this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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While I kinda sympathise, I won't be filing a complaint. I want Youtube to become so shit that even the average user will start looking for alternatives. I want ads plastered everywhere on that site and adblockers to fail miserably at blocking them. I want the average user to be so bothered by the ads that when they stumble upon an alternative they try and convince people to switch. I want content creators to be so bothered by it that they make videos promoting the use of another service.
Make this a competition for alternatives. Don't make it easy for users to stay on Youtube.
I'm sure content creators will be pissed that more ads are served on their videos haha. Oh no! More money! Whatever will they do? The conversation about ads has two sides where consumers are on one and content creators and youtube are on the other.
While I'd absolutely love for there to be a youtube alternative, they have a pretty much complete monopoly on online video distribution. Hosting all that data is expensive so competitors would need some serious financial backing which would likely put the competitor service in the hands of a large corporation.
Youtube and content creators are not on the same side. This woefully reduces a complex problem with many different actors down to a Right Side and a Wrong Side, and anyone whose not on My Side, must be on the Wrong Side.
I'm talking about purely in terms of ads on the video. Both youtube and content creators want as as much ad revenue as possible but not to the point where they lose viewership because of the quantity of ads. I'm not saying content creators are in the wrong, I'm just saying that they get paid based on ads, so of course they want more revenue. It's just an analysis of the relationship, I'm not pointing blame towards anyone.
The problem I see, is that it wouldn't actually be more money for the creators despite there being more ads as the user base actually seeing the ads is reduced and the difference has to be made up in volume.
I guess that's fair. There's a critical point where that happens though. Even if they doubled the amount of ads right now, I bet they wouldn't lose too many people because there aren't any real competitor platforms. The amount of youtube ads right now is still significantly less than the equivalent watch time of cable channels, for example. You can watch 20 mins of content and sit through maybe 3 5 second skippable ads, and 3 20 second ads or something? Still significantly less than tv where you have 15 mins of ads every hour.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=_--LvdAHfVo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.