this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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So many corporate bootlickers here, damn.
It's like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we're entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
That's their business model. Drowning us in ads is literally how they make money. They aren't a tech company. They're an ad aggregation company. They collect data via having users use freemium services. They use that data to create anonymized profiles of millions or billions of people. They break those profiles down into subsets. And then they let ad companies buy the ability for Google to target those users with ads based on things they're likely to buy based on the data that Google has collected. It's a much more effective way of marketing ads than just playing ad spots on tv or on radio. Better than billboards and magazine spreads etc. That's literally what Google (and Apple, and Amazon even) do. It's what Facebook does. It's what most social media does. Their tech? Just a way to get you to buy into an ecosystem so you continue to feed the profile and the algorithm and see the ads.
But man if we don't pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
The amount of money they made is entirely meaningless without knowing their spending.
I'll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old "influencers" millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they've always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of "network decay" for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn't expect something for nothing, as if we aren't fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can't get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It's morally upright, it's the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it's all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
You're talking about these as if they're separate things. Literally no company in existence harvests your data for any reason other than to serve better ads or to drive business decisions internally. Nobody gives a shit about your data otherwise. Ads are literally the only reason.
I mean... If the shoe fits, man.
Ok, I'll bite. Let's assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it's worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
While I agree, you shouldn't underestimate just how fucking cheap astroturfing services are, and how much easier it is to generate astroturfing posts using the plethora of LLMs out in the wild.
I still think it's silly to think they're doing that here, but it should be considered.
True, but it doesn't make sense to astroturf on a site with the tiniest fraction of users, most of which are already critical of mainstream centralized social media. Why worry about doing it here when a single comment on reddit can reach millions of people when lemmy doesn't even have as many users combined as some of the subs over on reddit.
This guy is a clown, regardless. I had an interaction with him on another thread where he edited his comment to make himself look like he predicted my response lmao. He also refuses to elaborate on some of the good faith response comments from other users because he knows his viewpoint is indefensible.
I've blocked maybe eight people in thirty minutes who are implicitly demanding that corporations create the law.
And one of them immediately down voted you. I wonder why they're here on Lemmy instead of continuing to support Reddit? They clearly like to be bottoms to corpos.
We must trust our corporate overlords who will use AI to guide us in their right direction.