[winks and nods]
Also, out of idle curiosity, I wonder what would happen if you inserted a dash (ie, ‘-’) between the ‘t’ and the ‘u’ in ‘YouTube’ (ie, ‘yout-ube’) after you call up the URL for the video you wanted to watch.
Yeah. I wonder. Hm.
This is my biggest beef. I pay YouTube so I don’t have to watch ads, and then the content creators insert their own.
It’s not so bad when they say “And now I’d like to take a moment to talk about today’s sponsor…”
The ones I really despise are when the person’s words start taking on an odd feel and they act so clever as they gently slide from their true content into some rambling about the same tired services that I don’t want.
No, it isn’t clever.
It feels like a bait and switch.
It feels like I was tricked.
It undermines my confidence in your words.
Stop doing it. Just say you are going to talk about your sponsor and get on with it.
Thankfully YouTube provides that handy “most replayed section” graph as you fast-forward, and the biggest peak is almost certainly after the end of the ad.
To be fair since they don’t actually get anything from YouTube’s ads (despite YouTube using them as an excuse) if they want ad revenue they have to add their own.
True, but I agree some content creators insert ads in a very grating manner. The bait and switch one is always annoying. They usually seem so smug about how clever they have been. Sometimes ads are done in really creative and enjoyable ways, others just leave you feeling like taking a shower. I particularly get riled by ads for what are little more than Ponzi schemes in new clothes, or dubious matchup services. VPNs seem the most benign of a bad bunch. And I like my electric razor thank-you.
I caved in and bought YouTube Premium a few years ago. In truth, compared to a streaming movie subscription service it is pretty good value. I have come to the conclusion that (at least here in Oz) nobody is going to provide me with access to many movies I actually want to watch. And now some services are adding ads as well.
“Planetoids orbiting a neutron star would have to withstand extremely powerful tidal forces, and for us too there can be stresses in our lives, and that’s where Better Help comes in…”
On my desktops, I use Freetube and enable sponsorblock.
On Android, I use Newpipe or Adguard, whichever takes less clicks at the time.
As for the morality of blocking ads, I sleep OK at night knowing that the people I watch and corporate giants that serve the content are still more wealthy than me although they didn’t make the pennies me watching an ad would have put in their pocket.
UBlock and Firefox continues to work for me. In fact, it’s been a good while since I’ve had to fiddle with it unlike earlier in the Great AdBlock Wars when Google started pushing back.
Some people I watch have sponsored spots and I usually watch them just because it’s no big deal. Some include little countdowns and stuff so you know when the ad segment begins and ends. A rare few even manage to make it semi-entertaining.
I don’t use Youtube Premium partially out of stubbornness, partially because UBlock/FF is working for me anyway and partially because they include YT Music in there which feels like overpaying for bloat to me that I don’t need, like a cable package half full of Spanish-language sports channels. If they had a non-music version for a few bucks less, I might have subscribed by now.
I’ll download a bunch of YouTube videos to a USB stick with Real Downloader, plug the USB into my TV, and watch the videos at my leisure ad-free.
The problem is that the several dozen “it doesn’t cost much, surely you can afford this!” hands out add up over time to a substantial sum. Particularly for those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder who are at risk of being shut out of information and entertainment.
I have to sharply limit my subscriptions. I do support a very few creators and/or causes, but the rest, no matter how worthy, just can’t get any more blood out of this turnip.
SEveral of the YT sites I subscribe to tell me that they are really supported by people sending to their patreon acct. way **more than** the ad they get from the ads inserted into their vids. The key thing that i see is that they must make the video at least 20 minutes or so long so that YT can insert at least a couple ads. I see it the same as regular over- the -air TV where the ads pay for the content so it is a deal with the devil (of advertising) . The ads for the 'special" walking stick and “military” walking stick are pretty funny to me.
Is this a factual statement or an assessment of the pittance they receive?
Since my own videos are lucky to receive a few hundred views, monetizing them has never actually even been in the cards, but it is my understanding that when you monetize your videos you will get payment for YouTube’s advertising. At one point I heard that it was not unusual to receive $1 per 1000 views, so a video powerhouse content provider who regularly produces videos with 1M views would make >$1K per video.
