OK Google, you win. Also - fuck you.

Mon, Dec 30, 2024 7-minute read

I’ve just subscribed to YouTube Premium but for all the wrong reasons.

In some ways, I should have seen this coming. The enshittification of literally everything has gathered steam over the last 18 months with every last damn good thing about the internet slowly being turned in to complete shite. Nobody would be surprised that Google / Alphabet is nuts-deep in this movement but somehow, in amongst all the evil shit they get up to, they seemed to have somewhat left alone the one Google thing I really like - YouTube.

Maybe they’ve been too pre-occupied with Gemini - their foray in to the AI-hellscape - to worry too much about other things. Or maybe they’re chucking so much cash into the putrid-AI-future that we should all be so concerned about that they forgot about making money to pay for it. Maybe it’s the declining revenues they’re getting from their golden goose - search.

Who knows or cares what it is. The point is the unmistakeable shift - they’ve been forced to look over their estate of under-milked assets and start clamping down on any and all of the available teats and turn the dials up to 11.

Kids with camcorders

YouTube has become so much more than the video-sharing platform of its origin. It has enabled an unmatcheably broad variety of content from millions of creators globally. It would probably claim to have precipitated what has become the streaming industry. Most importantly it really provides something for everyone, moreso than any one specific streaming platform.

This fact seems to be lost on some people. When discussing the topic of YouTube Premium recently - i.e., the paid, subscription YouTube service - someone remarked that it was an outrage that YouTube should be trying to charge for content - it was “chancery”; the justification (for the opinion) being that the Netflix, Apple, Prime, Disney etc., of the world all commission their content and so are entitled to charge for it. And by all means, they are. These are professional productions with professionals involved and everything that comes with it.

The insinuation being that YouTube is still just kids with camcorders making shit video that commands no value.

It’s a simplistic viewpoint. But understandable given YouTube’s origin. But it is also wrong outdated.

For a longtime, YouTube was just kids with camcorders making shit - but it was nevertheless popular. And it’s grown well beyond that ever since. YouTube is big industry in many places. But it’s also tiny industry in many others. And this makes it no less important. In fact, it arguably makes it more important.

I love YouTube for this simple fact. Normal, everyday people making videos and short films on things that interest them. I’ve even made a few of my own - just for funzies mainly - but a few of them have done quite well.

Netflix and Disney might be making big budget content - but not everybody wants to watch big budget content. They are however (almost) definitely not making content on… obscure crocheting techniques from the 1950s - but there absolutely are people who want to watch content on obscure crocheting techniques from the 1950s. And that is where is YouTube comes in.

Production across YouTube as a whole has changed dramatically over the 20 years or so of its existence. There are still plenty of kids with camcorders, but self-publishing finely produced and directed shorts/stories/films/movies is absolutely a thing. And there are vast communities behind all of these things. Communities that mean things to a lot of people.

Enshittify - activate

It is not unreasonable that YouTube cover its costs and actually make money from providing its service.

And for a long time it achieved this - and did so not at the expense of the experience. Ads (from its Adsense programme) have long been a thing, and they developed the platform for alternate monetisation options, with sponsored content and so on. Changes to the platform a few years ago, that prevented smaller channels from monetising seemed to be (or at least were claimed to be) in the best interests of the platform as a whole.

The only element of chancery in this is where YouTube is making money off the content but without paying anything to the creator, and this doesn’t appear to be happening, given the changes made above. The platform is nowadays very much focused on making money for the creators.

The existence of e.g. Patreon and alternate paid-segments might cast some shadows on whether YouTube’s adsense model is truly fair. The cut YouTube takes is high.

But nevertheless there are plenty of creators out there doing well out of their channels and it’s not the sole preserve of the uber-massive channels with millions of followers. What counts is engagement - how much do people enjoy your videos, and that can be achieved with followers even in the low thousands.

But this recent increase in ad density and ad frequency has been unmistakeable. It has very evidently increased. Videos of reasonably short duration (e.g., < 10 minutes) may suffer 5-6 interruptions, each of 10-30 seconds each, with varying ability to skip.

It may be a function of my location or my watch history but I seems to suffer an incredibly narrow pool of advertisements, so that in the space of that 10 minutes, I may see the exact same advert 6 times. I have yet to see an advert that is of actual legitimate relevance to me, so all I can do is skip it at the earliest opportunity. I may spend an up to an hour watching YouTube in a session, and I guarantee I will see the same 4 or 5 adverts.

To me this completely undermines the value of the ad platform on YouTube. If there is not a sufficiently wide array of adverts to show me, YouTube should just stop showing me adverts. Showing me the same irrelevant advert 6 times in the space of 10 minutes is nonsensical.

I am not going to change my behaviour and yet the advertiser is paying all the same. It’s win-win for YouTube.

Sorry not fucking sorry

This is undoubtely not unique to YouTube or Google Adsense. We’ve long since stopped believing that the companies behind this give the slightest tiny little shit about the users. Google are the OG here. It’s why ad-blocking browser extensions such as AdBlock and network-level filtering such as PiHole are a thing1.

I am sufficiently irritated. I am annoyed. The relentless imposition of the irrelevant adverts. It is now intolerable.

To the extent that I have finally caved and have subscribed to YouTube Premium2 to just make the adverts stop. I am not doing this from a place of willing, of wanting to pay for the value (like I do with other subscription services), to recognise the benefits the platform brings me.

I am doing it because it has become sufficiently annoying. The time spent watching/skipping adverts is now more costly than that of the subscription. They have intentionally ruined the experience and given me one3 option to restore it.

I expect this is part of the algorithm’s calculations. If YouTube cannot show me a sufficiently diverse set of adverts that I may actually engage with (that would generate more revenue) then how else are YouTube going to make money out of me? Beyond the value of my data - my watch habits versus my demographic - there is no direct revenue they can make from me. So presumably I am what they are likely consider to be a collateral loss - if I pay because it’s annoying then happy days! If I leave because it’s annoying, then it’s no big deal.

So here we are. Where we previously paid for YouTube with the currency of our data - we now actually pay for YouTube with actual money - as well as all my lovely data.

I just sincerely hope that since I won’t see any more of Google’s adverts, the creators we are watching continue to get some benefit, some share of my subscription.

So, well done Google, congratulations. You win.

Fuck you, though.

  1. And these work really well if you are using YouTube in the browser. But if you want to watch YT in the app on a smart device, it’s a no. ↩︎

  2. There’s also the hilariously ironic issue that I cannot actually signup for YT Premium through legitimate means since it doesn’t actually recognise Guernsey as a real country. I actually have to use a VPN to ‘move’ to a different country in order to be able to sign up!s ↩︎

  3. OK so we could just use a browser. And we probably should. Not easy on a TV, though. ↩︎

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