43
votes
YouTube is testing "Premium Jump Ahead" (built-in sponsorblock)
Link information
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- Title
- This Week at YouTube: Premium Jump Ahead Experiment and Remix a Remix
- Authors
- Creator Insider
- Duration
- 1:36
- Published
- Mar 19 2024
On the other hand I get it, YouTube isn't getting a cut from those deals but also what a big fuck you to creators.
This'll probably just introduce shittier ways to serve these sponsor ads, like split screen content/ad. Nothing changes for the better in the long run. Though I really dislike these sponsored ad segments in videos anyway so who am I to complain.
I mean, creators started doing sponsored segments and Patreon because Youtube ad money started being really fucking shit. The Adpocalypse was real and happened a while back.
This is all just an eternal back and forth between the platform and the people what make the platform worthwhile, but it's youtube, so where else are you gonna go? The only other companies that could pull up a competitor would likely be Microsoft (ew), Amazon (more ew), or Apple (ew as a subscription service). Even if those platforms started out really good and free to entice people to jump over, evensually they would be pulled into an Enshittification pattern. It's just the only way that big tech companies roll, and only big tech companies can produce a youtube competitor.
Apple would never let their brand be tarnished by an anarchic user-created content platform like YouTube. Apple would only ever do something curated, and they already have Apple TV+.
Part of the adpocalypse was YouTube persuading the US regulators that a company asking YouTube to place ads, and complying with Google's and YouTube's policies, and signing a contract with YouTube, and saying money to Google for that ad placement, is nothing to do with YT or Google but is a relationship between the creator and the advertiser, and the creator carries full responsibility if eg alcohol ads are placed next to content for children.
There were a bunch fo creators that were making content that anyone could watch. It wasn't aimed at children, but it was "accidentally" family friendly. Their ad revenue got hosed.
So, they did the entirely understandable thin of moving to merch and sponsored content.
We need better regulators. We've tried light touch / right touch regulation with some of the big tech companies, and they just abuse it as far as they can.
Amazon already competes with youtube between Twitch and PrimeTV
If it stays as a premium only feature, it does make some sense because those creators already get revenue from premium users. But yeah, if advertisers change the CPM for ads that is still a revenue loss for those creators.
That's unfortunately already happening. One of the channels I regularly watch, Momentum, has started breaking up their sponsor messages into dozens of tiny segments with tiny segments of actual content in between, and/or actual content footage playing in the background. So flagging the entire sponsor segment ends up skipping a bunch of actual content. And even though it's possible to flag every individual portion of the sponsor segment, that's a giant PITA to accurately do... And also makes the video somewhat painful to watch afterwards since Sponsorblock then has to skip ahead multiple times in rapid succession. :(
As much as I hate intrusive ads themselves, I feel advertising is one rare way though which both the content creator stays well fed and also the low income peasant also gets to watch good content for gratis cost.
Especially in these recessionary times when folks are getting fired and new jobs are hard to find, instead of bemoaning ads, we should establish ways and protocols to make them better and less intrusive. Ads don't have to be intrusive, even a benign still image can act as an advert.
I agree. This is a problem Youtube itself created by underpaying its workers (I consider content creators workers). The solution Youtube came up with is to prevent them from finding alternatives to compensate for Youtube's exploitation of their labor.
I hate ads more than most people, but this is obviously one of the worst possible moves to make. Thanks to the recent server-side ads, though, I started using Youtube less and less. I've never paid for a subscription for music before, but I recently subbed to Spotify. It's not perfect either for content creators, but I'd rather them get my money instead of Youtube. I will never pay for Youtube, because they messed up a very good platform in various ways both for viewers and creators. Not to mention Google has become extremely intrusive and awful.
Seriously, until last few months I didn't pay much attention to enshittification, and I was fine with Google for the most part. But in the last few months,
Thanks to Google's and especially Youtube's practices, I degoogled quite a bit. As a bonus, I ditched Adobe Reader because of its most recent update that constantly pushes notifications for corpo things (even though I tell it not to), and started using Okular instead.
