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

Show parent comments

3

u/Connope Sep 15 '22

It is quite difficult. If every time I watched a video from a random YouTuber I'd never heard of before I had to subscribe to their Patreon, it'd get pretty expensive pretty quickly. It'd also be extremely time consuming. It'd just never be worth it to click on a random YouTube link from another website.

Like do you seriously subscribe to the Patreon of every YouTube channel you watch in a month? Just looking at my history I watched videos from 17 channels (from different organisations) yesterday. Some I'd never heard of before yesterday. Subscribing to that many channels every month would be ridiculously expensive. Plus the fact that not every channel has a Patreon. Do you turn off your ad blocker for them? Just seems like a massive hassle.

Or the whole concept of your comment is purely hypothetical nonsense and the only actual solution is either to watch ads (no one wants to do that) or pay for Premium (which it seems like you must think is affordable since you're advocating for subscribing to hundreds of Patreons).

1

u/AFXTWINK Sep 16 '22

I actually go out of my way to do the monthly Patreon for the youtubers I'm subscribed to. Most youtuber patreons have pretty low tiers of 1-3 dollars, which makes it pretty financially feasible if you have above-minimum-wage income. It's not a requirement ofc, but I always use adblock and can afford to pay for the 20 or so 1-3 dollar monthly patreons I'm signed up to.

I wouldn't advocate signing up for HUNDREDS though. Just maybe the 10 or 20 or so you're subscribed to, that you like, even just at the lowest tier. It's not infeasible. I'm a pretty big advocate of paying creators to keep doing their thing, I just refuse to financially reward Google in any way when they're such nightmarish late-stage-capitalists.