Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…
Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.
The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.
demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer
Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.
whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide
There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.
To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.
I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime.
Did you just compare your small private server with YouTube’s infrastructure? Jesus Christ.
Google had already been paying about 2 million a month for bandwidth in 2015 or so.
I work for a larger company as a software developer, even with a billion in gross sales, there is absolutely no chance to provide even a tenth of YouTube’s service. Especially for free (without paywalls). The company would go bust in two years.
VPN has absolutely nothing to do with hosting a video platform, no clue why you even bring it up.
Debrids is just a file download service, isn’t it? But even if it was a video hosting platform, a single server would never be enough. You need at least two (as a fall back). Then you need dynamic scaling for bigger user numbers, which works just fine for CPU and RAM (or even GPU resources), but doesn’t work for storage. So you need extra storage somewhere all servers have access to, but when it comes to videos you’d be paying millions in no time.
So you need your own cheap storage and datacenters around the world. And CDNs on top to serve your content worldwide (otherwise the experience would suck on another continent if your server is too far away).
Look up how Google does it, they have their own data storage centers. And if your video is crappy and you’re a nobody, it probably gets stored in a slower location on-demand. So it also loads slower. But if your video is in high-demand with millions of views it gets pushed into a more accessible location (and gets higher priority for CDNs). It’s not just hosting, there is a massive amount of logic and software behind the stack.
You use a VPN when you either don’t trust your ISP (or the current network connection you are on) or you want to hide who you really are on the internet. Both are absolutely unnecessary when accessing a video hosting platform (you can do this, but you don’t have to). A VPN is also more on the user side of things to connect to a server, the server doesn’t care if you use a VPN.
Debrid just makes accessing files easier as far as I can see. Like you give it a torrent link and it provides you a direct download? That’s nice and all for piracy, but has absolutely nothing to do with a video hosting platform like YouTube. You could use Debrid to download the video file from a host, but we are talking about providing the actual host you store the videos on.
I absolutely do not get the points you are trying to make, do you have an example for an infrastructure like YouTube you could build out of a VPN and Debrid?
Peertube would be an alternative of course, but it obviously has tons of its own issues (mainly resources, it still costs too much to host a large instance and if you try to access one video a million times things would straight up implode). I don’t see a realistic YouTube alternative without investing millions.
$20/mo would have kept me fed for the better part of a month a couple years ago. Money has almost never not been tight, often to the point of being inhumane.
If they start forcing ads, I’ll just do what I used to do when I didn’t have home internet and start downloading videos instead. Which is nicer to be able to hold onto anyway. If someone doesn’t like me “stealing,” they can fucking pay me.
Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur’s Gate 3, even I’m waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that’s just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.
$20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we’re being honest.
I don’t like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That’s the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we’d see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.
And let’s be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It’s difficult to find a person who doesn’t have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).
Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…
Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.
The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.
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Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.
There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.
To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.
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Did you just compare your small private server with YouTube’s infrastructure? Jesus Christ.
Google had already been paying about 2 million a month for bandwidth in 2015 or so.
I work for a larger company as a software developer, even with a billion in gross sales, there is absolutely no chance to provide even a tenth of YouTube’s service. Especially for free (without paywalls). The company would go bust in two years.
Removed by mod
VPN has absolutely nothing to do with hosting a video platform, no clue why you even bring it up.
Debrids is just a file download service, isn’t it? But even if it was a video hosting platform, a single server would never be enough. You need at least two (as a fall back). Then you need dynamic scaling for bigger user numbers, which works just fine for CPU and RAM (or even GPU resources), but doesn’t work for storage. So you need extra storage somewhere all servers have access to, but when it comes to videos you’d be paying millions in no time.
So you need your own cheap storage and datacenters around the world. And CDNs on top to serve your content worldwide (otherwise the experience would suck on another continent if your server is too far away).
Look up how Google does it, they have their own data storage centers. And if your video is crappy and you’re a nobody, it probably gets stored in a slower location on-demand. So it also loads slower. But if your video is in high-demand with millions of views it gets pushed into a more accessible location (and gets higher priority for CDNs). It’s not just hosting, there is a massive amount of logic and software behind the stack.
Removed by mod
You use a VPN when you either don’t trust your ISP (or the current network connection you are on) or you want to hide who you really are on the internet. Both are absolutely unnecessary when accessing a video hosting platform (you can do this, but you don’t have to). A VPN is also more on the user side of things to connect to a server, the server doesn’t care if you use a VPN.
Debrid just makes accessing files easier as far as I can see. Like you give it a torrent link and it provides you a direct download? That’s nice and all for piracy, but has absolutely nothing to do with a video hosting platform like YouTube. You could use Debrid to download the video file from a host, but we are talking about providing the actual host you store the videos on.
I absolutely do not get the points you are trying to make, do you have an example for an infrastructure like YouTube you could build out of a VPN and Debrid?
Peertube would be an alternative of course, but it obviously has tons of its own issues (mainly resources, it still costs too much to host a large instance and if you try to access one video a million times things would straight up implode). I don’t see a realistic YouTube alternative without investing millions.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4Q3ZXQZZlcE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
$20/mo would have kept me fed for the better part of a month a couple years ago. Money has almost never not been tight, often to the point of being inhumane.
If they start forcing ads, I’ll just do what I used to do when I didn’t have home internet and start downloading videos instead. Which is nicer to be able to hold onto anyway. If someone doesn’t like me “stealing,” they can fucking pay me.
Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur’s Gate 3, even I’m waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that’s just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.
$20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we’re being honest.
I don’t like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That’s the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we’d see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.
And let’s be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It’s difficult to find a person who doesn’t have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).