this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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I think if it's not possible to run anymore without ads, then it's time to shutter YT and let the competition fill in the gaps.
The problem is that running a video streaming platform is too expensive for there to be competition and YouTube is the only platform with the user base to be able to do it while being profitable. If you want no ads because ads are annoying but you also don't want to pay for premium, you're advocating for piracy (which I'm not against either), but if you expect them to keep the servers running even after that, you're not living in reality
Just to add one more thing, if your criticism of premium is that they still collect your data after that, fair enough (get newpipe), but if you simply want to use YouTube for free and aren't that bothered about your privacy (like when you use adblock on a browser) then that's not consistent with that argument either.
Which is why peertube exists. Dont run a video streaming platform. Run 10 million streaming platforms all tied together.
Yeah, but where's the user base and content? That's why YouTube is successful.
As much as I love to shit on Elon Musk and ~~twitter~~ X, the fact that he's paying users that generate traffic to his website means that he realizes the importance of user generated content. That's one good thing I commend him for.
How does that work, exactly? For something like a railroad or a power grid, you get a natural monopoly because you need a system to connect everyone to everyone else for it to really work, and you need to pay to build out the connection to each person.
For video streaming, you need to pay for servers to transcode, store, and serve the video. Which is expensive, sure. But then each user comes in over the Internet; you aren't paying to connect directly to their house, and you aren't putting a CDN node in every town when the town has 5 users who can just talk to the central deployment.
If you want to run ads, you find some network that places video ads, and you get the ads from them and you run them. Maybe they don't pay enough and the service is not profitable, but what would make that change if the service were bigger?
Where are the huge, unassailable costs? Where is the revenue you can't get unless you are the absolute biggest?
The issue is content. Sites like daily motion didn't have the content to bring in the user base. No users means less incentive to make content means less incentive to make content for it, means less users and so on... that's the real reason no one's got competition