Never watch TV eh? Listen to the radio maybe? Drive down a freeway/highway? Walk through a mall or shopping center? Sensing a theme there? YouTube is a broadcast entertainment business. They make money by showing commercials, otherwise known as ads.
You, as a viewer, can either pay for the service with your time(watching an ad) or with money(subscription). It isn't free.
Please don't start that nonsense...
People are no so stupid.
Watching an ad doesn't means you're going to buy the product.
Honestly, who really care of ads now ? It just boring, colors, musics and words mixed altogether that no one care.
I think you haven't been paying attention.
The unbridled consumerism is entirely due to marketing. Influencers are marketing and even a vast amount of YT content itself is marketing. And yes, they make people buy the most idiotic stuff, even with money they don't have. We've been raised, told, every day, we need to keep buying. Even our government wants us to. The economy wants us to. Not buying stuff we need - we did that always - but buying MORE stuff we don't need. And the stuff we really do need, gets commercialized too, like healthcare or a simple loaf of bread. And guess what... even healthcare is unmanageable because we keep asking for more of it. We're not less healthy. But we use more healthcare. More comfort, more wealth also leads to greater spending and thus greater usage of resources per person.
And then we wonder why the world's going to shit.
After reading through all of this...I have a few things to say.
The Freeway/Highway system was initially tax funded construction. It was to provide quick access for transport of goods, and was strategic in its development such that the military and government had the ability to move things around effectively (in the US). What has since happened is that there is a Freeway system, and their are also state run toll roads. What happens most often is that a third party is sought to build extra infrastructure, their payback is some money, and the ability to levy tolls on users for a fixed period of time, so the state can effectively lay infrastructure at minimal cost. They can also do things like install additional toll lanes that are paid out at a premium, but theoretically are capable of skipping out on traffic because of that premium pricing. Theoretically the state, at the end of the contract, now owns the infrastructure and can make their own money off the tolls, or abolish them.
This is like removing the school spending from the budget, and legalizing a state lottery. The budget becomes inexplicably linked to the gambling, so you hear radio advertisements that your state has millions of dollars given to the education system from the lottery...because politicians removed it as something that was actually directly paid for. Kinda nuts to see such a monopoly as fine when gambling can become a huge problem...but it's just fine when it's "for the children..." right?
Back on topic. There are three things that a media company needs. They need content, a delivery medium, and infrastructure. Youtube used to not have adds because they would track data, and sell it to advertisers. They had no expenses for content, because they produced none of their own, and their infrastructure is an internet connection and server storage space. Note that they have a delivery medium that you pay for...no content cost...and only server space with a few people as their real required infrastructure.
The problem is that they decided first that advertisements needed to play and break the videos, after starting out as pre-video garbage. Then the advertisements were metered and matched to content type...which made certain "safe" content the only viable way to get reimbursed for your time. They then courted legacy media to try and get in on that sweet streaming media content...by introducing a premium subscription service. I...was fine with adds, but when a 3 minute clip had a minute and a half of adds it...required add blockers. Now they're fighting against add blockers because their 1:10,000 conversion rates have dropped to 1:20,000 (numbers pulled completely out of thin air), effectively meaning that their add space goes down in value as more and more people learn about add blocking.
I won't make this a "capitalism is bad" thing. What I will suggest is that the introduction to PBS (Public Broadcasting System) media should be heeded. "This content was made with support from viewers like you. Please support your local PBS station to keep making this content available." They say this because for decades they've been on the air, and supported by donations...while a lot of the advertising space they could use is largely used to pay for the infrastructure to transmit said content. This is why I support PBS, and loved Netflix, but hate Disney+. Disney entered the space after it was proven to make money, pulled their content from all other locations, bought up the content houses so that they had the right to squirrel away even more, and it's all fine because legally the copyright system would theoretically return the content from their monopoly to the common creative space eventually... Except Disney has lobbied to extend their monopoly several times...and won.
Youtube is largely seeking to triple dip. They've got huge content creators who make a lot of theirs for free. They control user data, so can optimize deliver and thus charge a premium for advertising. Finally, they are increasing advertising. I...actually kind of like their watch a movie with advertisements...and their 80's catalog is pretty good. That said, I'm frustrated that my 3 minute video from a nobody that has 10k views after a month getting advertisements from the content creator, then a pre-roll, and a mid-roll, is just...well, it's why people are frustrated whenever it's acceptable elsewhere. Youtube, and by extension Google/Alphabet, isn't crazy. They are greedy enough to deliver a poorer experience that now cannot even be hidden behind a reasonable doubt when they run "it's against our policy to run blockers" banners across videos while content creators are showing just how little you get unless you've got hundreds of millions of followers...that Youtube itself can evaporate by de-prioritizing your content without ever letting you know.
individual plan
