+ one with their content (and some linked from other platforms).
The apps view still exists but now the “home” button gets you to the Apple TV+ one unless you click it again from there (unless you accidentally scrolled a bit and the button) or double click it to open the menu with the recently opened apps.
You can change the home button behaviour in the settings to take you to the app view.
Casting on ReVanced will still have ads, because the ads are baked into the cast feature. The ad removal only works for the app itself.
I’ve got smartube on my fire TV
You could try SmartTube
It’s a great product. It is thanklessly maintained by a single developer who is constantly fighting Youtube changes to break it. If you do use it and like it, and you can afford it, please consider a few bucks a month via patreon to keep it alive.
It is thanklessly maintained by a single developer
A lot of these services are just passion projects by odd individual developers who create something for themselves and then share it with the rest of the world.
Github is great for this kind of spontaneous innovation. But it doesn’t do a good job of organizing communities at large. Why have six different “YouTube cleanup service” alternatives when you could have a single collaborative team working towards the same end-goal? Why are people constantly trying to “fix” YouTube when what we really seem to want is an alternative media host?
Like 3 ads every 3 mins pretty much.
It’s crazy on both ends of the pipeline. Like, if I’m an advertiser, I want my content to be relatively exclusive. I don’t want to be the twelfth ad you see in an hour. If I’m a consumer, I want a continuous uninterrupted stream of media. I don’t want a service that repeatedly cuts out, spams me with some volume-adjusted bullshit, and then cuts back in again seemingly at random.
Yeah I honestly don’t mind a short ad in between videos like the old days. But this shit right now is horrible, forcing people on to premium. YouTube don’t care about the creators they just want subs.
You can usually pay a radom guy in any latin American country who makes a business sharing family accounts for netflix etc. or just get ublock origin.
It’s the world’s medium length video platform. If there’s an indie creator that’s good he’s there. Of course we like the whole world’s content that’s fed to us by an incredibly sophisticated algorithm.
Try Invidious
I’ve heard there’s too many issues and they have to keep one step ahead of YouTube all the time and it’s getting difficult. Plus, can’t use that on TV
Any good instances? All I’ve tried are dead
People can’t afford yet another monthly bill.
It’s like walking in Trador Joes for snacks. Oh, hey, this is only $3! And look, this is only $5! Get to checkout: $130 please.
Seriously, that’s how this nickel and dime subscription crap works.
More like $126, if you know what I mean
uBlock Origin 🥳
I see this recommendation all the time. It frustrates me. I’m in favor of blocking ads and modding clients and whatever it takes to optimize one’s experience, but the majority - by far - of my YouTube experience takes place on my TV. I can’t do much to control it (pihole and other DNS solutions don’t work on YouTube since their ads are hosted in the same servers as their videos).
I could perform various modifications to the operating system of my TV, and trust me it’s tempting for a lot of reasons, but it was a very expensive (by my standards) TV so I want to at least wait until the warranty expires until I start experimenting.
I could also use something hooked up to my TV and mod that, which is my favorite idea, but my wife likes the interface as it is. It’s an LGTV with the … Sigh … “Magic” remote, which I absolutely hate, but I don’t want to take it away from her. It seems like that interface, especially the “magic” cursor, would be hard to replicate. I’d prefer not to go through the tedium of having two different systems.
Especially because we also have a console hooked up and no solution I’ve found so far has provided a simple way of switching between HDMI sources without running a disgusting number of cables. I did recently order a new receiver, so hopefully that helps with the multiple origins issue.
Obviously this is very much a a first world problem, and I apologize for my privilege, I just wanted to point out that uBO (or other software based solutions) aren’t always the solution.
If your wife wants her familiar interface with ads, then she made the choice that you’re watching ads on YouTube on your TV.
I agree. Once my warranty expires or I get brave enough to tinker with the OS hopefully the “ads” part will no longer be relevant.
Thanks for bringing this up, because it frustrates me as well. Most of the time I’m watching on a TV, and there’s no way to block YT ads on a TV. The people I share my house with aren’t technical and will watch YouTube even with ads. So to keep them out of my house I pay for YT premium.
Suggesting that people just do something technical and janky to block ads isn’t a solution for me, not because I can’t do it, but because there’s no way my family will do it.
