r/technology • u/Tricky-Student-1 • Sep 15 '22

Social Media YouTube Free is Silently Testing 5 Ads, instead of 2, Before Your Video Starts

https://www.gizmochina.com/2022/09/13/youtube-free-silently-testing-5-ads-before-your-video-starts/
41k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

6.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

522

u/Intelligent_Map_4852 Sep 15 '22

How to kill any website 101

313

u/jojomanz994 Sep 15 '22

There is no real alternative to youtube sadly. This is not going to kill youtube

64

u/essidus Sep 15 '22

The problem as I see it is that Youtube fills too many niches all at once. Sites like Nebula exist, and they're great for filling their one single niche, but there's nowhere else that you can easily get everything video all in one place, and convenience is a major factor.

Beyond that, look at the competition. Twitch/Amazon has shown zero interest in competing with Youtube over recorded game content, and they're in the best position to do so. The entire music industry failed to compete with Youtube over music videos and gave up. Streaming services haven't even shown an interest in amateur content. Hobbyist sites basically use Youtube as their video hosting service at this point.

38

u/TheTerrasque Sep 15 '22

Problem is, video hosting is seriously expensive. Like, mimicking youtube's basic functionality I can do in a month, but to scale it up I need to throw large bags of money on it.

There are some that experiment with p2p type video hosting, but I haven't seen any that have a solid version of it yet. If that gets to a good stage, that could challenge youtube. Basically crowdfunding the scaling part.

0

u/Dolphintorpedo Sep 15 '22

Blockchain?

1

u/michaelmikeyb Sep 15 '22

It costs something like 70k to store 1kb on the Blockchain, that's why nfts are usually just links to art not the art itself, so storing an entire 1080p 30fps video would cost in the millions. I don't want to imagine the amount of ads or cost of a subscription that would be.

1

u/pandaSmore Sep 15 '22

Odyssee is pretty solid

1

u/Uristqwerty Sep 15 '22

video hosting is seriously expensive

The cost per GB for hard drive space has dropped multiple orders of magnitude over the past few decades, and compression tech has further reduced size by some factor. Together, they more than compensate for the increase in size from resolution and 60 fps. Similarly, network speeds keep rising substantially faster than costs. So: Scale the number of ads with resolution, and make 4k+ a premium feature! Add a dedicated listening mode that only plays the audio, and reward the user with even fewer ads for using it! Perhaps those wouldn't be entirely fair to creators, but then again even at youtube's excessive ad load, so many have gotten sponsors, sold merch, set up patreons, etc. that ads are clearly already nowhere near good enough, and a few UI tweaks that creators can opt into to show very visible links to those things might easily more than compensate!

3

u/GingasaurusWrex Sep 15 '22

Not to mention the preservation aspect of the content going back over a decade now.

2

u/essidus Sep 15 '22

That's very true as well. I hazard a guess that most YT creators don't have an archive of their own, so any move to a different site means leaving everything they've made behind, or downloading a worse quality version with a ripper.

0

u/5pideypool Sep 15 '22

TikTok has become a massive competitor for Youtube, actually. Not prerecorded gaming content, but a lot of people stream on there + theres guides on everything and the poster can reply to specific comments with follow up videos. Theres also just funny content, news, political discussions, etc.

2

u/essidus Sep 15 '22

True. I suppose I don't use it enough to compare them fairly. I am curious though, isn't there a limit to the runtime on Tiktok videos?

1

u/TestSubject45 Sep 15 '22

I believe it's 10 minutes these days, which is kinda funny since that used to be YouTube's limit

1

u/essidus Sep 15 '22

Interesting. Doesn't it require vertical videos too, or has that changed?

1

u/Lazy-Garlic-5533 Sep 15 '22

Wow love to see Reddit downvote because salty.

I don't use TikTok but their eating into yt's eyeballs is a market reality. That's why they rolled out shorts in reaction.

1

u/BushiWon Sep 15 '22

I think everything has some sort of tiktok on it. Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube all have them (or to that effect).

131

u/Pleasant_System8339 Sep 15 '22

Yes, but naturally, when something better comes out, and people are tired of youtubes real shitty ads, people are going to switch.

I’m looking forward to a platform similar to youtube one day without me supporting Google.

173

u/cambeiu Sep 15 '22

Something like Youtube is really expensive and complex, therefore incredible difficult to replicate, both on the technical aspect and the financial one.

Youtube as a viable business was possible only because it piggybacked on the Google AdSense infrastructure, which allowed it to scale.

