What isn't the case? they've previously admitted to intentionally using ad patterns tailored to users intended to be frustrating.
Shock horror, they want you to either watch the full ad so they get paid or pay directly for no ads.
All of this.
that and the price they want people to pay for a site that beyond the video player itself hasn't moved on since the 90s with a pathetic comments, history, search and filters, etc. system, etc. etc. which occasionally gets a cosmetic update but no fundamental functionality updates.
The issue isn't with adverts, its the number of them, the length and the way they act. Showing adverts that you have to skip manually if you don't want to watch 2:30 of advert. Showing short adverts that just stop on a static final page until you manually skip. Showing you so many adverts in a video that you can't even be bothered to watch the content because its such a jarring and stuttering experience.
Per the above, the only way they generate revenue is if you actually watch the ads.
I can’t say I’ve ever had an ad which I had to click a button to move past in YouTube.
Skipable ads don’t pay as much money.
For now... they have already said that the ad tiers make them more money than the more expensive ones without ads i'm pretty sure. Make no mistake, ads will creep into all of them or your price will continue to rise and rise.
Got a citation for that? Generally ads don’t pay anything like the subscription revenue per user.
The free tier of Spotify for example is loss making and is subsidised by paying subscribers.
They have done this to themselves by catering to non-existent audiences and churning out utter dross at vast expense. Yes part of it is the sheet competition and volume of media coming out all the time but 99% of it is crap. Its recently come out that Netflix are changing the way they develop content so its more palatable to the attention incapable younger generation who have their phones in front of their faces most of the time while watching netflix.
Not really, the stuff they are churning out today isn’t any more or less dross than it was 10 years ago.
The crisis in the film industry is almost entirely down to a collapse in theatre revenue over Covid which has never recovered. Most of them up until this point were doing fine.
TV (including streaming sites like Netflix) are suffering because there is so much competition now for people’s time and the content costs so much money to produce. There are probably now too many players in the market so no one’s making any money which isn’t sustainable. I’m expecting there to be some consolidation over the next 5 years as the market is currently very fragmented.
Of course it is but they are still making bank on it. The issue, as with all publicly traded companies is that they need to always be making more profit. You either grow your paying customers or you squeeze more out of each one. Thats how these companies work. Google as an entity have a vested interest in creating their ecosystem and as a company their profits last year were around £60bn. They aren't struggling. They are greedy.
Google is making bank but that doesn’t mean YouTube as a business unit is.
We already know they pay out 70% of the ad and subscription revenue so that only leaves 30% for Google before any costs.
The split on things like memberships and super chats is not as high but those are a relatively small element of the revenue.
You are talking about a maximum gross margin of ~30% under their business model. That isn’t huge and only works at scale.
YouTube has substantial infrastructure costs which are only growing as more content is uploaded to the platform daily.
Nothing has been delisted by the platform, the very first videos uploaded are still available today, I’m not sure that is even sustainable.
It’s actually well known that YouTube only started turning a profit in recent years and it’s the main reason there isn’t a direct competitor. Those that have tried have failed because of the costs involved.
TLDR - YouTube isn’t a high margin business model.
It may make a good amount of profit in absolute terms but its profit margins are relatively slim and its capital deployed is significant so its return on investment is not huge and only really works because of Google’s other business units that it has synergies with.
Or just ditch chrome and move to a browser that allow ublock to function...
That’s not really a YouTube thing, that’s Google trying to control the ad market across the internet.
You're arguing as if I have a problem with ads and subscriptions. I don't. I have an issue with the race to squeeze every penny out of people so they can pay their shareholders and keep the line moving ever upwards. Netflix at this point is a content factory. The vast majority of it is rubbish. Give it 5 years and we will be back where we were before streaming services were de-facto. Ads everywhere or paying insane money. These companies aren't some of the most valuable in the world because they are rubbing two pennies together.
Not really, what im trying to say is the internet costs a lot more than what the vast majority of the population thinks it does. Most people think the internet is free, it really isn’t.
The downward trend in quality is largely down to people being unwilling to pay the real cost of producing quality content.
The main reason why the text based internet is disappearing is because no one is willing to pay for it and ad revue for static content has collapsed.
The same applies for news media, it’s now completely trash tier content because they can’t afford to actually do proper journalism anymore because no one want to pay for it.
The short of it is YouTube is a free service and optional content consumption. It's a business.
Pay for it. Steal it. Whatever. Just stop moaning.
This.
Edit: correcting the autocorrect fails!