YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
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When you have a goose that produces a reliable daily supply of golden eggs do you:
- keep collecting your daily egg
or - see if giving it a good kick or two gets you more eggs
"But what about profits"
enshittification at play
Doctorow is a very smart man.
"The ~$10MM in profit we booked last year is not enough!" The curse of infinite growth.
Youtube most likely never made any money. Hosting these vast amounts of video is expensive. Google stopped telling us how much they money youtube made them lose. You would think they would start bragging when they could make a profit off of it.
That being said, this still sucks of course.
Although they don't profit directly from youtube, it's a strategy they take to impede competition from arising and keeping their name as the main one. It's the kind of strategy only multibillionaire companies can do, and, in my opinion, something that should be restricted, because it affects smaller businesses to the point of becoming inviable.
More notably, its a strategy they can do when borrowing costs are functionally zero.
A lot of this shit is just the consequence of Fed Rate Policy. No more cheap money means these loss leaders are actually being expected to generate profit, not to just act as clearing houses for propaganda.
I agree. Amazon is infamous for that strategy as well. They either buy competitors or make a loss until the competitor is bankrupt.
As YouTube increases the number and length of ads, the amount of traffic behind blockers rises accordingly.
This is also just... a function of the evolving digital space. The consolidation of the internet ownership sphere and the modernized APIs/coding tools afford server-side content warehouses more and more power over what the end user receives.
Because AWS owns all the fucking rack space, because ISP monopolies are the defining feature of western net access, and Microsoft force-feeds people their proprietary interfaces, we're moving away from the point where clients control what they display and closer to the point where everything's just a dumb-terminal for big business.
We're effectively backpeddling from Web 2.0 to Terrestrial TV.
- keep collecting your daily egg