The second they seriously figure out ad blocking, everyone will figure out ways around it including the ytdownload app and Ublock Origin. This has already happened probably hundreds of times. There will never be a way to stop it because there are myriad ways around it.
They are approaching the issue from the wrong direction: They need to make the service better, not worse, and they will make more money! Steam/Valve is an excellent example of this because of their CEO’s philosophy on “piracy”, he views it as a service issue with the product itself instead of blaming people who are fed up with bad service and high prices.
Taking the approach of trying to extract more value out of customers ultimately kills the product, driving customers away and hurting profits compared to what they could have had if they’d just made a really great product with ads that aren’t onerous, prices that are reasonable, as well as adequate compensation and treatment for the creators (nobody gets randomly demonitized on Steam because they featured a particular thing for example).
It’s an asymmetrical arms race, essentially. Google has to discover and block everything you could do to get around adblock-blockers. Adblock devs (et al) just need to periodically find one new way that they haven’t discovered yet.
YouTube is not profitable, that is the number one problem. The infrastructure to keep it running costs billions per year, mainly in storage and bandwidth. Offering a better service won’t bring money for two reasons:
1 - they don’t have competition
2 - more people coming to YouTube will increase costs
Steam’s running cost is nowhere near the cost of YouTube, plus it has several methods of generating income, unlike a “free video streaming platform”
I feel like it’s disingenuous for Google to say they don’t make any money with YouTube when their revenue is largely from ads and selling people’s data. Part of me suspects they’re pulling something akin to movie accounting to claim a loss for tax purposes.
Sure, video hosting and streaming is expensive, but they have been running YouTube for 20 years now. If it was really losing that much money, they would’ve pulled the plug a long time ago.
Do we really know that YouTube doesn’t make any profit at all and there isn’t some creative accounting going on?
I didn’t say Youtube doesn’t make money, I said it’s not profitable, that is, the service alone does not generate enough money to pay for its own existence. If this HackerNews thread is to be believed, it’s unlikely even google execs know whether the thing is actually profitable or not (it did generate 50B USD in revenue in 2023-24, which is obviously a lot, but only 11B more than Netflix (39B) despite serving a much, much wider audience)
Youtube exists in a situation very similar to that of Twitter pre acquisition. It’s a money drain, but it’s extremely useful to control and own. Elon Musk saw that he could buy Twitter, he bought it, ruined its value, but we’re seeing that he didn’t buy “the company”, he bought a significant portion of people’s mindshare, so to speak. When Google bought YT in 2006, they saw the writing on the wall, that high speed internet would lead to more people watching videos, which turned true, and they also used their power to fully consolidate Youtube as the place to watch free videos online. Facebook likely played a bigger hand in destroying any possible competition than Google, but that’s a different story.
I remain skeptical despite Google’s claims and I have to wonder how much money they spend on fighting stuff like ad blocking when most people don’t even use any.
If they actually aren’t profitable (which I doubt), it would be pretty funny if it were because they wasted a shitload of money trying to stop ad blockers.
They pull that wild bullshit and users will drop like flies lol, AND there would STILL be ways around it both in terms of tech/coding as well as old fashioned methods.
If I really wanted to watch it I’d just run ytdownload on the URL. Peertube is pretty cool though.
The second they seriously figure out ad blocking, ytdlp is gone
The second they seriously figure out ad blocking, everyone will figure out ways around it including the ytdownload app and Ublock Origin. This has already happened probably hundreds of times. There will never be a way to stop it because there are myriad ways around it.
They are approaching the issue from the wrong direction: They need to make the service better, not worse, and they will make more money! Steam/Valve is an excellent example of this because of their CEO’s philosophy on “piracy”, he views it as a service issue with the product itself instead of blaming people who are fed up with bad service and high prices.
Taking the approach of trying to extract more value out of customers ultimately kills the product, driving customers away and hurting profits compared to what they could have had if they’d just made a really great product with ads that aren’t onerous, prices that are reasonable, as well as adequate compensation and treatment for the creators (nobody gets randomly demonitized on Steam because they featured a particular thing for example).
It’s an asymmetrical arms race, essentially. Google has to discover and block everything you could do to get around adblock-blockers. Adblock devs (et al) just need to periodically find one new way that they haven’t discovered yet.
YouTube is not profitable, that is the number one problem. The infrastructure to keep it running costs billions per year, mainly in storage and bandwidth. Offering a better service won’t bring money for two reasons:
1 - they don’t have competition 2 - more people coming to YouTube will increase costs
Steam’s running cost is nowhere near the cost of YouTube, plus it has several methods of generating income, unlike a “free video streaming platform”
I feel like it’s disingenuous for Google to say they don’t make any money with YouTube when their revenue is largely from ads and selling people’s data. Part of me suspects they’re pulling something akin to movie accounting to claim a loss for tax purposes.
Sure, video hosting and streaming is expensive, but they have been running YouTube for 20 years now. If it was really losing that much money, they would’ve pulled the plug a long time ago.
Do we really know that YouTube doesn’t make any profit at all and there isn’t some creative accounting going on?
I didn’t say Youtube doesn’t make money, I said it’s not profitable, that is, the service alone does not generate enough money to pay for its own existence. If this HackerNews thread is to be believed, it’s unlikely even google execs know whether the thing is actually profitable or not (it did generate 50B USD in revenue in 2023-24, which is obviously a lot, but only 11B more than Netflix (39B) despite serving a much, much wider audience)
Youtube exists in a situation very similar to that of Twitter pre acquisition. It’s a money drain, but it’s extremely useful to control and own. Elon Musk saw that he could buy Twitter, he bought it, ruined its value, but we’re seeing that he didn’t buy “the company”, he bought a significant portion of people’s mindshare, so to speak. When Google bought YT in 2006, they saw the writing on the wall, that high speed internet would lead to more people watching videos, which turned true, and they also used their power to fully consolidate Youtube as the place to watch free videos online. Facebook likely played a bigger hand in destroying any possible competition than Google, but that’s a different story.
I remain skeptical despite Google’s claims and I have to wonder how much money they spend on fighting stuff like ad blocking when most people don’t even use any.
If they actually aren’t profitable (which I doubt), it would be pretty funny if it were because they wasted a shitload of money trying to stop ad blockers.
Just because it has been that way in the past absolutely does not mean it works that way in the future.
What happens when they force login, then when they detect discrepancies in watch time vs watch + ad time and they ban your account?
What happens when they force ads to play before you get the main roll and simply don’t send you any video streams for 5 minutes?
What happens when they force screen recording rights to make sure you’re displaying ads on mobile devices?
What happens when they start using DRM and roll the encryption so often yt-dlp becomes useless?
The theoretical myriad isn’t any bigger than their theoretical ways to break that myriad, but the catch is that they’re funded.
There are LOTS of ways they could shut it down that are beyond checking agents and changing API’s around.
They pull that wild bullshit and users will drop like flies lol, AND there would STILL be ways around it both in terms of tech/coding as well as old fashioned methods.