Isn't YouTube bound to win the war against adblockers?
I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking. What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their video feeds?
The issue with YouTube is that while they don’t produce their own content, they’re currently hosting a wealth of information and there is no competitor at this moment who can come close to consolidating all that archival information.
I don’t mean react videos or mrbeast. If those ever disappeared from the face, nothing of value would have been lost.
I mean science, history and engineering channels. Tutorials and full blown college or university lectures. Documentaries. Archival videos and audio recordings. There is a great wealth of information currently hosted on YouTube and they’re holding it hostage.
Those will have to find a new home and it will likely be spread out over different hosting services so we will lose the convenience of having all this great information under one roof. Look at how dispersed lemmy is at the moment. I have no doubt that Lemmy will eventually match reddit, but lets be honest. We lose a great centralized location for information, tech support and memes.
I don’t think the centralization of information is necessarily a good thing. Besides, having information on different sites is why search engines exist. When I need to learn how to replace, let’s say a toilet shut off valve, I start with a search engine, so it doesn’t matter to me if I find a video on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other service, as long as I don’t have to sign up to view it.
The convenience that YouTube offers is a centralized place for entertainment, like Netflix used to be, and like we’ve had to do with streaming, we’ll adapt if we must.
YouTube was an amazing idea that changed the world, but now it’s being squeezed for every penny that Google can get, a company that found “Don’t be evil” too restrictive. It’s just another example of what happens when a company has to be more profitable every year in order to be considered successful.
Don’t get me wrong. I never said it was a good thing.
But unfortunately its what we have now. Same thing with Wikipedia. If they one day decided they wanted to squeeze a few pennies out of Wikipedia or just close shop overnight, we’d all be shit outta luck because its the only massive scale encyclopedia around. Nothing else comes close.
We should absolutely seek to decentralize that repository of videos yet somehow maintain the ease of having a collective index we can easily scour through to find the information we need.
I apologize if I put words in your mouth.
Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to download a copy of Wikipedia and it’s not even that big. For YT, it would be a pretty massive undertaking. I suppose a good way to start would be to download all the content from channels that you found interesting; I’m pretty sure there are tools that facilitate that. Then, ignoring licensing and copyright issues, hosting the content would depend on how big the data is. Maybe something like Plex or Jellyfin? I kinda want to try it now with a smaller channel just to see.
And they’re not losing us any time soon, for years I’ve seen people saying that YouTube is going down because they do shit the users don’t like and yet everyone keeps using them and in general making no effort in changing that.
It’s just like Reddit, a few of us left but that didn’t change anything, everyone’s still using it and they’re not stopping any time soon.
Even if not abandoning the platform, it would only take a decent portion of the users reducing their use of the platform for them to feel a punishment of some sort, but nobody’s really willing to do anything other than complain and automatically dismiss any suggestion of an alternative.
Nah, because no alternative can be a complete replacement and if it’s not the exact same experience, people aren’t willing to put that tiniest bit of effort.
Again, look at Reddit as an example, alternatives exist, yet none of them are the exact same because there’s not a comparable size, and because of that people will just pull down their pants and begrudgingly accept reddit’s problems.
Good. Considering that they roll in billions, I have no sympathy for them.
I will not shed a tear at the death of the advertisement based internet. Or the horrible things that it has motivated companies to do to maximize advertisement revenue.
I do know how the Internet works. It used to work so much better. I know it can be much better because I lived it.
It was never free money. This ad based revenue model. That money came from the direct extraction of a social resource. It was a system that turned our labors of love, our very thoughts, our ability to express ourselves into a business venture. It gamified a system where it used our labor for their profit, their product.
These spaces belong to us, not the small handful of companies that aim to monopolize our internet. Federation is a great step in the right direction. And rather than fund sites by ad revenue, where they would be motivated to follow that engagement algorithm, we can have communities rewarded for supporting it’s own.
The massive growth we’ve seen over the last 15 years is where the “free” money came from. Tons of companies didn’t have to make money are now needing to pivot. Everyone’s doing it. Everything is changing because there are no longer investors funding growth.
There’s a distinct difference between the Netflix area of the Internet and then Geocities era. Most people aren’t thinking of the later.
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