With that said, it’s not surprising that it is not enough to support one person, much less a full crew; hence live read ads and Patreon.
I sub to a Youtube creator’s Patreon (and a few others non-YT related). They have exclusive videos on there so, combined with the public YT videos, it’s good for 3+ hours a week of reliably entertaining new content. I think it’s also more attractive to me because (a) They’re offering me more for it rather than trying to bombard me with ads until I give up and pay, and (b) I know the money is (mostly) going to a creator I respect rather than 99% to Google and some pittance to the people I watch. Which is the same reason I don’t feel as ruffled about in-video sponsorship spots.
They do include a Patreon plug in their public YT videos but it’s 15-20 seconds and they try to make it amusing.
I noticed this a while ago (like two years). It seemed like the more I watched free YouTube, the more ads I would get.
It almost seemed like there was a daily progressive meter or something where if you watched for one hour you would get x amount of ads for that hour of video playing time, but if you watched for another hour, you would then get 2x ads that hour, watch another hour and get 4x ads per video/hour.
And, if there was a daily counter to play ads, it didn’t seem to reset to 1x ads/hour each day, but more like 1.1x of the previous day watching.
If that’s what YouTube was doing, it worked on me and I upgraded tp Premium.
I have been a long time subscriber to YouTube Music (formerly Google Play). I like it much better than Spotify. It’s $11/month. YouTube Premium, which includes YouTube Music, is $14/month so I could get it for just a little more but I don’t watch enough YouTube to care. But…Verizon just offered me YouTube Premium for $10/month so I just started that. I look at it as a 10% discount on my music streaming with no ads YouTube for free.
This. Just about the time I began to make YouTube a meaningful chunk of my online time-wasting, that’s when the ad supply skyrocketed. I quit cold turkey and now 4 or 6 months later it appears that I’ve been reset back to the baseline of very few ads.
I do wonder how quickly they’d ramp up if I started watching in quantity again, but I’m not inclined to run the experiment.
They also seem to be not targeting the entire userbase all at once. This might be something they’re phasing in over an e.g. 3-year ~= 1000 day ramp. So many of us will report “I don’t see any change at YouTube” while somebody else is reporting “Massive ramp-up in my ads! what gives?” Well there, Mr no-change person, your turn will come.
Why the slow ramp? IMO to prevent a freshly outraged critical mass that will go viral enough to have either political results or encourage a shift to a rising competitor. Google can afford to enshittify us all slowly. Just like the proverbial simmering frog.
i guess you didn’t read my post upthread. 'Sokey. It was TL;DR
But this is FQ and you are wrong. YouTube pays. But the creator has to opt in and therby allow ads. And they have to qualify, meaning having a certain amount of subscribers and views.
I pinged @Mangetout, because he has a channel and IIRC is able to make a living from it.
golf clap
Confirm - my full time income is from YouTube ads; I don’t have Patreon or channel memberships or accept sponsorships, and I don’t even place midroll ads in my videos; the standard revenue model, based on pre and post-roll ads only, is sufficient.
There may be factors that make ads less of a viable income for some creators, for example my content is usually quite tame and family-safe, so there are no rating exceptions when I upload.
My impression though, is that, by the time a lot of YouTubers ‘make it’, they may have also adopted a considerably more spendy lifestyle than they had when they started out, so there is a tendency for no amount of money to be enough money, or that they see additional opportunities for income, such as patreon and sponsorships, and simply see no reason not to pursue those opportunities.
Tiny possible nitpick on this detail. It used to be the case that if you were not in the YouTube Partner scheme, you couldn’t apply ads, and couldn’t earn revenue, and your videos would be shown without any ads on them (and it was quite difficult to qualify for partnership).
Since then, youtube has relaxed the partnership requirements, but I think also, even if you don’t apply for partner, YouTube will sometimes still automatically show ads, and they just keep the whole of the revenue.
Just to weigh in on my opinion on the reasons for recent changes to ads on YouTube - I do believe it’s fallout from the adblocker war; Youtube has invested in changes to the way ads are delivered, to try to make them harder/impossible to block, and it seems like they have capitalised on that development effort by incidentally making them generally harder to skip too. It all happened about the same time, so I don’t think it’s coincidence.