this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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My "favorite" lecture from young people is the one in which they berate me for "stealing content" by not watching ads on YouTube.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
I have an honest question and I feel like Lemmy is a good place to have a real discussion on this. To preface this, I use adblock too so I'm kinda calling myself a hypocrite with this question :P
Why do we expect any free service not to have ads? If a paid service like Netflix introduced ads I'd be pissed, and same goes for cable TV these days. But why would something free like Youtube not have ads? How can we be bothered by ads on a service we're getting for free?
Someone help me reconcile this for my own well-being haha.
To add on to what the others have said, there should always be competition between free and paid services. Free services should provide only what they are capable of with the limitations they operate under due to a donation model, while paid services can use all the advantages they can get with advertising, big budgets for hosting, etc. Free and open-source often still won under these conditions. Think Encarta against Wikipedia. If paid wins, that's fine, people can still have a reasonably good alternative with the free option.
The problem arises when a corporation builds on the back of a free resource, and then starts charging users once the network effects kick in. With YouTube, Google was able to leaverage 20 years worth of videos that people lovingly uploaded (although 10 of those years were in the post-ad plagued world) and then start forcing people to bend to their monetization rules. Most of those people didn't upload to YouTube because they wanted to make money off their videos, they just wanted to share a funny video. If given the choice, they would have chosen free instead of ad-driven. We have no choice since all that content is now locked behind YouTube's ad walls.