These are, of course, not one of my biggest problems in life. But I'm starting to realize why people value open source programs and relatively uncorpo platforms so much. I'm really sick of being advertized to and monetized. In other, more classical words, I'm really tired of being a commodity. The target of ads becomes a commodity for the ad companies. It's somehow extra frustrating in this context, because;
I noticed a "Skip Ahead" button when skipping some built-in video ads today. They are trying to guess the spot a user will skip ahead to (the end of the ad segment). As a premium subscriber, it seems like a pretty nice feature, although I wonder if it will change the rates that youtubers can get with sponsers.
It's just not explicitly for ad segments, it can also be for, say, intros or just boring parts of the video. I'm part of the B group on my android device, and how it works so far is that either at the beginning of the video, or at any point in the video if you double tap to skip ahead 30s, it'll show the "skip ahead" button, but only if the youtube backend detects that there is a skip ahead point.
Honestly, very useful. I think youtube's done a lot to make their product better the last few years. Automated chapter markers has been a godsend.
Given that content creators make sponsorship deals with independent advertisers/brands or make merch to supplement the ever-decreasing revenue they're getting from Alphabet, this is a pretty brutal move.
First you steadily decrease CPM rates, "fix" the bot issue with an account cull that causes massive subscriber count drops, then you force users away from using the sub page so they can be addicted to your BS algorithm on the main page, ratchet up the ads and anti-adblock while selling your own cure in the form of a subscription that you keep raising the price on, and now you're ruining any means of mentioning external forms of income.
I guess this is what happens when you make the ad-tech dude that cleaned up doubleclick inc for purchase by google the youtube CEO.
Add to that, it seems like videos flagged for copyright infringement also has ramped up recently. I follow some movie related channels, at it seems like almost weekly someone has a random video flagged for infringement because they show short clips from a movie while they talk over it. They have no appeal for 30 days and they get no revenue from that video, it all goes to the copyright claim holder. Sometimes they can win the appeal, but it is often not worth the fight. I don't know how much that is attributed to YouTube themselves, as most of the blame should go to the various rights holder that are blind to the actual value for their product such movie analysis videos create. I can understand going after low-effort "watch along" videos, where it is just an entire movie with someone in the corner making a few comments. But YouTube has still made the system incredibly unfair and almost kafkaesque to work with.
According to Cinema Therapy's posts, it seems YouTube themselves are the one doing the review process for consideration of whether fair use applies. Basically YouTube is stealing money from creators if true.
What was wrong with the bot cull?
It happens randomly, is poorly communicated[1], and can harm negotiations with external brands and with youtube itself.
That said, it only shaves off 1-2% of subscribers from the mega-channels like Mr. Beast but for smaller content creators on the verge of a "shiny plaque from alphabet" milestone, it can be a real setback that does seemingly nothing to actually stop the harmful spamming and scamming that takes place in comment sections.
Every day that passes makes me more and more against marketing as a whole; no other industry focuses exclusively on profit so openly. Their incentives are perverse, and they'd use mind control if they could.
edit: emphasis added to clarify point
This is such a strange statement. Profit is literally the only thing that motivates almost all industries. I mean, why do you get up and go to work every day? It's money. You want money, you do job. Same same.
Of course there are a few companies who want to have a lower impact on the earth or support their local communities (although that sort of thing is often soft marketing anyway) but they are a minority.
There are also marketing agencies who operate with more robust ethics than others. Not everyone in marketing is trying to build the buy-it brain-laser.
I live under the boot of capitalism. I have no choice. If I do not pay my bills, I lose food, water, housing, shelter and medicine, because current society sees these things as commodities to be sold rather than necessities to be guaranteed. I would choose a different system in a heartbeat if I could.
And almost any company that tries to be ethical in the world of today is fighting a losing battle. The market champions profit, and so anyone not doing everything they can to get as much as they can is leaving money on the table that other companies can use to drive them out of business by either buying them up, loss-leading, or any other of a plethora of underhanded tactics. Everyone is incentivized to do evil.
