It's the old problem of I don't care about anything that you advertised to me, don't care about most of the content that is eating your budget and simply won't stand for being called a criminal after being the reason you are a thing in the first place. You're trying to get my money, I'm trying to get your content. We both cheat. That's always been the game.
If I come to your house, destroy your door, steal your mom's dinner for 4 ppl, are we both cheating?
How about we compare with something actually worth comparing for? For example switching channels when there's the ad break, or turning the sound off, etc.
When I download something, I'm not "stealing it". When I block an ad, I'm not stealing either. I didn't remove 10$ from Google's bank account that was there before.
I signed a contract with my local power company, which I would be breaking if I did not pay them. I signed no such contract with Internet Historian.
That said, I appreciate it when content creators provide alternative ways to support them. I support dozens of creators with monthly donations and I occasionally buy merchandise when they're selling something I'm interested in. Just don't waste my time with ads.
Ah the old "physical objects work the same as digital copies" argument. Yes I would download a car. You can still drive yours. I was trying to pay you for use of the car but you insisted I drive around your deadbeat family and pay for the drive through that I don't eat.
This a a very different situation. Stores are selling products or services, and they explicitly put prices on the products.
Content available freely online is much different, as there is no price and at best the hope is that the consumer sees an ad or sponsorship and that the content creator has accurate analytics as to how many saw the ads.
Your analogy would be more akin to someone stealing access to paywalled content somehow. In that case a price was put on the content and someone took if anyway, much like shoplifting.
I'm not saying that ad blocking isn't stealing, there could be a case for that especially if T&Cs specifically require that ads aren't skipped, blocked, or avoided.
My only point there was that shoplifting and ad blocking are very different things. Stores don't make their products freely available to anyone willing to walk past enough ads along the way.
Bit of context: grew up in Sudan, with embargo and us sanction (also Cuba and Iran and lately Syria), there was not even a possibility to pay for these subscriptions, torrent and modded apps were the viable options (also economical factors).
Another benefits to that: while I was in Sudan, I didn't even have to use so many ad blocks, major ads providers (Google and fb) blocked Sudan and that was absolutely great!
I don't mind paying to services, but it should definitely factor in economical status per each country
I don't want ads all over my screen when I browse the web. It doesn't mean I don't want to pay for content (I do pay). If ads were all blocked, websites would charge for content, and I believe people would pay. I would. I'm glad to pay for a better quality of life and less consumerism. Meanwhile I use NewPipe and uBlock Origin which I believe have a good impact on this society.
I for one do not because I do not have a Google account, and do not want one, because I do not consent to their data harvesting practices or give money to surveillance capitalism corporations.
When I can pay creators directly with anonymous microtransactions, I will.
YT went too far from being fair for consumers personally. Google cuts off monetization almost randomly at times, creators then have to embed the ads directly into their video, bypassing Google's ad platform and inconsistent monetization terms, the consumers now have to watch through Google's ads and creator's ads. I'm paying Google for YT premium to get rid of its ads, there's no alternative to get rid of shit the creator decides to sell out for. And there should be no sponsorship deals in the first place, since Google should be paying them. So I feel justified to use SponsorBlock.
I don't mind LTT-style sponsorships that are relevant and neatly presented as part of the video, but randomly jump cutting to a car insurance ad just ruins the experience and it's easy to see why people would block these.
My (at the time) 2 year old daughter actually cried the first time she saw an ad on the YouTube app.
I would like to pay YT/creators with my own PC with several TB disk space and 100Mbps connection (even 1Gbps inside country) which might host some videos by the network's choice.
There's at least three kinds of videos on Youtube and friends.
The first are ones not related to making money in any way, someone doing their thing "for fun" or similar.
The second are ones where it might be someone's "day job" but the money isn't coming in through youtube ads. For example, a band putting their songs online for essentially free because money comes from fans going to concerts, buying CDs, or merchandise. Having the videos available essentially for free means that more people can discover the music and maybe become paying fans. Or a cook who's brought out their own book showing some of the recipes online hoping that people will buy the book. Or a martial arts school putting videos of some training or contests online hoping among other things that people will join up for real.
The third are the "content creator" ones where the author's whole business is the videos themselves and the ads are their primary revenue stream. It's not that there aren't some really good offerings in this space - there are - but if the choice is Youtube with the full ads/tracking/targeting soup or not at all, my life will carry on without this category.
