https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/
Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.
Shareholders: you doubled your profit last year, so I expect you to do it again this year.
*we expect you to do better than that
There, fify
Pretty much. Capitalism is completely unsustainable.
And kill the entire planet in the process if you need to.
That’s the whole company. How much did YouTube lose for them?
YouTube lost google -31.5 billion in 2023, approximately 10% of all of alphabet’s revenue.
I was genuinely confused by this statistic until I realised it was a double negative. YouTube losen’t Google a lot of money.
Yeah, sorry, sometimes I can’t help my need to play with language, when given the slightest chance.
Revenue is not profit
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn’t find revenue numbers. It seems unlikely to be costing that much to host. I’d be really surprised to learn it isn’t cash positive at this point.
Best I could find is the entire division makes about 35% profit and you’d have to assume some of that was YouTube
And as we know companies prefer to provide a service with a loss, for decades. Name a company that can make -31.5 billion and keep going. Or maybe the data went to google, where they made the money.
Not made -31.5 billion. Lost -31.5 billion. As in they brought in that much, not cost it.
Do they somehow calculate in this the value off the youtube harvested user data that serves other Google branches? No, right?
It’s funny that free third party apps literally have more features and are more user friendly than the official app with premium.
Why the fuck would I pay for less when I can get more for free?
Some years ago ago, I was a happy subscriber to Google Music. But, they added it to the graveyard, and instead grafted on some music playing functionality to YouTube and called it YouTube Music. So, I went back to Spotify.
Then I started paying for YouTube Premium Lite. It wasn’t unreasonably expensive, although it was a bit annoying I couldn’t just have “YouTube” in the household, like with Netflix. So if wife would cast a video to the TV, it would play with ads.
It was about a year ago, when Google starting cracking down on adblockers, that they also removed an option to pay for the service. I think YouTube Premium Lite wasn’t a thing in the US (correct me if I’m wrong), but they removed YT Premium Lite, and the only option left was a twice as expensive YouTube Premium bundle that included YouTube Music.
Tldr: fucked up Google Music, then removed an option to pay for YouTube premium, leaving a fairly expensive alternative with the pile of shit they replaced Google music with. It’ll be a rough time if they manage to force ads. I won’t pay for it, out of principle.
Edit: I looked at the numbers again. I’d have to pay more for YouTube than for the highest Netflix tier. It’s more than Prime and HBO combined. They also don’t have to front large sums to fund risky projects. If they didn’t include YouTube Music, I might have considered it. But with it, it just pisses me off, they can go get f.ed
I think there’s a couple things at play:
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You know enough to find a different app and make it do what you need it to. Not a hard thing, but something many non-tech savvy people could struggle with, or more likely–
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People often will just use what’s there. We know we have options, we are aware of the privacy concerns… but many people simply aren’t and/or don’t care enough to do anything about it.
We spend a lot of time here, so it seems to us like second nature to avoid intrusive apps… I find in my day-to-day life not many people are talking about that kind of stuff, or don’t have much knowledge/experience in that realm. (I realize that is anecdotal).
I 100% agree with your statements–just trying to rationalize how so many people end up using/staying with these ever-worsening services/apps…
To prove your point I am person #2, I know things liked invidious and piped exist but I just idk haven’t gotten around to it
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To be fair, one of the apps mentioned, [Re]Vanced, is literally just the stock app with extra features patched in and the premium features enabled for free (like no ads and downloads). It makes sense that it would be more user friendly. Allowing that modified version doesn’t get them any revenue though while still costing them to host and serve the content to those users.
At least with NewPipe it supports multiple sites and is its own app with their own code and UI.
I don’t understand this argument because NewPipe still gets the video from YouTube (primarily), costing them to host…
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I pay $4/mo, mainly for YouTube music (I’m part of a friend’s family plan).
It’s pretty convenient since you can use the background audio on an iPad as well - I don’t use it often but it’s nice when I do. And there’s no ads there it’s pretty insane seeing the level of ads when I try and use my work phone which I’m not signed into.
Also, you can make channels within your single goggle account so I made one for my mom and bro so they get no ads aswell. They have to sign in to my acct which can feel a little sketch but I trust them since they’re just using the YT app on their TVs. They stay in their own user acct. and it doesn’t affect my history or anything
I’ll give up on YouTube before I give up my ad blocks or 3rd party apps. Fuck off Google.
That’s likely what they want. If you’re not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a ‘customer’. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you’re blocked or when you eventually stop using it.
Thing is you also stop sharing and commenting and engaging with other users. If it wasn’t useful they would pull the plug long ago, nothing technical is preventing them.
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I recall Louis Rossmann saying something along those lines, and sounded perfectly reasonable to me.
Only reasonable to a capitalist who sees everything as zero-sum.
It will go the way of Reddit…
Almost no impact to their userbase or revenue?
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You could just pay for premium. Then you wouldn’t have ads
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It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.
“security reasons” is the classic cop-out for making users lives more miserable.
Like what are you gonna do, argue that you don’t care about security?
Has that actually rolled out yet? I thought it was only announced and planned for late this year.
was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers.