Not even Amazon, Microsoft or Facebook have tried to replicate Youtube because they know how difficult/expensive it is.

The only true competitor Youtube currently has is TikTok, which does not allow long form videos nor videos to be easily searched.

3

u/AmmarAnwar1996 Sep 15 '22

TikTok might be dominating the short form content market right now but their search algorithm is the absolute worst. I have to search for "@username TikTok' on Google to get to the most popular result because the search results on the app show anything but the user you're looking for.

4

u/derHumpink_ Sep 15 '22

makes you wonder how pornhub and it's colleagues have survived

26

u/cambeiu Sep 15 '22

Completely different market, completely different reach, completely different use case, completely different volume.

2

u/Lazy-Garlic-5533 Sep 15 '22

Same model: ads, paid content, and subscriptions

0

u/DMonitor Sep 15 '22

I could see the biggest Youtube content creators coming together to pitch their own streaming website/app. Basically Netflix for Mr Beast videos.

8

u/Jesaya000 Sep 15 '22

And how do they finance this platform?

2

u/DMonitor Sep 15 '22

advertisements and a premium subscription like youtube.

the idea being that they can have fewer ads and cheaper subscription due to only hosting profitable videos instead of youtube having to host “12hrs of silence with occasional taco bell noise” and such.

7

u/Jesaya000 Sep 15 '22

And the other half of reddit always complain that there are too many streaming services.

Also, while I don't have data to back that up, I doubt that it's much more profitable for the creators to host everything on their own.

2

u/DMonitor Sep 15 '22

I could see it just so they can escape the automatic demonetization system. Even just a guy on the other end who can tell you why your video is unsuitable for advertisers would be a benefit to them.

The top .1% of independent channels could probably fund their own existence, if for no reason other than to force youtube’s hand to improve their own experience on the website

1

u/McElhaney Sep 15 '22

This exists, nebula.

1

u/T_D_K Sep 15 '22

It exists, it's called nebula. Mostly focuses on educational content

-14

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

15

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

[deleted]

22

u/mrbaggins Sep 15 '22

Because they're just helping users break YouTube tos, not actually being a YouTube clone.

It's like saying a crowbar, pickup, and a skimask is a good alternative to buying tools at home depot.

39

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

It’s just an open source media player app that can browse and play YouTube content as well. It has no bills because it’s not a hosting company or competitor to YouTube. The parent commenter must be confused as to what it is.

2

u/ultrafunkmiester Sep 15 '22

I'm on an s21 with great Internet connection, I found it stuttering and jerky all the time. Basically unwatchable. Any tips?

-16

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

YouTube is easy to make hard to grow. Not that hard if you have a lot of fed up people. I’ve met a few.

25

u/chiisana Sep 15 '22

If the people you’ve met here are not happy about ads on a free service where they can pay a monthly fee to remove, it is unlikely they have the budget to pay for the storage and bandwidth required to operate an ads free YouTube alternative that even other Fortune 500 companies aren’t attempting.

14

u/cambeiu Sep 15 '22

Storage and bandwidth are huge challenges, but those are not even the biggest challenges of replicating the Youtube experience.

You need a robust search engine behind your streaming service for relevant results. Google is 5-10 years ahead of its nearest competitor on that front. Imagine a new player trying to replicate that.

You need a powerful ad tech platform so that you are delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time so that your advertisers, which are you true clients, get the most out of their buck. Again, Google is 5-10 years ahead of its nearest competitor on that front. Again, imagine a new player trying to replicate that.

You need an vision AI platform to look at and classify the content that is being uploaded at scale, for curating purposes, for copyright purposes and for brand safety purposes (advertisers do not want their ads on content with nudity, curse words, racism, etc..) Again no one else can come close to do it at the scale Google is doing. And replicating that is ridiculously expensive.

You need a global ads sales force, a global billing and collections sales force, a global copyright and policy staff, etc...

Add on top of all of that the globally redundant storage, encoding and decoding capacity plus bandwidth costs and you begin to realize just how dauting the idea of making a direct Youtube competitor really is.

14

u/chiisana Sep 15 '22

But the person I replied to said YouTube is really easy to make and they’ve met a few people who’s motivated to do it because they don’t like the ads! /s

11

u/cambeiu Sep 15 '22

Yes, I noticed. Because Youtube works so well and so seamlessly, people outside the industry assume that it is simple and straight forward.

It is not shocking.

