General > General Technical Chat

YouTube runs experiment addressing users with ad blocker

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Bicurico:
The thing is: Google results are far from being what they were.
Nowadays the results are highly determined by commercial interest. If whatever you search for can be shown as a commercial result, it will prevail any other results.
This renders many searches almost useless.

ataradov:

--- Quote from: Bicurico on October 17, 2023, 07:08:01 pm ---His ads are not intrusive as YouTube ads and hence much better tolerated.

--- End quote ---
What "his ads" we are talking about? I don't remember any sponsored content apart from equipment donated for reviews. He relies on the YT ads. So, if that goes away, his ads would have to be the same raid shadow legends crap as everyone else does.

Bicurico:
Even this forum uses ads. Have you noticed? Sometimes I even click on them, mostly by accident, sometimes on purpose.

ve7xen:

--- Quote from: Bicurico ---1) People start to host the videos themselfes and Google has no other alternative than to show search results pointing to said videos. Example: Dave with EEVblog could host his videos himself and completely forget about Youtube. He would get his money from Patreons or ads, the increased bandwidth shouldn't be that expensive (I guess - could be wrong) and he would be in full control.

--- End quote ---
This might work for mid-tier creators who have enough dedicated viewers to drive them to their site. But this is not the way people consume content today, they want a single pane of glass showing them new content, not to have to constantly refresh a dozen websites to wait for something new or sign up to a dozen e-mail lists or RSS feeds. They want a first-class experience on their TV and mobile. Ultimately I think even popular creators would see attrition under such a model with little hope of gaining viewership. I don't think we're going back to that consumption model.

There's also a bit of a scaling problem with no diversity. If a stream is 5mbps, you can only host 200 streams (optimistically) on a typical single server. Maybe the average case is 20 viewers watching your streams, but when you release a new video it peaks up to 1000 (no idea on realistic numbers) and you're well underwater. I don't think these are big numbers, but you're talking about a fairly significant infrastructure investment to satisfy those peak loads. Or you need to start getting into Cloud infrastructure and it stops being so simple and cheap. There are also tons (probably most) of mid-tier channels with very little technical ability.

For creators just starting out, it's a fairly large barrier to entry compared to today, and it is much harder to get discovered and gain viewers if you're not where the viewers are. And you still need to make money somehow, which likely means - you guessed it - ads. At the other end, the huge channels, they can probably afford to pay a SaaS kind of thing for hosting, but they also have the scale to implement the same kind of ads YouTube uses, and likely would need to (or more aggressive 'embedded' spots) to make the funding work, and they'd be a lot less efficient at selling ad space etc. Hosting it themselves at that scale is probably not really viable.

None of this solves the real problem that YouTube solve(d), which is putting all that content in one place and helping you find other stuff you might like.

Ultimately someone has to pay real dollars to at least maintain the infrastructure and pay the creators a living wage, and over the history of video content, that has either been via advertising or pay-to-view.


--- Quote from: Bicurico ---2) Youtube gets replaced by a torrent-like network, where all registered users share their bandwidth and disk space. Not one but several sites can then act as a search engine - pretty much how torrent based movie sharing works. A reward system could be implemented: host so many GB of contents and you get preferencial data streaming over those who don't share. Or make the sharing mandatory.
--- End quote ---

Technically this is probably viable, and I think it's been tried if something like that isn't actively operating today. There are a few problems - ultimately you need to host 'seed' copies somewhere, which someone needs to pay for somehow, and someone needs to develop and host the discovery / search / community mechanism, which also requires money or dedicated individual effort at least. Even so, it likely won't ever be anywhere close to as good as something like YouTube.


--- Quote from: MK14 on October 17, 2023, 07:00:07 pm ---In summary, YouTube can indirectly get a lot of payment/money/resources, from the people who don't watch the adverts (e.g. because they block them or ignore them), and who never subscribe to it.

--- End quote ---

I'm sure there are other models that might work, but the bottom line is Google needs to get something out of the relationship, and in almost all cases, that means you (or at least some significant fraction of users) are giving something up. It is not quite zero-sum, but there's not much that earns Google money that helps you, outside of very specific targeted advertising, like you describe, which is still advertising. Your #1 for example is way more offensive to me than inline advertising, that is literally 'selling your information' that people always bring up, which is something that Google doesn't currently do. Getting more views from people who also won't see the ads is actively harmful as views cost them money; ultimately they need people to watch them so that they get paid, which isn't likely to increase if they let you just turn them off.


--- Quote from: MK14 ---I suspect, that if Google had charged $9.99 or whatever, right from the start for searches, we would have never heard of Google, and they perhaps wouldn't even exist, now.

--- End quote ---

Of course not, that is the story of so many tech companies. Launch for free, get users, and figure out how to monetize it later. Ultimately that depends on venture funding, which depends on people believing money can be made, or it will eventually collapse under its own weight when people stop believing and stop funding the operation of the service, regardless of how well-loved it is.

Search is funded by, you guessed it, advertising. Being the top Google result for your search term and desired demographic is apparently less offensive to folks than being forced to view an ad, and likely also more valuable to the advertisers paying for that placement, so there's less 'noise' about this, but ultimately this is the same basic model as YouTube and pretty much everything Google does.

It's interesting and maybe enlightening that AFAIK none of the new AI hotness is free.

ataradov:

--- Quote from: Bicurico on October 17, 2023, 08:17:38 pm ---Even this forum uses ads.

--- End quote ---
But the forum ads are not video ads. Do you think it is viable to make a living from the forum ads? The only reason none of this is intrusive is because it is only a part of the income.

Once you have to live off those ads, you will have to start accepting anything and everything.

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