I think there are ways, will likely vary by TV brand. I’ve set it up for my LG TV at home, it’s better than premium.
Edit: to clarify, I didn’t set up uBlock, I set up the TV with a patched TY app that has ad block and sponsor block. The latter makes it better than premium.
Oh and I can remove shorts.
It has been frustrating to read the various solutions that are all for PC or mobile, but there are some good solutions in this thread. Mad_Punda, who also replied to you separately, had what - at a glance - seemed like a pretty viable solution. Hopefully the new receiver I mentioned fixes things for me, but if not, I’ll be looking into his suggestion.
Good luck to you; though I don’t wish you to suffer, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.
LG AI Voice Remote?! That’s a huge no from me dawg hahaha
All of my screens just have computers hooked up to them, controlled by wireless keyboards with built-in touchpads. Adblocking on everything!
May I ask which devices (computers/keyboards) do you use for your screens? I’d like to do the same, since we mostly watch the same TV channels in my house and one subscription would cover most of the content my family watches.
Sure! I have a bunch o Logitech k400s controlling some standard windows 10 PCs, and a couple screens have Raspberry Pis connected. Even a very old windows computer can run 1440p videos or YouTube just fine if it has a solid state drive, and those are mega cheap now!
Thanks! I’ll check which similar hardware I can find near me :D
If I lived alone, this would be the way for me as well.
I recently spoke to LG support, rather at length, about an unrelated issue. During that conversation I asked if there was a way to turn off the “magic” cursor because fuck do I hate it. Apparently, there is: turn on narration - that is, the accessibility option that reads anything you highlight on screen in case you have vision issues. Why are the two things related, you ask, and why is it a binary option? I’m sure the answer is because LG leadership wants you to use the cursor, but apparently they couldn’t think of a PR friendly answer, because every time I asked support changed the subject.
edit: Fun fact: yesterday I complained about LG support. Today all features of my LG TV (other than the screen) stopped working and I came down to find my wife using the console to watch YouTube. I … Guess I got what I wanted?
Woof… I’m so sorry you hafta deal with that. I hate anything listening to me. D: I’m thankful both my partner and myself love using keyboard with touchpad.
I love my wife extensively and for many reasons, but her respect for privacy concerns is not among them.
Thank you for the recommendation and I’ll investigate this.
I haven’t personally used it, but a buddy likes it.
I totally get that, I have a few suggestions since I’ve been in the same situation for years and have recently improved it.
Our Yamaha stereo takes many HDMI inputs, and has a single TV output, so the TV never needs to change inputs. It’s quite easy and quick on the Yamaha.
I bought a Raspberry Pi 500 for ~$100 US and am loving it. I think it could use a speed upgrade (I hear the SD card will do it). Of course it’s mouse and keyboard, but we only use it for Netflix, YouTube, etc, so it was easy to make shortcuts and get a small/nice living room keyboard/mouse combo.
It’s led to zero ads, and the household discussion was like “would you trade some ease of use to not see this stupid ad?” And we both agreed that it’s worth it. So far it’s been really nice.
I’ve been eyeing this little gadget, maybe it would solve the inconvenience issue?
Logitech K400 on all my machines!
thank you! i was hesitant to get one that was unbranded, but i am more inclined to get one by Logitech!
I have three of them and I love them! One TINY complaint is that if I’m all fucked up on drugs, the thumb sweat makes the touchpad very difficult to use. But that’s only a couple times a year, so it’s not a huge deal. My oldest is like eight years old and I have spilled on it, and it still works!
Living room? Logitech k400!
Thank you for the recommendation! I have, at this point, probably five forms of HDMI splitters, including at least two receivers (though admittedly no stereos). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get any of them working with the TV. I think, though I can’t confirm, that HDCP is the problem. The best I’ve managed to do is a multitude of sources plugged into the the splitter, but only two of them working; specifically my (original) switch and (also original) Steam Deck seem to be pretty recalcitrant.
I’m hoping the problem is the splitter / receiver. The new one, which promises HDCP compatibility, is set to arrive in four days. My fingers are metaphorically crossed. I’ve already replaced everything else but the consoles, so the next troubleshooting step, replacing the consoles, would be much more expensive.