And as for marketing, I don't think I'd call it the greediest, or the worst of industry today. If nothing else, the military-industrial complex would certainly rank higher. I hold particular anger to marketing only because its greed is the loudest, proudest, and projected for all the world to see, all while being incredibly difficult to escape.
Sure. And I agree with you that if there were an alternative, I'd choose that. But my point really was that the vast majority of people who work in marketing are in the same boat as the rest of us. Most people don't have enough money to not work.
Let me introduce you to the oil industry. Knowingly destroying our actual ecosystem for profit makes showing you some ads pale to essentially nothing.
Also, marketing only exists because other industries exist. If it wasn't for those loud, proud, greedy manufacturers going around making products and services for their own gain, nobody would be trying to sell you anything.
The statement is strange because it is missing some parts:
... without any consideration for their users, the planet, or anything else. They don't care whether the product becomes worse, they don't care that other parties might suffer from the changes, they don't care about anything but that profit.
No, it is not. I go to work because I can provide (a part of) a service that other people genuinely need or want. It is a double win. They get what they want, I get money. Everybody happy.
For the ad industry (and not only there) the motto is: I get money and fuck you, I don't care how much worse your life becomes as a result.
I would once more point to the petrochemical industry, which is literally and knowingly (for decades they have known) destroying the planet we live on, for profit. Also the tobacco industry who knew about the risks of smoking for years and hid it, and the section of the pharmaceutical industry who pushed synthetic opioids, the part of the games industry who push lootboxes/microtransactions, and and and. The list of shitty things done in the name of getting every penny of profit at any cost is very long and in no way limited to just marketing.
If you think you having to see some ads is the worst thing capitalism has wrought, you need to pay more attention.
Great! I mean that. You're lucky to be able to do something genuinely worthwhile for a living, many people don't get the chance. Curious as to how your employers are telling people about this service so they know to use it? Is it... marketing?
I used to work in the industry and no. Not all of us are evil maniacs. Some people just want to go to work and get paid so they can have food and shelter. Selling stuff isn't inherently evil. My agency turned down clients with products we didn't agree with. Including and not limited to both oil and tobacco companies. Companies you've heard of, with budgets to make your eyes water. But we were people, and liked being able to sleep at night. There are strategies we consciously didn't use because even though they "worked", they were overly manipulative or annoying for the user (which ultimately damages the brand being sold, which is bad marketing).
Just because the worst of an industry is evil doesn't mean the whole industry is evil. Except tobacco companies, of course. There is no redeeming side to them.
I would also point to public information campaigns as examples of marketing for (fairly pure) good. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved by campaigns for anti-smoking, sexual health (the AIDS campaigns in the 80s particularly) and so on.
I agree with all of that. I was just trying to limit the subject to the conversation at hand.
Actually they don't, but I get your point. However, marketing is not a synonym for advertising. Marketing can be as simple as just making available information about a product/service, in whatever form, on whatever level. Advertising is about stealing attention to force that information into someone's throat. I don't think anyone has a problem with the former. I personally can't think of a positive aspect of the latter.
I have nothing but respect for that. You acted with a conscience. That is indeed something I claimed was not happening at all.
I may be a bit extreme, but I consider a billboard for a legitimate product (that I might even want to buy) already a small evil. Someone decided to steal my time and attention to force-feed me information I did not ask for. In the overwhelming number of cases, for selfish reasons.
I don't have statistics, but my guess is that the number of lives saved by anti-smoking campaigns gets dwarfed by the number of lives ruined by the campaigns for cigarette brands. Yes, in the end, advertising is a tool and tools can be used for both good and bad. But any other tool that has a similar track record in good and bad uses runs a serious risk of getting banned or monopolized by the state.
I don't agree. Marketing is just the business of doing advertising. "Making available information" is precisely what poster or a leaflet or a billboard or a TV ad or a banner ad does. Putting a hand-drawn flyer for your club night on the counter at your favourite record store is advertising. In all cases people are marketing their products, using advertising to do so. Everyone with a product advertises it, or at least they do if they want to actually sell anything. It's not inherently bad.
