HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Yeah, just what've been saying for some time now. As Google is struggling for growth, it'll squeeze ad revenue off the extant web, turning it into a piece of shit even more than it is already. The same thing happened with eg. free PHPbb forum providers in early 2000s which were plastered with banner ads more and more (many mobile sites are like this already). I don't see a way that Google can win this race to the bottom, and neither do I see any reason for content creators to even bother with Google Search and Google Analytics; they will just direct your visitor's precious profile data to your competitor spending more on AdWord bids than you.

FYI: see also [1] and [2] as additional upcoming measures by Google

[1]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/03/announcing-mobile-...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLxiN_dpjU

⬐ mikro2nd

So time, then for a robots.txt with

  User-agent: Googlebot
  Disallow: /

?

(Of course one would have to find an exhaustive list of all the web-spiders they have and their UA strings, but you get my point...)

⬐ shirakawasuna

They could just ignore it, right? Or do any new rules actually require honoring robots.txt?

⬐ occamrazor

All major search engines follow robots.txt

⬐ Guidii

Your argument assumes this is a fixed-sum game?

The story changes if the web continues to grow and more folks do more business over the web.

⬐ AlexandrB

It is a fixed-sum game for Google's search product. There's only so many searches that people can/will do in a day - we're probably nearing that limit - and Google already has >70% marketshare in search. The only way to increase revenue is to get more money per-search. Hence the increased number of sponsored placements and other revenue generators on the first page of results.

⬐ blackrock

Is it still worth it for people to make videos on YouTube?

Is Google still sharing revenue from the ad money?

⬐ rasz

Most big channels have external sponsor/affiliate deals. Others,like AvE, instead of 'selling out' go direct patronage route and are pulling comfy >$50K/month thru donations https://graphtreon.com/creator/AvE

⬐ anoncake

YouTube cannot "opt-in". That's not what "opt-in" means.

⬐ tannhaeuser

Ha, I'm responsible for this as I was insisting on scrolling over hundreds of 3-6 min soundbites to find the 1h+ concert I was after, even if Google made it nigh impossible to find in the last couple months. Seriously, we need a new (paid) music download service; Apple Music doesn't carry all the titles I want anymore, and the videos on yt are just consuming bandwidth anyway.

⬐ mvid

What’s wrong with Spotify?

⬐ jeremija

I don't like that I have to use their web player to listen to music. Also if their licensing deals change, the music that used to be there can disappear. I don't like that and therefore I continue to support bands via Bandcamp, from where I can download FLAC files. Unfortunately not all bands are there and some keep focusing on streaming platforms/YouTube and it's becoming harder and harder to get the music files locally.

⬐ tannhaeuser

Nothing I guess. I just thought Spotify is about streaming when I really just want to buy music from artists who are less mainstream.

⬐ imagetic

Spotify and Apple Music have the same issues, sometimes opposite issues. I used Spotify for years, and switched to Apple Music out of curiosity to allow me to have better control of a curated collection of work mixed with all the music I still owned from my younger years. I listen to a far more diverse collection on Apple Music, but it's also far more difficult to discover new things and aimlessly browse. Spotify is slowly building a wall around itself. They have a lot of great original content that you can't get anywhere else. Just thoughts I had so far. That's all.

⬐ imagetic

I've been working on mainstream media content for broadcast and streaming services heavily for the last 10 years. I figured it was only a matter of time before they did something like this. At some point, the ad dollars and need to be profitable take control.

To be honest, I think this will go over very poorly. Once content becomes inundated with ads, we tend to just move on to something less intrusive. I'm not sure if views will drop, but there's a massive economy at stake here and media is a far more fragile ecosystem than most think.

⬐ scoot_718

What ads?

⬐ rasz

Dont you worry, at some point google will switch to re-encoding every session in real time with hardcoded ads. Even today they dont care about cache-ability and their official player keeps refetching same data every time you decide to rewind more than 5 minutes, +video stream TTL is set to something like 60 minutes last time I checked. Btw Chrome will happily write that data (twice) as cache on your SSD, to never be used by anything ever again!

⬐ conception

Excited for TiVo for YouTube

⬐ BlackLotus89

1) youtube will auto enable midroll ads on all videos longer than 8 minutes! For evedyone!

2) Thought about linking to the changes listed on youtube and changing the video title. Liked the video so I opted for posting it and adding infos via this comment, changed the clickbaity title to something more fitting.

Official google video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vbm0b26kng

Google Support Page https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006

Edit: All the more reason to use ublock origin and newpipe [1]. It's just really sad for content creators who opted out by choice and are now forced to manually disable ads or leave them on completely.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

⬐ lmilcin

Of course they will. Youtube was created to earn money on ads. The time to suck it out dry is now before users get bored with it and new generation will flock to other types of entertainment.

Requiring content creator to individually opt out for each video is such a transparent dick move. If that was done in good interest of content creator why not just honor their explicit opt out in the first place?

⬐ BlackLotus89

Yeah youtube is going down the drain right now automating everything and failing (you can search hn for youtube bans and cam find at least 3 blocks of non violating channels in the last 2 weeks).

For every content creator on youtube, you can still opt out, but once it's enabled on your channel you have to disable it manually or write a tool to do it for you...