Even if you have a device connected to your TV to block ads when you’re using Youtube, nothing prevents her from using the TV OS when she does.
That’s why I mentioned the console. She and our kid both use that pretty extensively. Obviously I can switch the HDMI cables around manually as necessary, but they’re in a fairly awkward spot and I have some mobility issues. Once the new receiver arrives, I hope to be able to switch between devices using a remote, at which point I’m more likely to be plausibly able to do this.
Your general point is acknowledged and appreciated, though.
I recently set up dev mode on my LG TV and installed a patched version of YouTube with ad block and sponsor block. I don’t think this voids warranty.
If there’s interest I could look up the instructions I used (I’m traveling right now).
If things don’t work out with the receiver, I’ll look into this. Thank you for the suggestion.
As with most things in the modern world that have gone to shit. It is not the monetization scheme in of itself that is the issue. It is the never ending desire for more profit this quarter than last forever.
If it was acceptable to stop trying to make even more once the cost to operate is covered and some healthy profit is made predictably then a lot less people would have issues. And enshitification would slow down.
„I don’t want to watch ads and I want everything to be free.”
My brother in christ, this is not how services work.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the ads were reasonably placed.
Don’t target people who come in from another domain or on the first viewed video. Pre- roll ads after that. Most importantly, ad breaks at creator-defined times only. Sick of ads coming in at arbitrary times in the middle of a sentence. That’s the worst part of it, IMO.
Oh and a time limit on ads. That has to happen too.
Also could somebody tell all the streaming companies that they know what language I watch all my videos in and to stop giving me Spanish language ads? Like, I got no problem with other languages, I just really feel like you’re wasting your advertisers money showing them to people who don’t know a quesadilla from a carton of pickles.
I was fine with it back when it was just one ad that you could skip.
I was fine with it back when it was just two ads that you could skip.
I was fine with it back when it was just two ads, and you could skip one, and the other was 5 seconds long. 10 was a stretch, but I’m patient.
Without an adblocker, now it’s playing an unskippable, 10+ seconds long ad at the start AND at the end. Some ads are as long as 20 seconds. If the video is long enough, it dares to abruptly play an ad right in the middle. You can’t skip that one, either. We’re back to television content-to-ad ratios - the exact thing I was happy to dump once there was enough content on YouTube. I was patient. That wasn’t enough for them. They can suck a beehive.
I can be patient if the content is >10min long.
If I need to watch an ad for every 2-5min video of streamer clips I’d go balistic as that are even more ads than the broadcast tv nonsense.
Free-at-point-of-service is a common feature of amenities provided by countries with socialist economies.
But they only work when the economy is actively managed. If you’re just pumping cash into a big banking machine and telling people to grab for it, you’re not incentivizing any particular economic activity. You’re just encouraging entrepreneurs to get particularly good at snatching money out of the air and elbowing one another in the face.
Line must go up
Well companies do need to make money, yeah
Nah, they have enough money. They won capitalism. Billions in profit. Fuck advertisements. Directly support the creators in your life.
That turns out to be a lot more expensive, personally I’d get a lot less useful content/content I enjoy. I do chip in to a few patreons etc, but realistically someone like Karl Jobst or Levy Rozman or many other creators that I use to plug a 10 minute hole between tasks would likely get nothing from me because £10/mo is a lot for maybe 1-2 hours use a month.
Companies don’t need to make infinite money. That’s just a weird incentive that modern corporations seem to be chasing and burning everything down around them to achieve.
The Stock Market. It’s an inherent consequence of being a company that rapidly filled a new niche and being publicly traded. A private company wouldn’t have grown as quickly, but could in theory, transition into a steady state monetary model. The investors expect the same quarterly reports every single time and will not be satisfied with dividends. The founders might have pushed out long ago and executives who make the decisions have no long term commitment to the company, so they have no reason not to crash the company into the ground trying to wring every ounce out of their customer base.
It would be fine if there were so many ads
I don’t mind paying. Except if it’s evilcorp. Which it is.
According to Google, YouTube had made US$15.1 billion in ad revenue in 2019, […] nearly 10% of the total Alphabet revenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Finances quoting https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=05bd9fe
But have you considered how clever you look if you simp for the bourgeoisie?
