this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Unpopular opinion here but service providers should be allowed to enforce whatever conditions they want (within the law) for accessing and using their service.
There are plenty of other video hosting services. If you don't like what YouTube is doing, don't use their service. Not sure why people feel entitled to free content AND the ability to keep them from earning revenue.
The expectation of free content with no revenue stream attached is unsustainable. Pay for the content, or let them monetize it
And this is coming from someone who runs pi-hole on their network for security reasons.
There's a problem when they have a sort of diagonal integration into the industry, as they're kind of pulling up the ropes from competition while monetizing the product. It reeks of looming antitrust.
If I want to distribute billions of videos to billions of people on my own site, that'd be great, but my options are basically to pay Google, Amazon, or Microsoft for help.
I don't understand this comment at all. Hosting your own video is actually super easy. HTML5 video is as simple as HTML5 images. It's just the cost factor.
You can do it all without the cloud as well, you just have to actually go buy the servers or rent them from traditional virtual private server hosts. Not everyone has gone to the cloud.
I'm happy to talk about antitrust and breaking up conglomerates. But that needs to be a big conversation across many industries not just "Google bad, grrr".
If you're referencing WEI, btw, it is one of the topics people have been most misled about. Can link you to my Mastodon thread where I break down all the misunderstanding if you'd like
There's no overarching anti-trust conversation to be had because there's currently no anti-trust cases, if there ever will be. The comments under each individual instance of it being required is the "big conversation". As a content aggregation site (mainly news) the only place it could realistically occur is under some wishful thinking self-post nobody would care about.
I also saw people pine for trust busting just the other day under some Amazon article, there's simply nowhere else to post about it at the moment.
I meant to say that I'm much more inclined to have conversations with people about the need for stricter antitrust laws and enforcement than I am about a single subsidiary of a multinational corp. protecting their revenue stream
It's all about ads/ad money/data, it's heavily bleeding into a single issue. It's not like some giant manufacturing company doing shady things with their cars and air conditioners, all the subsidiaries are interlinked. You could say WEI is just a Chrome thing, Google is just their search engine, AdWords is just an ad service etc, but they're all part of the data to ads to sales pipeline.
Okay, but those independent content creators are often doing this trying to make money.
YouTube actually does have a pretty fair deal for "if you make us lose money, we won't charge you" and "if you make us money, we'll give you 55%." That includes increased revenue to those creators if you are a YouTube premium subscriber.
Getting in the way of monetization here isn't just hitting Google's bottom line, it's hitting those creators using Google's platform as well.
I used ad blockers for YEARS until YouTube added a paid option and once I started using YouTube more (again) I went for that option quickly. I switched my mentally a few years ago to "if it's not worth paying for, it's not worth it" and that cleared a lot up for me in terms of priorities.
An aside but, I'm extremely annoyed with the pro-piracy, sentiment against paid game mods, and general attitude against paying people money for the work they're doing attitude, that I've seen on Lemmy (and in gaming communities) recently. It's like everyone wants to be paid a six figure salary when it comes to their life and then they want to get everything they enjoy on a computer for free.
The hell are you talking about? Premium is $13.99/mo, removed all ads, includes YouTube Music with all it's licensed music, among other things. What exactly does your math represent? The amount of hours you'd need to watch to generate revenue equal to the cost of the service? That's a ridiculous thing to base your calculation on. If you think watching ads is such a better value than Premium then watch the damn ads?
Like, this is basic supply and demand economics. They know that there is less tolerance for ads in terms of exchange of value so the "cost of the service" when payment is in ad viewing time is less than the upfront cost if you get premium. That is really simple economics.
Because their revenue stream comes entirely from destroying our privacy throughout the entire internet?