They’re bothering me enough now that I’m going with an android phone after more than a decade on iPhones just so I can get back to YouTube the way it used to be with a decent ad blocker (better than it used to be actually).
I can’t fucking stand it, and again, it didn’t bother me before.
Want to show someone a short clip? Nah. Gotta skip two fucking ads first while you stand there looking stupid and waiting.
Becoming ever more obnoxious with ad placement because your ad-supported service is losing money and you don't know what else to do is a classic late-stage-enshittification step. It is usually the last one before the service becomes openly hostile to its users and partners and becomes a mostly-worthless relic. I did not think Youtube was at that stage or even close to it but maybe it is.
I can't really tell if Youtube is losing money or not, but it creates about $8 billion per quarter, and Google's overall operating expense is $55 billion per quarter, and I think it actually might be a safe assumption that Youtube is a pretty decent amount of that expense given its scale and its storage, bandwidth, and employee-resources requirements.
Here's the thing about YouTube. From the very beginning, it was a video-hosting platform. Users create content. They upload the content to YouTube's servers. Other users view the content, and upload their own. A simple formula, no? That's why their pre-Google slogan was "Broadcast Yourself". The thing is, storing video data long-term is expensive. This is where Google comes into play, because, unless you've got Google's money, you cannot afford to store literally 100s of Yottabytes of video data, not for very long, anyway. Even if YouTube becomes a "mostly-worthless relic", there's nobody who can readily replace it. I suppose someone could create a fediverse version of it where you simply upload your own content to your own server and then sell (or give) access to other users, but it would be slow to start, and small as not everyone can afford their own server to host their content on. Or, a service that aggregates videos by scraping them from from video servers that it has access to, creating a hub for users to enjoy the content made by other users that is stored on their own servers.
Yeah. As with many things, "Can this make money?" is not the same as "Is this a nice thing to have around?" and the disconnect between the two when capitalism tends to assume they'll be the same thing, is a source of unhappiness in many ways.
Funnily enough, one of the things Reddit's PCM community tried to push was the concept of nationalizing YouTube because "it's a public service."
They thought the average browser was too stupid to ask why all these Nazis wanted that, where all of a sudden the 1st Amendment actually comes into play, and now you can't take down their blatant misinformation and hate speech.
For me, I think the problems all started when creators themselves wanted to be paid for the content they created. When "content creator" started becoming a legitimate profession. YouTube was always going to need to have ads. They started adding more ads when creators started to establish themselves and want paid for the work they do. Don't get me wrong, creators should absolutely get paid for their work. But there were better ways to ensure that those who made quality content got paid for it AND keep the servers that host their content up and running than embracing full enshittification.
EDIT: You can downvote me all you like, but it does little to change the fact that once the costs started increasing to more than simply keeping the lights on, they started looking for places to put ads. Like the meme itself says, They could have had one skippable ad at the start of the video and just passively made income that way, but then their operating costs went up when it was determined that the pay for content creators should come directly from the platform's coffers.
Bad capitalists, yes. The trend of "maximize profit this quarter at the expense of everything else" is a recent (meaning a few decades old) idea.
Once upon a time the boards of publicly traded companies could think long term and sacrifice short term gains without getting fired by shareholders. When a large firm prioritizes long term success efficiency still matters but so do things like building reputation through quality and retaining talent - the things sorely missing from publicly traded firms today.