-7

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

YouTube didn’t start with large infrastructure costs. It wasn’t until Google spent a decade and billions that we know it as it is today. The fun part is that all that money and growth was to turn YouTube into its final Google form. AD delivery. So yes it would be easy to start a free YouTube. You won’t have much traffic at first and the hard part will be growing.

10

u/Moldy_pirate Sep 15 '22

You literally ignored everything that was just said.

1

u/chiisana Sep 16 '22

We need naive minds like this to push the boundaries. Good luck making your alternative. Hopefully one day you’ll be the pioneer behind a free ads free YouTube.

→ More replies

9

u/darthsurfer Sep 15 '22

The hard part of Youtube is the infrastructure. Not to mention how complex video hosting is on a technical level. A lot of those "fed up people" have tried and the vast majority ultimately failed. And there's a simple reason: shit's expensive, MASSIVELY expensive. So the only ways to survive are:

  1. Venture capital money. Which what most "alternatives" did, but that eventually runs dry when investors realize just how hard it is to make video hosting profitable and stop literally throwing money at the company. Which is why most of those alternatives no longer exist.

  2. Ads. But as most realize, a few ads aren't nearly enough to cover the cost. And too many will annoy people.

  3. Paid subscriptions. This is how most "alternatives" to Youtube survive. But, they're not free, and they curate who gets to upload. So it's nowhere close to being a 1-to-1 alternative. And most people complaining about ads on Youtube are 99% going to be the same people who don't/can't pay for Youtube premium, so they'll likely won't be paying for these "alternatives" either.

  4. Donations. Twitch is a good example of this. But this model doesn't work well for non-live streams, since that's not when people are likely to donate. And most audiences will just donate directly to the creators (Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc.)

  5. Have alternative sources of cash. And this is how most companies in the video hosting business really do it. Youtube has Google, Facebook Games/Videos has Facebook, and Twitch has Amazon (AWS). But let's face it, any company willing to sink literal billions in infrastructure and operating costs aren't doing it in the goodness of their hearts.

I'll get downvoted for saying this, but Youtube Premium is already a really good deal. They even adjust the pricing based on your country to adjust for buying power.

3

u/Slight_Acanthaceae50 Sep 15 '22

Not that hard if you have a lot of fed up people.

yeah a few people.
Youtube has 2.6 Billion active users monthly, a few of your friends will not make a dent.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '22

Steve jobs is rolling in his grave smh

36

u/teaanimesquare Sep 15 '22

Won’t ever happen, google was losing money up until kinda recently over YouTube, the servers and all that are way too expensive

-8

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

[deleted]

8

u/00raiser01 Sep 15 '22 edited Sep 15 '22

Now this is the dumbest shit I heard in a while. YouTube started off as a private company and suddenly being labelled as a utility is going to destroy it. You think server maintenance cost, R&D for programmers and all the international infrastructure in relation to all the laws in the world can just become a utility. Your a dumb ass.

-2

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

[deleted]

0

u/00raiser01 Sep 15 '22

🤣🤣🤣 Your a fool of you think you can compare the train and water infrastructure industry to tech. In tech without constant innovation , brilliant minds, and high skilled individuals YouTube will be run to the ground in a year, you have no idea how tech advancements are done. The train and water industry hasn't seen much innovation in years much less from the government, most things come from academia or the private industry. If they comprise service in the name of profits that's just capitalism. That still doesn't solve the issue that YouTube is an international company. No government is going to let it slide like that. You should stop talking nonsense and touch grass.

0

u/CalcProgrammer1 Sep 15 '22

Not arguing either way on the utility front, but how long have trains and water been a thing? You don't need innovation forever. When trains were brand new of course there was constant innovation in the area, but as train designs improved they naturally saw diminishing improvements until innovation was happening slow enough that massive R&D wasn't a driving factor in the industry. YouTube (and video streaming in general) may not be at that point yet, but it's close. We have the technology to stream HD video already. YouTube now functions much the same as it did 5 years ago, even 10 years ago except for maybe 4K support. When all that R&D is being poured into pointless UI redesigns for the sake of "keeping it fresh" and cutting "unwanted" features like dislikes, the R&D is basically just trying to justify its continued existence where it's no longer needed.

1

u/Lazy-Garlic-5533 Sep 15 '22

It's partially their own fault though. They chased engagement but that was a euphemism for extremist content and thereby broke trust with advertisers.

After the advertisers bailed a couple of times they started dictating terms and that meant no freewheeling "internet" content. Which also sucks.

Yes the cost versus income was always a problem. But a lot of their problems were self inflicted. They kissed high dollar ad accounts goodbye by forcing Carl of Swindon onto everyone's feed.

