YouTube dominates TV streaming in US, per Nielsen's latest report

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/20/youtube-dominates-tv-streaming-in-u-s-per-nielsens-latest-report/

by StarrySkies11 • 2 years ago

155 185 2 years ago

techcrunch.com

iancmceachern• 2 years ago

It's replaced what was traditional TV in our home.

We watch movies, and youtube as if it were tv.

Old TV is now either 24 hour garbage news, reality shows, or similar nonesense.

harryquach2• 2 years ago

Same in our house. Most youtube channels we watch have weekly releases which we watch similar to traditional TV episode releases.

subtra3t3• 2 years ago

If you don't mind sharing, what YT channels do you typically watch?

dacryn2• 2 years ago

There are two modes of watching TV in my opinion: intentional and casual

Intentional: look for a certain show/movie, e.g. the weekly episode of House MD, Lost, Friends, HBO, ... -> This is the streaming war between Netflix, HBO, Disney, ...

Casual: You turn on the tv with the aim to just browse around and relax, and get something accidentally interesting/amusing -> Youtube is king and more or less the only option here (and a bit of Nebula)

The two together is the traditional TV

toofy• 2 years ago

omg nebula is incredible. i just subbed like 2 months ago and i feel like ive been guzzling from a firehouse.

amadeuspagel6• 2 years ago

I watch things on Youtube intentionally. Right now I'm watching That UK Sound[1]. There are many more things worth watching intentionally on Youtube then there are on Netflix, HBO and Disney together. There's nothing like 3Blue1Brown on these.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlCEg4hCa1LHLLYk4KQQI...

Scoundreller2• 2 years ago

The funny thing is, a casual viewer might be more interested in the ads/promoted products because they’re bored and looking for something to do.

On a certain movie/show, you can’t be bothered to divert your attention: you’re committed to the show.

hiAndrewQuinn• 2 years ago

Same here. We have the benefit of a nice projector, so we have biweekly movie nights with friends; when it's just us we'll fire up YouTube and watch whatever tickles out fancy.

Last night it was Vewn animated shorts and music videos by group_inou, here's a favorite: https://youtu.be/JP2728BtJ34?si=UGkXJWJFGdy8muyu

alpaca128• 2 years ago

Old TV is now either 24 hour garbage news, reality shows, or similar nonesense

Take a look at YouTube's trending page. There's clearly a reason for that content on TV.

iknowstuff• 2 years ago

The horrors you’ll see when you visit youtube in incognito

nxvk2• 2 years ago

Lot of consolidation likely this year among all the streamers. Too many streamers. Too much content. Too few eyeballs.

gonzo41• 2 years ago

No way. There are too many lazy customers with auto renewing subscriptions.

babypuncher• 2 years ago

There are already talks of Peacock and Paramount+ merging into one service.

phantomathkg2• 2 years ago

It is not the lazy customers that drive the merge, it is the shareholders and wall street.

Scoundreller2• 2 years ago

Can’t beat the price. Google knows what its target market is willing to pay.

benatkin4• 2 years ago

If you can afford to subscribe to a paid video streaming service, YouTube will help you to cancel whatever service you have anyways, when you realize you don't watch it enough to justify the monthly fee.

namegulf3• 2 years ago

Mainstream media is dying fast and YouTube is replacing it #ftw

You can watch what you want, when you want, search and recommendations are powerful.

Individual content creators are on fire, unfiltered and quality content. Can't remember when we watched MSM in the last 10 years, like other said it's garbage and just propaganda.

kiba• 2 years ago

Search are rapidly trash, while recommendation required some effort on my part to cultivate or otherwise trash might sneak in.

It's certainly the golden age of youtube, with high quality creators, I learned a lot of interesting stuff that I probably otherwise wouldn't, though it's hard to know because I would have read about these things in magazines.

But there are some issues in the space.

For example, my attempt to report low quality autogenerated nonsense from a bot has so far been unsuccessful because of a combination of being too small to notice and successful evasion tactics.

Creators need sponsors, some of which are questionable, to pay the bills and youtube continues to be an unstable income stream.