I had not heard of Manifest v3 and actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. I guess you are.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/
They’ve been trying for years to implement this at a large price to the users. They always try to hide under the guise of security.
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/16/google-intensifies-fight-against-youtube-adblockers/
Man they’re fucking out of their minds!!!
I only care about how this will affect Floorp’s user agent spoofing abilities thought 😶🌫️🌫️
They’re not being sarcastic, they are repeating Google’s (bs) justification
They are being sarcastic, with the emphasis on “purely”, while saying Google’s justification. It’s exactly to point out it’s bs.
yes exactly what sneezycat said. I was being sarcastic and pointing out that Manifest V3 was always a crackdown on ad blocking and nothing else.
Sure, I guess I maintain its that’s not what sarcasm is but we do agree on the point
If it is not sarcasm then the justification is not bs. And OP agrees it is sarcasm.
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https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
This won’t change your mobile experience, but on desktop this makes Firefox absolutely gorgeous. I’ve been using it for at least a year now and it still blows me away every time I happen to see the stock UI.
I literally don’t know what people who say this mean. It looks totally modern, almost identical to the chrome and edge UIs, it’s fully customizable, and there are thousands of extensions to alter the appearance in a single click, not to mention custom css styling if you want complete control.
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There’s only so much you can do on a mobile browser to be fair, they all look the same
How is the mobile app terrible? I’ve been using it for years with no issues, and it has many extensions that chrome on Android doesn’t allow like adblocking.
The tabs in FF are great, for years now FF has been much better at handing huge accounts of passive tabs, and there are tons of extensions to provide any functionality you could want.
I guarantee you if you just install a few extensions that you like and use it for a week you won’t even notice any more.
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There are a ton of other WebKit/Blink based browsers to choose from! Safari, Vivaldi, Brave… not to mention good old Firefox and Gecko!
Are there any semi-popular alternative browsers still based on WebKit? I thought most of them like Brave and Vivaldi were based on Chromium’s Blink rather than WebKit.
Technically not really, I just said WebKit to avoid breaking down the whole fork situation in my comment. Blink isn’t that different in reality so, WebKit for simplicity. Safari and Chrome are much closer to one another than Firefox is to either, so 🤷♂️
Vivaldi and Brave use Blink (Chromium), not WebKit
They are practically the same thing.
Uh, no? They’re absolutely not the same.
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Firefox has had data sync for a long ass time.
It’s even end-to-end encrypted!
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I mean… yes? If you’re saying that Chrome sucks now, then why would you want to switch on some platforms but not others?
What the fuck? Can you sync chrome to edge and edge to opera? What kind of bad faith bullshit ass argument are you trying to pull here?
You’re claiming that you cant sync data on Firefox, when you absolutely can. Then you claim that what you meant was that you cant cross browser sync on multiple devices. Well congratufuckinglations, you can’t on any other browser either.
What is wrong with you?
What’s wrong with you? Are you unable to read my comment, or is it comprehension problems?
I’m saying if I switch to Firefox, I have to switch it on both PC and mobile, but I hate the UI on mobile. I can’t leave one as Chrome (mobile) and the other as Firefox (PC) and expect them to work together (sync). Thus, I’d rather stock to Chrome because the ui is better.
The mobile app is great.
You can use the session on your desktop on the go automatically on Firefox.
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
And all of those come down to money
Search shows you random videos because “the algorithm” is hoping to drive you through to videos that are the most monetized and the most likely to keep you on the platform based on their data
The shorts thing is because they can pack more ads into 15 second bits of content while using less bandwidth and they’re hoping to hijack your attention with an “endless stream” of short clips a la TikTok or instagram reels
The video bandwidth drops to low every time because they’re hoping people will still watch, see the ads, and not bump the quality up, saving Google on bandwidth costs
The live streams thing is just more advertising revenue again
None of that applies if you’re a paying customer like me, and I see all the same bs. So no, it’s really just bad design, it’s not trying to do any of the stuff you mentioned.
Even that’s just a monetary decision. They are choosing not to spend money to build a custom “premium” experience for paying customers and instead just stripping ads, keeping the existing engagement/monetization driven UI in place. A customized UI takes more dev time, costs more in engineering labor, etc
Why would they design it to be any better if you’re still willing to pay for it?
The live streams thing is not about advertising. Problems like putting the hearts button on top of the chat instead of next to the chat or having the chat cover up the entire left side of the stream every time a single message is sent are just because they don’t care.
As soon as I have to see shorts, YouTube is dead to me. I hate the format with a passion.
bizarre restrictions around background play
there’s nothing bizarre about it - the free version is shitty on purpose
They already do but it’s pretty restrictive in what can be changed about the experience:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies-guide#examples_3
Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!
Host them yourself to watch them locally.
Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!
We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.
Quick shout out to yt-dlp. It comes everything you need to download, transcode, and even use Sponsorblock!
I also recommend NewPipe for Android. It lets you download in multiple formats and shows comments in a mobile format (you can get it through the F-Droid store or from github.)
NewPipe
FreeTube for Windows. Finally stable, download options, subs, history, ex-/importable data, locally, no ads of course. It’s awesome!