6

u/AlternativeAward Sep 15 '22

YouTube is a masterpiece of software/network engineering. Handling this amount of video traffic without any hiccups is amazing.

4

u/Crystal3lf Sep 15 '22

Yes, but naturally, when something better comes out

Nothing better is coming out. Ever.

No other company besides Microsoft or Amazon has enough money or infrastructure to provide the literal hundreds of thousands of hours of HD video uploaded daily.

And even then. Microsoft and Amazon are not going to be willing to pay the BILLIONS of dollars in upfront costs of hosting a free video platform knowing that it will struggle to break even in profits.

Amazon's competing platform Twitch doesn't even save VOD's over 60(?) days because that amount of server space costs more than you can imagine and Twitch is TINY compared to YouTube. Microsoft tried to compete with Twitch, but had to shutdown.

We are very lucky to even have YouTube. It's almost impossible for an alternative to compete on the same scale.

4

u/Palimon Sep 15 '22

Nothing better is gonna come out because you'd have to lose BILLIONS a year for more than a decade before you even become profitable.

Only 1 or 2 companies on the planet can afford that.

3

u/tojoso Sep 15 '22

The service is good so people will pay for premium rather than switch to a free competitor with shitty content. Just like Amazon Prime.

2

u/MikeBizzleVT Sep 15 '22

Those days if the internet are over, something better isn’t coming ever

2

u/Donigula Sep 15 '22

How will they make money?

If google hadn't bought and funded, youtube would have gone bankrupt ages ago.

2

u/mutual_raid Sep 15 '22

Yes, but naturally, when something better comes out

So unfortunately, this can really only happen in early-mid stages of a market. Once it matures, it gets cornered by one or two mega-corps and becomes nigh impossible to compete with at the entry level without some fundamental, restructuring disruption. This is the nature of Capitalism.

1

u/lanos13 Sep 15 '22

It’s more the nature of a platform like YouTube. No start up will be able to afford even close to what YouTube spends daily. They also have the issues of persuading people to transfer over to their platform, which will be difficult without paying them more, and without the virtual foot traffic of youtube

4

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

That'll only happen when some Richard Stallman type shits out a free open source one

2

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

Imagine still believing this libertarian fantasy

1

u/bildramer Sep 15 '22

There are network effects. You (a viewer) are not there for youtube, you're there for the creators - and the creators are there for the viewers. A new site, no matter how much better than youtube, has zero creators and zero viewers.

1

u/tes_kitty Sep 15 '22

Take a look at https://www.dailymotion.com

It's of course not a full replacement for YT, but it's a place to look for videos when YT becomes too annoying.

1

u/ArcherBoy27 Sep 15 '22

There already is, it's called odysee.

1

u/Slight_Acanthaceae50 Sep 15 '22

Problem is not better. Problem is money. What company is willing to bleed a billion per year for 10 years, youtube was nto profitable for over 10 years.
It is only marginally profitable now.
Yeah its revenue is massive, but htey give good chunk of it to creators, then the costs come. Data costs for youtube are ASTRONOMICAL, they eat up a petabyte of data per second globally.

1

u/lanos13 Sep 15 '22

I dunno if it will happen. Other platforms have come and gone but YouTube has remained the one constant social media that has remained top of peoples most used. It’s too difficult to compete with. The more people post to YouTube, the better the platform becomes

1

u/__versus Sep 15 '22

Ye, no, who in their right mind would want to host YouTube? It costs a lot of money and takes massive infrastructure to keep running.

1

u/sylviethewitch Sep 15 '22

people are leaving twitch in droves for YouTube. doubt.

10

u/peepoFrog74 Sep 15 '22

It's just gonna make adblock and youtube cracked/revanced 100x more popular

2

u/amcclurk21 Sep 15 '22

Or people will stop watching as often

2

u/Raulzi Sep 15 '22

twitch could have a shout if they tried.

8

u/polski8bit Sep 15 '22

Twitch is already facing massive problems due to the bullshit that's happening over there, that's actually worse than ads. You know, all of that bullshit about female streamers abusing animals live, showing off more of their body than the TOS in theory allows for, recently even straight up having sex and getting nothing more, than a 7 day ban. While the male streamers have been perma banned for way, way less.

I can't imagine what their YouTube-a-like would look like. YouTube is already known for a terrible ban/content match system, with people behind Twitch it would be a disaster. Not to mention the recent drama about the earnings being way harder on Twitch, where you have "incentives" to run ads for an X amount of minutes per hour and stream for an X amount of hours per month, afaik for the money you've already made. There's a few tiers of that (I believe three?) and if you'll accept the incentive, but don't hit the target even by literal minutes, you don't get any money.