Moderation is absolutely necessary to maintain information quality, but youtube moderation is not very transparent and they are unaccountable if creators are wrongfully banned. It's also why my attempt to report a bot go nowhere.

namegulf3• 2 years ago

Agreed, it's easy to report copyright (even if it is fake to take someone channel down) and its taken down immediately and they don't have a way to even appeal and get back.

While it's tough to report genuine cases like you mentioned.

phantomathkg2• 2 years ago

Mainstream media is dying fast and YouTube is replacing it #ftw Traditional linear media is surely being push out, but YouTube is also being "replaced" by short form media.
You can watch what you want, when you want, search and recommendations are powerful. On demand part is surely powerful, but are you sure on the recommendation? Did you remember a few years ago people are talking about horrible youtube recommendation?
Individual content creators are on fire, unfiltered and quality content. Can't remember when we watched MSM in the last 10 years, like other said it's garbage and just propaganda. I don't know how what channel or geo region you are in. There are quality content, but at the same time there are thousands, if not million of rubbish on YouTube, propaganda[0][1], spammy content farm[1].

[0] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-ai-propaganda-1... [1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Guerrilla-influencers-are-pu... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

namegulf3• 2 years ago

True, however the point is you are in control and have a choice of what to watch and what not!

benatkin4• 2 years ago

With YouTube not only is it easy to not look for other stuff to watch, it’s easy to skip other activities. It’s low hanging fruit for just about any interest. I’m trying to use it less.

throwitaway222• 2 years ago

Remember when everyone laughed at google for buying them for a billion

huytersd4• 2 years ago

Who knew something as basic as streaming videos would basically be a monopoly. It makes sense in hindsight with all the expensive storage required. It’s still mind boggling that you could literally upload video to them 24/7 and they will host it for free.

elcritch3• 2 years ago

For now that is.

I sort of hope someone more motivated than myself makes a timer for how long before the crappification* of YouTube begins now that it appears MBAs will be taking over. The new CEO probably has some gumption, but it seems inevitable.

* of course this is subjective, but generally I can find lots of great YouTube content. I can buy premium to avoid the ads and become the client, not the product.

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64675997.amp

BlueTemplar• 2 years ago

Circa 2009, with the introduction of ContentID.

riffraff• 2 years ago

Fwiw I think the commonly used term is "enshittification".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

lynx235• 2 years ago

The crappification of YouTube has already begon with Shorts and the inability to disable this completely useless content.

sph3• 2 years ago

If you click the X on the Shorts section it says "We will hide Shorts for 30 days"

How about you hide them forever? Some MBA must have decided that it would not be good for their KPI if people could just ignore the clickbait.

ruune• 2 years ago

On mobile that's the biggest reason I use ReVanced. Sure, blocking ads is nice and all, but I'm paying for premium anyway. I just don't want to see shorts

1: https://github.com/ReVanced

Player6225• 2 years ago

fwiw I turned off history and all the recommendations settings, and now they hide the shorts and frontpage recs

elcritch3• 2 years ago

Eh, I like some of the shorts. I just scroll by them when I'm not.

I'm thinking about much deeper enshitification like nickel-and-diming content creators until they all leave. Getting rid of premium or adding ads to it, etc. Adding even more ads for regular users.

fnordian_slip• 2 years ago

The fact that search is broken (you often only get a few relevant videos and then some recommendations that have nothing to do with your search) and YouTube shorts are shoved in your face constantly are not enough for you to attest enshittification at this point in time? How bad do you expect it to become in the near future?

xbmcuser2• 2 years ago

The amount of human knowledge available today on youtube I think nothing will ever come close as apart from formal knowledge we have millions of small hacks improvements that would probably not been written down but have been recorded. If you are dedicated enough today you can go from being a novice to being quite proficient in 100s of different things. And every day the knowledge keeps increasing as well as improving.

croes• 2 years ago

The same is true for disinformation.

If you down the rabbit hole you start losing your mind.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

I think there is much more information on the internet in written format though. Which I personally find a lot more accessible as well.

I always find video really slow and not very information dense, I don't have the patience for it. I get frustrated with the slow delivery whereas I can consume written text at my own speed. Skipping video works of course but I constantly have to "resync" my mind after a skip which happens automatically with written content. Written text can also be overly verbose and woolly but somehow I can scan through it even faster and summarise it without even thinking. It's really weird.

