Google warns users of these apps that their experience may deteriorate soon. They may “experience buffering issues” or see errors such as “the following content is not available on this app” when trying to watch videos.
Similar to Google Search, ads have become insufferable for many users of the service. There are too many of them, they may break the viewing experience, and they may show inappropriate content.
YouTube Premium is expensive. What weights more for some users is that its functionality is severely limited when compared to third-party apps.
The cat and mouse game continues.
For those looking to avoid ads or improve privacy, here are some options for free, open source, privacy-friendly frontends to YouTube without advertisements:
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Right, cause YouTube/Google are really struggling so much that their only option is to increase prices while offering less value and making everyone’s experience worse. Maybe, and hear me out here, the massive billion dollar corporation could make less money.
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As far as I know, YouTube does not lose money(feel free to correct this with a source) and even just from a logical perspective if YouTube loses google money why keep pouring so many resources into it? The correct answer imo is YouTube doesn’t lose money theyre just greedy pigs but Alphabet(the parent company behind both google and YouTube) makes 10s of billions of dollars in profit, they are not struggling to pay the bills hell even if YouTube was losing then money fucking good they shouldn’t be allowed to hoard that much wealth anyway, but feel free to keep being a corporate bootlicker.
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Can you look to that? They only seem to share revenue, not profit. And profit is easily manipulated. Apparently they had 29 billion USD in revenue in 2023. There was a huge growth in revenue. I don’t see why you really claim that they’re making a loss.
I did find some statistics about YT running at a loss back in 09 but I can’t find anything recent really https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7868311&page=1
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First of all, a link to reddit isnt an acceptable source. Second if it was common knowledge that YouTube ran at a loss I would think looking up “does YouTube run at a loss” would give something more recent then 2009 I did find this from 2016, by looking for “YouTube revenue report” and according to this YouTube generated 31bn USD in 2023, unfortunately I can’t find any concrete numbers for operating costs but some estimates I read were between a couple hundred mil to a few bn, either way drops in the bucket compared to profits. Sure YouTube may have operated at a loss at first but its highly unlikely it still is.
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It reads to me like you think these companies are entitled to a user base. They aren’t. Just because it costs money to run a service, it does not mean we have to accept the price they charge or the anti consumer practices.
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That was a whole lot of assumptions about me. That, with the emotional language being used tells me that this interaction isn’t going anywhere useful or productive, so I’mma go ahead and step out.
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The Internet is actually free. Services on it aren’t always. The issue with YouTube monetizing, for me, is 1) they are doing it retroactively and 2) they’re monetizing content made by others.
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