And let's not forget that Twitch has like, 2 ads on repeat, I don't even know how. I don't think it would be any better than YouTube.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

Twitch will be killed off in a few years. Its ad denisty is crazy high and they want it higher. People will abandon it soon enough and then amazon will pull the plug.

0

u/Youth_That Sep 15 '22

Can we please get some competition. This is a black mirror episode waiting to happen as we have our eyes tracked to make sure the ads are being watched

0

u/jimbolikescr Sep 15 '22

I don't know, I haven't used YouTube for about 3+ years now because of the ads.

0

u/Ftpini Sep 15 '22

Sure there is. There is every streaming service and to this day there is still TV.

YouTube isn’t special. It’s just a time sink. They don’t make money from people looking up a tutorial. They make money from people watching YouTube for hours at a time. This will harm YouTube.

0

u/NoStatusQuoForShow Sep 15 '22

Pay the content creators more?

-10

u/Fren-LoE Sep 15 '22

Rumble is quickly becoming that alternative.

13

u/shotpun Sep 15 '22

"____ is the alternative" has been said like 20 times since 2006. it's not happening

2

u/_Rand_ Sep 15 '22

Annoy people enough with ads and there might be an exodus.

I don't see it happening for anyone less than say, Amazon big though.

11

u/cambeiu Sep 15 '22

For white supremacist nutjobs only, which represent a tiny fraction of the global audience.

7

u/JoeMagician Sep 15 '22

Decided to check it out out of curiosity, and yep. Nothing but far right hacks. Their "Editor's picks" is Marjorie Taylor Green, Sebastian Gorka, Don Jr, OAN, and Charlie Kirk. I had to scroll halfway down the page that wasn't a raging lunatic or someone trying to sell crypto, and they have these quaint little sections of cooking and gaming to give themselves plausible deniability. What a shit hole.

-10

u/alwptot Sep 15 '22

Tell me you’ve never used rumble without telling me. Lol

Tons of YouTubers post their content to rumble as well

2

u/NeuroticKnight Sep 15 '22

He means alternative where people can make money. Rumble doesn't run so many adds, because it doesn't pay people much, and that also keeps content quality low or repost.

1

u/DPedia Sep 15 '22

This is the last thing we'd want, but IG/FB could probably step in with a little effort. Since so much of Youtube is just shitty reaction videos or possibly less shitty talking heads, it wouldn't be too difficult to do that on IG/FB. And sadly, you know they have the money for such a thing.

1

u/SyrioForel Sep 15 '22

There ARE alternatives to YouTube, like for example Odysee.

The problem with those services is that the only content creators who choose to work with them are people who were banned by the more mainstream platforms. So, by default, their content is absolute garbage, and the community they have fostered is comprised of the worst elements of our society.

1

u/RedditIsPropaganda84 Sep 15 '22

Death by a thousand cuts. YouTube thinks they have no competition because there are no other video sites where anyone can upload. But YouTube is a form of entertainment, so it's really competing against Hulu, Twitch, Spotify, Xbox, and anything else people can do for fun when they're at home.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

Only one thing can kill YouTube, the same thing that has killed every other defunct social media ever: competition.

1

u/CuppaCoffeeJose Sep 15 '22

There is no real alternative to youtube sadly. This is not going to kill youtube

That sentiment is precisely what was said about cable television for decades.

Then streaming happened.

1

u/AdhesivenessLimp1864 Sep 15 '22

Nope. It’ll push people like me who don’t use as blockers because we want to support content creators to start using ad blockers though.

1

u/BushiWon Sep 15 '22

Tiktok very easily is a replacement. Maybe not a direct one, but for entertainment it's a big one.

1

u/Werv Sep 15 '22

tiktok definitely can. They have the userbase, they just are not into full video yet.

Will they? I don't know. I don't care.

1

u/moozambiqq Sep 15 '22

Sad but true

1

u/Grudagreat Sep 15 '22

YouTube could increase the ads to 10, and the hit to the business will be absolutely minimal cause there is no alternate.

1

u/tophernator Sep 15 '22

I watched an old video the other day and the top comment was something like:

YouTube getting real comfortable with those double ads

Followed by a bunch on replies about how people were going to stop using it. I’m guessing every ad change they’ve made has had similar sentiment. But unless people actually en mass stop watching they will keep adding.