But it's great video exists for those who love it of course. And I think most people find video more easily accessible. I'm more of an outlier.

Fwiw I already stopped watching live TV many years ago :) All the ads, the endless game shows and talkshows with the celebs loving the sound of their own voices, no thanks.

ReleaseCandidat• 2 years ago

I always find video really slow and not very information dense

That always depends on the actual "information". Some stuff is "better" in written form, other things need audio and for other video is neccesary. Trivial thing is needing audio to e.g. hear music (yes, even if I can read musical notation) or pronunciation, intonation and accentuation of words or videos of physical "movement" in sports, crafts and art (dancing, theater,...).

But no, I wouldn't watch somebody programming for hours instead of reading about that either.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

For some things video is superior though. Like, replacing brake calipers. It is really hard to see what to do on a drawing.

huytersd4• 2 years ago

Most things that aren’t academic can’t really be learned by reading about it. You have to see someone do it to get all the thousands of different bits of information you cannot possibly write down. Videos are extremely information dense depending on what you’re trying to learn.

masteruvpuppetz• 2 years ago

Finding the right videos is only the limiting factor. So many times I get frustrated and give up not finding what I'm looking for.

troupo• 2 years ago

The problem is that Youtube severely nerfed their search (ironic given that Google still pretends it's a search company).

Now if you search for something will give you 5 relevant videos, 10 "for you videos" and then an endless list of something it hopes you will engage with, whether relevant or not

testplzignore• 2 years ago

I just opened the YouTube app and the first recommended video is "youtube's search function is atrocious now". Their search function may be bad, but the addiction feed is spot on!

xbmcuser2• 2 years ago

I use google search then select videos try it you will probably get better results instead of youtube search. I wonder if they google search scans the subtitles as well from youtube so has better results.

bberrry• 2 years ago

I know it's silly but I sometimes feel anxiety at the prospect of that enormous bank of knowledge getting lost in some way or another (e.g. Google deciding it wants to do something else or some disaster).

It is truly invaluable to _humanity_

LightHugger• 2 years ago

youtube is doing it's best to now hobble search functionality on youtube, which is already a disaster from a discoverablity perspective. not to mention the huge amount of content that gets deleted due to claims of all kinda of nonsense and other bogus reports and faulty automated detection.

pjc50• 2 years ago

The medium-term threat is the gradual replacement of that knowledge in search results with AI para-knowledge that looks plausible but is not actually true or useful.

godzillabrennus• 2 years ago

It’s the only streaming service I pay for that brings me joy.

electriclove2• 2 years ago

I can’t stand how they shove YouTube Shorts down our throats and don’t give us a way to disable that.

I am a huge fan of YouTube overall and have been happy to pay to have an ad-free experience

benatkin4• 2 years ago

I don't mind the short videos. What I do mind is that they co-opted the word "shorts" which means something else in the context of videos. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024...

shiroiushi3• 2 years ago

Perhaps not: I think your link is talking about "short movies" or "short films". YouTube's Shorts are "short videos". Movies (films) and videos are not the same thing: movies/films are a type of video, but there are many other types of video that are not movies, most notably TV shows, and also "music videos", but really anything that involves a moving picture. A "movie" (or to some, "film") these days is commonly meant to refer to a specific form of art, meaning a visualized stand-alone story that usually takes 1-4 hours to watch, and frequently gets played in a cinema.

Similarly, a "book" is a collection of bound paper pages, but a "novel" is a specific type of book that contains a story, and is usually a certain length (if it's too short, it's called a "short story").

So I think it's ok for YouTube to call their 60-second videos "shorts", as long as they don't call them "short films" or "short movies".

fragmede• 2 years ago

how much extra would you be willing to pay for a shorts-free experience? I'd probably be willing to throw them a dollar or two more for that.

resolutebat• 2 years ago

You can get it for free by turning off your watch history.

lastofus• 2 years ago

There are extensions to hide the Shorts. I’ve been using one for a month now and it’s been great.

evere• 2 years ago

There's no way to disable them in their mobile apps unfortunately without jumping through a couple hoops with something like a PiHole or using an alternative app on Android.

amadeuspagel6• 2 years ago

There's even one featured on the chrome web store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-youtube-shorts...

spike021• 2 years ago

IMO what Instagram has done is worse. Reels every other post in the feed, reels in stories, reels specific tab.