Lol, yep that’s how it works in tha GAFAM ecosystem because YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. So I’m not giving a dime to google but I’m hapoy to support creators directly.
YouTube already randomly drops me to 360p on my big-ass broadband sometimes because it just feels like it. What are the guarantees YouTube Premium won’t do that? ANSWER ME YOUTUBE, THIS IS CRUCIAL PRE-PURCHASE INFORMATION.
On mobile, many videos will start at 720 and I have to specifically select a higher resolution but it will stay there. It will have me wait for buffering if my internet isn’t capable but it won’t drop the resolution.
On pc it remembers the resolution you set last.
Premium user since Red launched.
Mobile defaults to 320p no matter what I do. I have to manually select 1080p each and every video
If your internet is flaky, there’s nothing YouTube can do about it. The alternative would be waiting for the video to buffer at 1080p.
13 per month. That’s over 100 per year. Did not expect it to be that expensive.
It is because it includes YouTube Music. A really crappy Spotify clone that nobody asked for.
I use both and find yt music is far better for discovering new music and artists and I love that it can play music from YouTube video as well. Everything else about it is worse though.
I unironically use ytmusic more than spotify because finding niche artists is a lot more easier, which is basically the entirety of edm and its many subgenres.
I use revanced though because I dont like google that much
For some magical reason, YouTube music has less AI music than Spotify.
The playlists are significantly worse, but I haven’t really heard any AI Christmas music that has infested Spotify.
The package for couples is 25. I save a dollar.
That’s almost one cent per video. Outrageous!
If you watch 43 videos per day on every day, yes…
Some of us go to work or school or whatever and can’t therefore do that every single day, especially not when the videos are longer…
They’re especially greedy when you consider they are not only the most profitable of all their competitors (Netflix/Disney Plus/Hulu/etc), but that they’re unique in that they’re the only one who doesn’t fund creating any content at all.
At least the other companies put tons of money producing content alongside their other stuff. YouTube just lets others do that for them and then takes all the profit.
So how does YouTube really justify their costs for premium with zero production costs and the largest profit margin?
Most other companies can be selective in what they host / stream. YouTube will host/stream anything users upload and that’s actually quite insane. Current statistics say that YouTubers upload 30.000 hours of video… per hour.
Aside from the streaming/processing, only the disk space that would need is already frightening. Most of those videos will never be seen, and no ads will be played on them. The setup needed for this is massively more impressive to me than services like Netflix.
Do you perhaps have a source for those profit margins? I really wonder if they’re already running break even.
From a technical perspective, I wonder what they do with those seldom viewed videos. Do they get stored somewhere in slower, deep storage, only to be eventually transferred out and cached when they’re actively receiving views? I imagine you wouldn’t want to waste faster, more expensive storage on something that’ll likely rarely to be retrieved.
I don’t know about YouTube exactly, but when I was still using Telegram I noticed the following: When you’re scrolling back in your chat history long enough, you’ll get to a point where loading them a message takes 1–2 minutes. This indicates to me that these were stored on magnetic tape somewhere.
Don’t worry about YouTube - according to alphabets filings they account for ~10% of Googles ad revenue. Google is posting record profits every quarter, so they should manage.
I was paying for it until it got to like $16.99 on iOS. As much of an annoyance to use a work around like AD Guard. I can now afford it but refuse to give those greedy mofos a dime.
That is because you are paying for the premium of signing up through ios; apple takes a cut so to make money they raise the rates. It’s extremely common signing up to any service through ios, that you will be charged higher than if you went to the website on your browser and sign up for it there. First link has link to Hank Green who does a great break down and investigation but provided many more examples.
https://www.devicemag.com/youtube-premium-cost-iphone/
https://lifehacker.com/dont-sign-up-for-subscriptions-in-the-app-1850298355
https://umatechnology.org/psa-subscriptions-cost-more-when-bought-on-an-iphone/
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My screen shows you having one single downvote. I wouldn’t worry about a single techfruit loyalist.
One downvote and you start complaining about downvotes? Have another. Maybe it’ll help thicken your skin.
The 1080p non-premium looks like shit, not better than 720p. I think they reduced the Bitrate a lot and premium restors the original Bitrate.
Bitrates have always been garbage to be fair
