Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Greed runs amok at YouTube

As you've probably figured out already, things are a bit hit and miss around here at the moment as my state of welbeing goes up and down on a daily basis.

Fortunately, today I'm feeling pretty good -- or should I say "more far less bad" than I have been for a while so I will be inflicting another daily dose upon you all.

One thing I've done a lot of over the past few weeks, is watch a lot of YouTube on the livingroom TV set.

What a hideous experience.

YouTube used to be a refreshing change from broadcast TV, the latter inflicting eye-watering levels of advertising on a captive audience in a way that reduced the signal to noise ratio to a level I gave up on a quater of a century ago. Our TV set has no antenna connected and no satellite receiver sitting beside it. Life is too short to spend extended periods of it watching advertising for products and services I neither want nor can afford.

YouTube used to be a great alternative -- as was PrimeVideo.

Sadly, that has changed -- a lot.

When PrimeVideo decided that it would start including ads in its streams unless I was prepared to pay a significantly larger monthly stipend I kicked it to the curb. Sorry, the value just disappeared at that point.

Now YouTube has also reached a level of advertising that is intollerable and which is seemingly even worse than broadcast TV when viewed on the big screen in the living room.

It seems as if ads start appearing every four or five minutes when watching a video and those ad segments are now as long as 90 seconds in duration.

I'm sorry, that's just not acceptable.

Sure, I could pay for YouTube Premium but that would mean paying more than for Netflix or PrimeVideo and I'm not sure the value is there.

Another thing I noticed is the absolute tsunami of AI-narrated videos that have appeared on YT, masquerading as documentaries.

These seem to use very similar formats and consists primarily of still images with an AI voiceover. You can't tell they're low-value AI dross until you've sat through a bunch of pre-roll ads and the video itself starts to play so in order to find something actually worth watching you've probably spent more than five or ten minutes just skipping the same old ads that YT throws at you before a video runs.

Ridiculous.

Now it's not as if YouTube is running on fine margins of profitability here. Last year the enterprise raked in over US$60 billion in revenue which represents over half of parent company Alphabet's total earnings of US$111 billion.

Of course you might think that YouTube's partner program will be distributing a fair amount of that revenue to content creators -- but YT's business model is a brilliant one.

Unlike other streaming companies like Netflix, PrimeVideo and Disney+, YouTube no longer commissions content or pays up-front for the material it streams. Instead, it receives pre-payment from advertisers or subscribers and then sits on that money for over a month before paying a share to its partners.

That's a zero-risk proposition, even more so when you consider that there are still a large number of unmonetized channels where YouTube pays *nothing* for the rights to stream that content.

Despite its huge success, YT continues to hike its subscription prices and crank up ad levels to unacceptable levels because it is obviously only focused on increasing revenues quarter on quarter, despite the market being saturated. This is something you can only do if you have an effective monopoly in a market.

The way YouTube has cranked up the advertising is also rather cunning...

All content creators have noticed markedly reduced revenues from their videos so that leaves them with little alternative but to insert more mid-roll ad breaks to try and compensate. I guess this leaves YT able to say "it's not us" if challenged over the increase.

Sadly, this also means that creators like myself who choose not to use mid-roll ads out of respect for their audience tend not to have their videos promoted to the same extent as the more greedy creators that load up their vids to the max.

So, am I going to swear-off YouTube?

No.

Am I going to buy a subscription to YouTube Premium?

No.

I'm going to do the only thing a sane person can do -- put a Rasberry Pi on my network and run PiHole.

When the greedy get too greedy, they shoot themselves in the foot and I'm happy to provide the ammo to do just that.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font