Next to KDEconnect, I freaking love Freetube. Just a nice application
Btw FreeTube is not just available for Windows, it also works perfectly on Linux and macOS
Made a script/cron job to auto dl new videos from my favorite channels with ytdlp and then they are hosted through jellyfin. Archived forever, ad free, accessible to me from anywhere.
Another quick shout out to Tube Archivist, it’s perfect for archiving YouTube videos
This is the way.
Not again … Well, let’s wait a week or so for the clients to fix that.
Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”
I think YouTube wouldn’t care as long as they got paid
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Years ago I used to use an app called “AdSkip” or something along those lines that used the accessibility API to automatically mute and skip all YouTube ads. I’d imagine the screen black-out would be trivial to add on top
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not for YouTube but there is for twitch yea
Please don’t leave me hanging.
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Xtra was one of them I used to use, but they have a bunch of different ad blocks that do it too now. Multistream services do it as well
You can use SafeTwitch with LibRedirect
For Android, I recommend Xtra
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They’ve been trying for a minute. Must be different now that they’re saying it!
Checks notes
Nope, revanced still works.
That’s because revanced is still youtubes app, just lightly modified.
If I put my dick in your girl, is she still yours but lightly modified?
Women are not property, nor are they software
That’s your take from this?
It’s a false equivilence
You need to get better at language. Let me help you with an example someone autistic can easily understand.
You’re working at a restaurant as a waiter. You’re in charge of some tables. Your coworker says to you “Your party in the back corner asked for one of the apple pies.”. Did your co-worker just say you owned people?
I put my dick in your mom, but it didn’t seem to improve your intelligence, but you’re still hers.
I simply cannot get revanced to even download to my phone, and I’m not smart enough to troubleshoot it.
How motivated are you? Motivated enough to buy something good?
Depends on where you get it. Recently had to go through and find another version, as mine was detected by YouTube and just said to download the official version of YouTube to play videos.
Same. Gotta keep in the game.
My newpipe 😔
I’ve mostly only noticed that the comments won’t load, not a big loss imo
Likewise but im sure it wont stop there
I think Google engineers drag their feet on this.
Like - Google’s pre-installed corporate Firefox and Chrome both have ad blockers. Ublock origin is installed by default on Firefox (I can’t remember what was installed on chrome, I only used it for the work suite/cloudtop and did everything else on FF).
Nobody I worked with at Google liked ads… But I didn’t work at YouTube. So maybe it’s different there.
But I suspect the engineers are doing it just to show management that they’re doing something but it’s half hearted.
Real efforts and real threats of it getting locked down, sure, but half hearted effort.
There’s already a patch for comments in the release candidate for the new version
I switched them off by default.
As soon as 3rd party clients don’t work as they do anymore, I am stopping going to YouTube. Simple as, I know it doesn’t matter as a singular thing, I am just one user. Was the same with reddit, now I am here but reddit is still going (how well we don’t need to debate now).
You’re not alone. Don’t think that. A lot of people will do the same. I’m right there with ya. Fuck YouTube
Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: “Let the market decide!” The market: “We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it.” Companies: “Waaaaaa, they are fighting us.”
Conservative companies promoting free market economy: Government, make it a crime to not use our products!
“A company should be able to decide not to do business with individuals for ideological reasons.”
Twitter, Facebook, etc. start filtering misinformation and banning offenders.
“Mah freedoms are being infringed!”
The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.
Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.
Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.
YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.
Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.
Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.
It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.
Ofcourse you always get youtube music with the subscription, which they claim ads extra value. But I dont want youtube music, I already pay for another service. So for me it would be a waste of money
I pay for the family plan and they use google music. I use pandora because my station is older than my 16yo niece that’s on my yt plan.
Fuck them. I’d rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.
The issue is not only the ads, it’s the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it’s the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it’s every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn’t work for you, it works against you. That’s not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.
I’ve been using youtube on Firefox with ublock since the premium price raise. Even on android. The experience is not great, but that makes sure I don’t have ads at all.
Also discovered unhooked addon yesterday. Is desktop only, but great for going into less youtube rabbit holes that waste my time.
don’t make solutions popular.
It’s lemmy, world’s smallest social media platform. We’ll be fine :p
That’s sad but it’s true 😢
Howso? You think even in the event this wasn’t being scraped, that there isn’t a single dev from YouTube, or a YouTube adjacent team possibly here?
There’s a large (relative) tech worker user base on Lemmy.
It was a joke.
And I think they are very much aware of uBlock. Unhooked got recommended to me by a Youtube video.
They know.
If they’re going to find it on lemmy they’re going to find it anywhere. Also, they already know about ublock origin, and its unlikely they’d even care about unhooked, since it doesn’t block ads.
“there’s all this litter on the ground I’ll just throw my litter”
Not a remotely relevant comparison, and even if it was, completely ignores my second point.
If you suck at critical thinking sure
Edit I’m not obligated to address every point, this aint debate club
Yeah but things get popular here, we tell our family and friends, they go out and tell people…
We disdain to hide sauce that could benefit the people. We don’t bogart knowledge like a settler would.
I’m simply saying what happens. For good or for ill.