I also don't think anyone can "steal" your attention. Some advertisers might try very, very hard to get that attention, but aside from physical coercion, attention is ultimately only yours to give. Nobody is Clockwork Oranging you into seeing their ads. Although there are definitely execs who would like to be able to.
I guess I had different definitions of the words marketing and advertising then. Fair enough. To me, the difference between getting forced or tricked into consuming information versus the option to seek it out if I want to is the thing that matters.
Really? If a pickpocket takes my wallet, it is called stealing. It does not matter that I can avoid that, just by grabbing my wallet tightly in my hand, whenever I walk into a crowd.
Similarly, that I can avoid watching a part of a television commercial by turning off the TV, walking away, etc. does not make the act of taking my attention against my will "voluntary" and "by choice".
I feel there's a pretty marked difference between "we want to be profitable so we can continue" and "we must squeeze every last fucking cent of possible revenue out because LiNe MuSt Go Up NOOAAAAAWWWWW."
The latter is what a growing number of people typically object to. No one particularly disagrees that a commercial concern needs a profit margin to continue being an ongoing concern. Modern commercial attitudes, especially at the mega corp level, put everything in a hydraulic press and squeeze until there's no humanity, civility, or geniality remaining.
And marketing is among the worst. There seem to be very few marketing companies and marketing professionals that don't hew to the industrial squeeze methodology. If marketing was calmer and didn't push, push, PUSH for every possible way and place and time to plant ads and ensure they're being seen and listened to and so on, fewer people would be angry with the industry.
But marketing does push. It's the default strategy. Does a thing exist? If so, monetize its existence. Slap logos and labels all over it, cram ads and ads and more ads into it, and keep doing it until people literally pitch a fit and flee in disgust from the thing they used to like before it got turned into a big giant advertising avenue.
Then marketers just pivot to the thing that the refugees found and continue with the same playbook. Anything anyone likes, if it's people and not a singular person, marketing will start fucking it and them over with ads, ads, more ads. Nothing but ads. Marketing people seem to literally see the world as nothing more than vast untapped opportunity for advertising. If it exists, they will advertise on it, in it, across it, instead of it. Fuck content, embrace ads.
Demolition Man.
That's the marketing wet dream. A world where people embrace not content, but commercials. Where they don't have interests, but eyeballs and eardrums and wallets that are always open and ever engaged with advertising.
If marketing people and marketing concerns and the marketing industry want to not be treated like that, they need to stop acting like that. Because their actions for decades are exactly that. A desire to eternally squeeze everyone and everything in pursuit of ruining it with advertising.
There are those who offer a service at a community level -- Tildes is a great example -- whose reason to exist is one of purpose rather than profit. It's possible and likely that we'll see the same model adapted to video streaming as server costs lower.
I find it difficult to imagine that we're beholden to the current profit driven market -- even as the tech matures and the cost of doing business lowers.
I mean, the present state of desktop Linux, the emulator scene and countless other hobbyist/non profit services exist. Whats to stop a video streaming service from popping up that uses the same model?
The real reason is that there's no need for them to exist. Youtube isn't a video hosting site anymore, it's really a social media site focusing on longform video. The reason why vimeo and like are dead is because the mere service of hosting video is no longer needed.
Back in the good ol' days, having video on the internet was hard. Browsers didn't come equipped with video codecs, you had to use a lot of 3rd party code from the likes of Macromedia Flash.
That's not today. If you want to have a video on your website, you barely need to do anything - browsers know how to play embedded mp4s by themselves now.
Reddit? Has video hosting. Facebook? Has video hosting. Twitter? Has video hosting. Instagram? Has video hosting. Tiktok? is video hosting. Your own website? <video>. Basically anywhere you want to put something on the internet already trivially has video hosting. Video hosting as a utility has been sherlocked.
Youtube is like Tiktok; it's its own ecosystem. That's it's value, and it's selling point. Just having video is so easy now that it's table stakes. Getting other people to watch it is the question.
