If nothing else, the 1-3 minute ads at the start of videos (e.g. most of those James Rolfe videos I posted about the other day) are kind of sneaky ways to get around Youtube's dumbass "you can't curse during the first X amount of time" policies, even if they weren't intended for that purpose. I still skip such ads as a general practice, same as I do any other ads (such as the ones I block entirely with ad blockers, which is 99.999999% of them, including the automated ads on Youtube), but whatever.
<rant mode> Commercials/advertisements, in general, are obnoxious eyesores and wastes of time, even in the best of circumstances, as far as I'm concerned, especially on the Internet. If and when I want to learn about new products on which to burn money, I'll actually actively seek them out myself, via reviews or store websites/sales papers or Steam Discovery Queues or whatever. I don't want to be bombarded with utterly irrelevant dumbshit (or pseudo-relevant "targeted" dumbshit) when I'm just trying to watch a video (or fucking read fucking news fucking articles, fucking Google fucking News fucking app) or whatever. Especially when said dumbshit is, say, a goddamned Donald Trump ad on, say, a Some More News video or whatever. (I've never seen such a thing myself, because I block all Youtube ads as a matter of course, but I've actually seen people in the comments under Some More News videos or Last Week Tonight videos claiming that they got political ads supporting Trump during them, which just goes to show that Youtube's automated advertising algorithm is literally worse than completely useless.) If it's just James Rolfe shilling a VPN or a shitty mobile game or a knife or whatever, that's innocuous enough, I guess. If he gets paid upfront for that shit, that's all fine and dandy, particularly given that I can still "fast forward" through it (like how James himself talks about fast forwarding through all the commercials in the movies that he'd record from TV and how explicitly cutting them out entirely was a benefit of splicing the recordings onto new tapes), but I never want to see (or even run the risk of seeing) a Trump ad or something similarly hateful/harmful/half-witted like that, regardless of the circumstances. </rant mode>
As for Youtube alternatives, even ignoring broken copyright bullshit, another big reason there aren't any is due to the fact that any potential competitors probably simply can't afford the stupid ridiculous amounts of storage space required for Youtube-levels of content, especially when people are uploading all those "extended 10 hours of <insert song here>"[1] videos and other such pointless, asinine dumbfuckery. (Remember the days when even Youtube videos used to be limited to like 10 minutes max or whatever?) Sure, competitors might be able to keep up at first, but as soon as they start to reach even the tiniest fraction of the amount of content on Youtube now, they'd very quickly start to run out of money for harddrive space (or whatever we're calling "harddrive space" these days, "SSD space" or "cloud storage" or whatever the fuck). Particularly because Google/Youtube already has most advertisers (and their sweet sweet advertising money) gobbled up, which I'm sure they wouldn't want to share with competitors. (And that doesn't even include however much disk space is required to store the billions of worthless fuckstick comments underneath said videos. Or all the processing power it must take to run all those dimwitted, broken algorithms they use for everything, so that they can ostensibly save money instead of hiring actual humans to do a [marginally] more effective job.)
Yeah, you got your Dailymotions and your Vimeos and whatnot, but I sure as shit don't see everyone abandoning Youtube in favor of those. The only thing that comes even remotely close is probably Twitch, which has the benefit of all that Amazon money the same way Youtube has all that Google money. Without Amazon barreling in and gobbling up Twitch three or so years after it started up, it would probably be just as obscure as all the rest, compared to Youtube. But then, the same probably would have been true of Youtube itself, if Google hadn't swooped in and scarfed it up a year or so after it started.
Or... maybe Tiktok is a viable alternative to Youtube these days, too? I wouldn't know. I don't give the first shit about Tiktok, personally.
[1] - I'm not sure it would be the same for anyone else clicking that link, but for me, at least, the top result of that search is "Home Depot Theme [Extended, 10 Hours]" which is inducing a pretty strong case of "what in the actual fuck?"
no subject
<rant mode> Commercials/advertisements, in general, are obnoxious eyesores and wastes of time, even in the best of circumstances, as far as I'm concerned, especially on the Internet. If and when I want to learn about new products on which to burn money, I'll actually actively seek them out myself, via reviews or store websites/sales papers or Steam Discovery Queues or whatever. I don't want to be bombarded with utterly irrelevant dumbshit (or pseudo-relevant "targeted" dumbshit) when I'm just trying to watch a video (or fucking read fucking news fucking articles, fucking Google fucking News fucking app) or whatever. Especially when said dumbshit is, say, a goddamned Donald Trump ad on, say, a Some More News video or whatever. (I've never seen such a thing myself, because I block all Youtube ads as a matter of course, but I've actually seen people in the comments under Some More News videos or Last Week Tonight videos claiming that they got political ads supporting Trump during them, which just goes to show that Youtube's automated advertising algorithm is literally worse than completely useless.) If it's just James Rolfe shilling a VPN or a shitty mobile game or a knife or whatever, that's innocuous enough, I guess. If he gets paid upfront for that shit, that's all fine and dandy, particularly given that I can still "fast forward" through it (like how James himself talks about fast forwarding through all the commercials in the movies that he'd record from TV and how explicitly cutting them out entirely was a benefit of splicing the recordings onto new tapes), but I never want to see (or even run the risk of seeing) a Trump ad or something similarly hateful/harmful/half-witted like that, regardless of the circumstances. </rant mode>
As for Youtube alternatives, even ignoring broken copyright bullshit, another big reason there aren't any is due to the fact that any potential competitors probably simply can't afford the stupid ridiculous amounts of storage space required for Youtube-levels of content, especially when people are uploading all those "extended 10 hours of <insert song here>"[1] videos and other such pointless, asinine dumbfuckery. (Remember the days when even Youtube videos used to be limited to like 10 minutes max or whatever?) Sure, competitors might be able to keep up at first, but as soon as they start to reach even the tiniest fraction of the amount of content on Youtube now, they'd very quickly start to run out of money for harddrive space (or whatever we're calling "harddrive space" these days, "SSD space" or "cloud storage" or whatever the fuck). Particularly because Google/Youtube already has most advertisers (and their sweet sweet advertising money) gobbled up, which I'm sure they wouldn't want to share with competitors. (And that doesn't even include however much disk space is required to store the billions of worthless fuckstick comments underneath said videos. Or all the processing power it must take to run all those dimwitted, broken algorithms they use for everything, so that they can ostensibly save money instead of hiring actual humans to do a [marginally] more effective job.)
Yeah, you got your Dailymotions and your Vimeos and whatnot, but I sure as shit don't see everyone abandoning Youtube in favor of those. The only thing that comes even remotely close is probably Twitch, which has the benefit of all that Amazon money the same way Youtube has all that Google money. Without Amazon barreling in and gobbling up Twitch three or so years after it started up, it would probably be just as obscure as all the rest, compared to Youtube. But then, the same probably would have been true of Youtube itself, if Google hadn't swooped in and scarfed it up a year or so after it started.
Or... maybe Tiktok is a viable alternative to Youtube these days, too? I wouldn't know. I don't give the first shit about Tiktok, personally.
[1] - I'm not sure it would be the same for anyone else clicking that link, but for me, at least, the top result of that search is "Home Depot Theme [Extended, 10 Hours]" which is inducing a pretty strong case of "what in the actual fuck?"