• Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    7 days ago

    I experienced this crazy onslaught of advertising to the point of reducing how much I watched YouTube. I was pretty upset and not at all inclined to pay, especially since YouTube was even putting ads on my own videos without me seeing a single cent, because my channel is too small.

    Then my partner bought me a few months of a Premium Subscription as a Christmas gift.

    It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.

    Combined with background music on mobile, it’s changed my life.

    I’m still unimpressed with the business model, but the alternative is so far worse.

    Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

    • Strider@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      42
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      7 days ago

      To me this is way too much like extortion. The more they do this the less I want to give them money.

      Also I need to be logged on everywhere, which I don’t want to (have to), mostly for privacy and data harvesting reasons.

      It also does not help that when I want to see something and jump around in a video, I get the same ad 30 times. No exaggeration.

    • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      7 days ago

      The thing is… All the premium features USED TO BE FREE AND AVAILABLE UNTIL THEY LOCKED THEM BEHIND A PAY WALL.

      I used to be able to have YouTube playing in the background, reduced ads, etc. All of the features.

      Now, I still do because I use Firefox + ublock on mobile. Yeah, I can play this shit with my screen off (Firefox + unlock + desktop mode + turn screen off).

      Fuck 'em.

    • tal@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      7 days ago

      It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.

      Yeah, I think that YouTube provides a lot of value.

      My problem is that I don’t really want Google – a company who makes a lot of their money via profiling and data-mining – logging and data-mining everything I watch.

      YouTube Premium lets someone avoid ads. But as best I can tell, it’s not buying any kind of no-log service – in fact, it’s just linking your activity to your financial information, which makes logging and profiling easier. That’s not the service that I want to buy from Google.

      What I’d be willing to get from Google is a “no log” service.

      I pay for Kagi, for search engine service. I pay for commercial email service. I’m fine with giving money to online service providers and entrusting them with (some) of my data…but I want part of that service to be that they aren’t logging what I do and data-mining my data.

      I don’t like the model of “we don’t charge up front but we make our money by extracting all the information about you that we can”. I’m fine with that existing, because some people are more comfortable with that. But it isn’t what I want for myself.

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        7 days ago

        I think that every single provider tracks your activity and the vast majority of them use it to optimise their service income from you, either by giving you better engagement, ie. making you use the service more - endless searching for content for example, or by selling the captured tracking data to the highest bidder.

        • 1984@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          7 days ago

          Not Kagi if you believe their privacy policy. I believe them and have been loving Kagi for like a year now I think. I made the switch long ago and it’s so good I forgot about Google search.

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        7 days ago

        I think that every single provider tracks your activity and the vast majority of them use it to optimise their service income from you, either by giving you better engagement, ie. making you use the service more - endless searching for content for example, or by selling the captured tracking data to the highest bidder.

    • cobysev@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      7 days ago

      Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

      Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

      Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        5 days ago

        The lifetime access option shouldn’t exist for an app like that, not unless they have another primary form of income (usually ads). That type of service costs a lot of money to host and if you have a user base that does a one off purchase you stop having a good chunk of that income relatively fast

        That’s just the main red flag I see from that, I would be super hesient starting on a platform that isn’t self sustaining and doesn’t have a parent company willing to chuck money at it “till it works” like Google did

      • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        7 days ago

        No offense to nebula (I’m rooting for them) but unless you exclusively watch news and educational content it basically has nothing to offer. I tried it for a year and I ended up barely using it because I don’t watch that type of content.

        • cobysev@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          7 days ago

          Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.