In case anyone else is like me and hasn't heard the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked_as_a_term
Totally agree, though as we have seen with Facebook, the king doesn't stay the king forever if there are enough fumbles. Unskippable ads could be the motivator for people to seek and create alternatives elsewhere.
There are competitors and alternatives. Tiktok is an competitor (and a strong one, although the US government may solve that for Youtube). Instagram reels is a competitor. Reddit is a competitor. Patreon is a competitor.
Now, they're not exactly the same as youtube, but that only makes sense if you're still viewing youtube through the lens of merely a video hosting utility. Of course they're not exactly like youtube - in what business segment is exactly copying a competitor with no selling points a winning strategy?
I guess it depends on the purpose. For profit social ventures like Tiktok and YouTube have to distinguish themselves as they're in a race for eyes and ad dollars. What I'm talking about is something that doesn't play the game - that chases neither of those things.
Look at the Internet Archive as an example. Their mission is preservation and file hosting with a video player attached.
If the discussion we're having is about a peer upload video service model only being one that exists because of a profit motive, I'm saying that I'm eager to see alternatives pop up that who explore a more nonprofit, principled model.
For merely a site that hosts video in a utilitarian fashion, the thing is that we don't need that anymore. Hosting a video is too easy. There's no real context where that would have utility. If all you wanted to do was have video that other people can watch, there's many easy and cheap ways to do it now that all browsers have HW accelerated video built in, and bandwidth is comparatively cheap, at least on the scale of normal users.
So as to why we don't have that: we don't need it! What would be a situation in which you would want that, and why would you not already have the tools for it?
The one we're talking about: a community site without advertisements.
Opportunities have a way of presenting themselves when the big players jump the shark.
Well, now we're talking about something different. That's not something "like the internet archive". In terms of an "open source" social media, you always come into the same problems that it presents too many compromises and technological barriers for "normal people" to use it, which is a problem for a site specifically about having other people.
There is PeerTube, but you're not going to see a lot of people in it.
Youtube gets around 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute. It takes way more than just reduced server cost to handle that realisticly for other than billion dollar companies. To encode, distribute and moderate that amount of video on a global scale that is competitive to YouTube is out of reach of a crowd sourced model in my opinion. Sure smaller scale stuff like Nebula can exist but it is still miniscule in comparison.
Who says a competitor has to be a carbon copy of Youtube? Very large portion of those videos will never be seen by a more than single digit amount of people if that. Even minimal barriers would lower that amount immensely.
Nothing also also says the platform has to be centralized. I see no reason that a hybrid peer-to-peer model where the central servers are there to serve low demand content and act as balancer would not be feasible.
But then it will not really be an alternative and just a hobby project for a small group of enthusiasts for a very limited amount of content.
Why, what of what I said implies that? The whole reason for p2p here is scalability. Done right that would likely eliminate orders of magnitude of resources that would be needed to run Youtube clone. The central servers would be there as a compromise to ensure smooth service.
Eliminating 90% or more that basically no one never sees on YT would not affect size of the service, simply its run costs.
PeerTube is basically what you are describing and it exists and is fine, but also very niche. And while the distributed model does scale with lower cost, if it actually got some substantial traction I would doubt how far that will go in practice. Hosting and distributing video can quickly ramp up in cost and resources way way more than just text based content.
It gets even more complicated when you look at moderation concerns. You say eliminating the 90% useless content will help, but how would you do that in practice? I'd such a federated network got broad use outside it's current enthusiast small scale, who gets to decide what is worthy of the networks limited resources? Add to that the complication of a potential influx of illegal video content. Having volunteers providing serverspace is one thing. Having to deal with CSAM or terrorist content is another matter.
As to the second paragraph - that is the question. My very much would need a lot of refining solution would be to let the uploader decide what they value their content at - anyone could upload what content they want but the central servers would only index content that:
and distribute content that:
I have no idea how they are doing these days, but PeerTube seems to work? There are many forces that prevent them from being a serious competitor, but server costs is not one of them.