Why would I want to pay for anything? Consumers generally seek the lowest possible price. That's how economics works.
YouTube wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't "free".
I do pay for my internet connection and bandwidth. But obviously I found the best possible deal.
There is the busking model and I do choose to contribute a small amount to a small number of creators that I can tell put a lot of cash and effort into their uploads. But YouTube premium would cost more than all of those and I'd be paying into a monopoly, paying for MrBeast and other worthless crap and no longer paying the aforementioned creators.
| YouTube wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't "free".
People forget Gopher was around before WWW and wanted to charge for commercial entities. If they'd not done that then the outcome of the internet would have been different (imho)
Hiding behind theories of consumer behavior is not an excuse for immoral actions. Open source was never meant to be the place where open theft and piracy should thrive. And, the Robinhood sentiment isn't really applicable here because you're stealing from creators. YouTube may be owned by a multi billion dollar corporation, but it does support and bootstrapped a vibrant creator community. The more time we spend stealing content that should be supported by ads or a paid subscription the less effective we make that economy. If we want to do good here, pay some of your favorite creators with a tip, or merch, or specifically sub to their channel. Or, even better, come up with ways creators get paid more. Subverting ads is a downward spiral for things to work better for consumers and creators.
Ads are not an important part of society. They're a crowbar cooked up by companies to barge into your daily life, as if they deserve to be seen and heard just because they want your money!
We need to cut middlemen out of the problem. 'creators' and 'influencers' and shit should find ways to make money from their fans directly.
Patreon, Flattr, gittip, etc are ways to achieve this.
Companies have no more right to communication than the rest of us, and they don't deserve any social or legal protection for the time and attention they waste in society daily from their incessant marketing.
Last night I performed a private concert in my house with an entrance charge. You did not attend. Were you "stealing from creators"?
If you walk past a busker on the street without dropping a coin in the hat, are you "stealing from creators"?
In the former hypothetical, this is clearly absurd. You didn't ask for the concert, you didn't even attend, so of course you were not obliged to pay for it.
This would be like Netflix telling you you are "stealing from creators" by not watching their shows.
In the latter hypothetical, you did not ask for the performance but you heard it nonetheless. You may have even enjoyed it. The busker has costs that you did not meet like food, clothes and equipment costs. How could you not support that?
If Netflix follows the "private concert" model, YouTube very clearly follows the busker model. If it wasn't in public, most of these creators would be like me playing the concert in my home: nobody would attend. They need to be in public.
You can't be in public and force the public to pay.
Download bandwidth can be paid for by re-sharing content with peers via upload bandwidth. It works for millions of people torrenting content right now.
Once you remove ads and the ability to track and target people, peer to peer works. Add anonymous microtransactions to creators and you end up with LBRY.
Do you have a better idea? The service isn't worth paying for and they'll STILL spy on you and serve ads, after taking your money.
Ads do nothing but waste the viewer's time and piss them off. Sponsorships are fine, but what moral or ethical right does ANY business have to force any terms on visitors?
Sure, use whatever technical means you want to control your site, but it's not a moral failing of others that a business can't put together a healthy and mutually beneficial business model.
It turns out modern tech businesses are just shit. I wouldn't buy basically anything on offer in this market due to the total obliteration of trust in the market.
You literally cannot trust a Western or US tech company to not try dragging a net over everything you do to gleam some psych data to manipulate.
The best way to get my money is offering a solid product to me that you cannot take away after the fact with cheap parlor tricks like DRM.
People click on the video for actual content and will always try to remove other stuff.
It's not shocking, it's not surprising, it's pretty rational to do that if you think about it for 2 seconds. This is a solved topic, I really don't understand why people keep bringing this up.
If you are mad about people skipping your boring sponsorship segments — paywall your stuff already or stop complaining. Or better yet, find non-intrusive ways to monetize your content instead of relying on same old methods that became unsustainable years ago.
The fact that you find this noteworthy shows how deeply ingrained capitalism is in your thought process. You are unable to think anything outside of it is possible.
There are zero payment methods available for those of us who opt out of surveillance capitalism, and we refuse to be excluded from culture either, so we consume content for free and without ads until alternatives emerge.
