It already reduced the services severely. The included Amazon Music sucks if you don’t pay extra. The included Amazon Video has ads now. And Prime gaming has reduced the offers.
While YouTube premium gives you full access to YouTube music and 1080p Enhanced Bitrate video quality. I only got it for the music, no ads on TVs is a bonus (Already had an adblocker for phone/PC).
Amazon has around 310 million active users. Amazon has 230 million Prime subscribers, even though it costs up to $15 a month. Yes, those include cheaper student subscriptions of course, but still.
Of course 30% is optimistic, but the average people I know happily watch those fucking ads. And don’t even complain about unskipable double ads. They don’t like them, they’re still too lazy to install an ad blocker as long as they get their content. Each one of them would absolutely shell out 5 bucks to continue watching (it’s less than a single beer when you go out).
You underestimate how addicted people are to YouTube. There is no alternative to it.
Twitch is streaming focused, the vods absolutely suck. Kick? Same.
What else is there? TikTok? Instagram? Neither of which provide long high quality videos.
After all we are talking about YouTube literally blocking everyone and putting up a banner: $5 a month or you’re out of luck. If someone already happily pays $18 a month for Netflix, what is 5 bucks?
It would be a huge gamble, but it could pay off. Seriously, how many people are watching YouTube every day? Hours of their favorite content creators.
Imagine a rug pull, YouTube is now a pay only service. No ads, but everyone has to pay $5 a month to access. I’d bet with you that a surprising amount of people would just pay that to continue using it.
How many? Nobody knows, but it would certainly be 30% or higher. Now imagine 30% of users paying just $5 a month how much money that would be.
It can be done, YouTube just doesn’t do it right now as they still earn plenty with ads. If suddenly everyone started to use an ad blocker then things would change very quickly.
Collapse what exactly? It would actually reduce strain on their servers and provide a better experience for paying users. Obviously they won’t do it because there’s a ton of users who watch ads (think of the average guy who plays YouTube on their phone or TV, with zero adblocking).
Just the way I described, I’m a software developer, it would be easy as hell.
Your browser requests the video, YouTube decides you have to watch an ad. The ad has 15 seconds unskipable. So the easiest thing they could do is not send you video data for 14 seconds (add a spare second for buffering to not piss off users who do watch ads).
Doesn’t matter if you call some endpoint, load the ad data, whatever. You’re not receiving any video for a while, which would piss people off enough to leave.
I still hold the opinion that they could absolutely block you out. I use uBlock Origin and there was actually a time where I got blocked/warnings every day. Even with upgrading my plugin / refreshing all block lists.
At some point I finally gave in and grabbed YouTube Premium, not because of the ads (I’d rather stop watching than watch with ads), but because I needed their music service (Used Amazon Music before, the app sucked. Music quality was the highest out there though. Also cancelled Prime for a double whammy).
For example the moment an ad gets triggered they could just refuse to send you video data. And if the ad is an unskipable 15 seconds, block playback for 15 seconds. Done. Even if you block this, you get 15 seconds of nothing and will soon be pissed off enough to either start watching ads, buy Premium or leave (no longer costing them bandwidth).
Totally fine by me! But by your logic you can’t get mad at them if they block you from watching due to using an ad blocker. Which brings us back to square one?
That’s a weird way to look at it, obviously you’re watching the content.
I’d rather see it like this:
Free tier with ads
Subscription without ads (and better quality)
You are currently on the free tier. Yes, you can block ads (just like you can pirate movies), but that’s not the deal you were offered. I’m using an ad blocker myself, but I can understand the corporate side too.
They absolutely could add a hard paywall, but why should they if there are plenty of users who want to watch for free by paying with ads?
I work in a creative field. But companies are companies. If I work for a company and create something, it doesn’t belong to a natural person, it immediately goes over to the company.
Not the CEO or CTO or whoever is in management, it belongs to the legal entity. Isn’t this a company owning the work I just created? If the CEO dies, the company still owns it.
Only humans can hold copyrights.
Yeah, no. Most copyrighted material is owned by companies, you don’t have to be a natural person to hold copyrights. And if a company can hold copyrights, you can also argue it can have fair use.
If I as a human listened to every single song of a band from start to finish, then produced a similar song in the same vein (lyrics / music genre), it would be fair use.
So why would it stop being fair use if an AI does the same thing? Just that the AI can listen to every song of this band and a million other bands, combining them.
But that’s not how model training works, it doesn’t simply copy and paste entire songs into its training data. It more or less “listens” to it, analyzes it and when you ask to create a rock song for example it just has an algorithm behind it what a song like that would sound like.
But you can’t just ask it to generate Bohemian Rhapsody from its data, it would probably get very close depending on the training, but it would never be 100% the same (except the model was only trained on this one song).
Just like you can listen to rock songs and then make your own, that’s totally valid. The problem here is of course automation and scale, but saying it’s not fair use is dubious.
That’s super easy to fake for a bot…
It’s a ton more than mouse movement. Lots of browser fingerprinting for example and tracking.
My ISP doesn’t support IPv6, now what?
It’s really bullshit.
Agile is not about being quick, it’s about delivering what the customer actually wants. When you do Waterfall you gather all the requirements, then you sit down and code the thing. Only to find out months or years later that you delivered crap as the customer didn’t even know themselves what they wanted.
With agile you take it one step at a time. What is important now? Get the requirements for this feature, deliver it in the next two weeks (or at least a part of it). Then the customer, which can be an actual customer, or your internal Product Owner, or a Product Manager looks it over. If the whole thing is perfect? Nice, carry on to the next thing.
Often you find out some detail was overlooked, or a new requirement came up, or the design didn’t fully work out. So pack it into the next sprint and do it better. You’d never get this feedback if you gather “all” requirements first and then just try to go from start to finish.
Agile certainly has its upsides when done right, unfortunately there’s not a lot of companies who manage to do so (like most I’ve been part of). Despite being messy at times, it’s still better than Waterfall. There’s too many meetings either way.
I like my 3080 TUF, but damn ASUS makes it a tough sell to get any of their products in the future. Crazy how they fell off.
There were 3 issues at once, so “trust & safety” is definitely part of it.
From the additional info I read, it sounds more like the traffic wasn’t the main issue.
Gambling is forbidden in a lot of countries or heavily regulated. Cloudflare uses a common IP pool for all customers, so a casino customer would possibly get their IPs blacklisted (by various ISPs). The Enterprise tier of Cloudflare has “Bring your own IP (ByoIP)”, which they probably wanted to force onto this problematic customer to protect their business.
So it’s actually a problem, not just them paying not enough (which is another reason to get rid of them as fast as possible).
Facebook doesn’t make phones.