On top of all that, yesterday I wanted to post a 5 second video post, just a regular video post, of my dog doing something, and no matter what I did it insisted on posting it as a reel, even though at one point I cancelled the new post, went back to the "new post" view, made sure "post" not "reel" was selected, and then it still made the video a reel.

pkamb2• 2 years ago

Reels in the feed is what makes me hate modern IG. There’s already a Reels tab I never tap! I’m telling you something, please listen.

djsavvy• 2 years ago

To post a video as a non-reel the standard workaround is also putting a picture in the same post. You’ll see some creators with an image that just says “anti-reels slide”.

nox101• 2 years ago

this is what made me finally quit Instagram. I was only following friends and family. if it had been 3 friends posts for every 1 ad and zero other stuff pushed at me I'd have stayed but the signal to noise ratio got too high and I finally got fed up and deleted my account last month.

I often want to do the same to YouTube as it's recommendations are atrocious and it provides no good ways to turn off the noise. 4 easy things I'd like.

The obvious, let me disable shorts.

Next up, separate music from non-music. 30% to 50% of their recommendations are for music when I'm not looking for music. By separating them they can give me 100% music when I want music and 100% non-music when I don't.

Let me chosoe for it to never recommend videoes I've already watched. 5-10% of their recommendations are wasted on vidoes I've already seen. That should include videos I've manually marked as already watched

Don't recommend mixes. (maybe ok in music mode of they'd separate music from non-music)

offices• 2 years ago

It's very subjective, but Reels are actually the only way my close friends interact with Instagram now. As Facebook did, it's gone from a platform for sharing ourselves to a platform for sharing third-party 'content'[1]

[1] stolen pet tiktoks

k8sToGo3• 2 years ago

If you go to the website, you can hide Shorts for 30 days. There is an X on the top right for the Shorts section.

I do that and don’t feel like it’s being forced into my face anymore.

theshackleford2• 2 years ago

If I can only hide them and not remove them on a permanent basis, that is the very definition of being forced into my face.

"Oh wow, I can not eat the poop whilst I catch my breath. This will be an enjoyable break before I am forced to start eating the poop again"

TeMPOraL• 2 years ago

hide Shorts for 30 days

Is there a name for this fucked up dark pattern of giving users a "choice" only between accepting and accepting couple days or weeks later?

amadeuspagel6• 2 years ago

Not from search results.

electriclove2• 2 years ago

Thanks for this tip. I want to be able to do this on the YouTube apps on my kids’ devices

huytersd4• 2 years ago

Shorts pollute everything because they’re so easy to make it’s basically spam.

Timshel4• 2 years ago

Just make a filter to remove the shorts insert.

barryrandall2• 2 years ago

The killer app for Shorts is the ability to view Tik Tok videos without having to directly engage with Tik Tok.

Jordan-117• 2 years ago

I used to scoff at the idea of paying for YouTube, but I'd absolutely consider it if they had a cheaper plan that excluded YouTube Music.

happytiger3• 2 years ago

I won’t pay for YouTube as long as they keep trying to make Shorts happen. It’s everything I dislike about the Internet in one feature.

Edit: Why would this get downvoted? Do people really find value in shorts?

spiderice• 2 years ago

Do people really find value in shorts?

Yes. Obviously. This is an absurd question.

judge2020• 2 years ago

TikTok has a clunky Web UI (there was an experiment they accidentally rolled out for a day in 2022 to make it much better, but it was rolled back and never seen again). YT Shorts work fairly well. It also supposedly pays out to creators better than TikTok.

Although I have to use `document.querySelectorAll('video').forEach(e => e.playbackRate = 2);` in my console for either service since they don't have native playback speed control on the web.

ssl-32• 2 years ago

I'm not one of them, and clearly you're not one of them, but: Yes, some people do find value in things like YouTube Shorts.

And these people are real people.

(But complaining about downvotes is a sure-fire way to get downvotes -- even as far back as Slashdot, where such a complaint could only be levied pre-emptively or as a reply to oneself.)

theshackleford2• 2 years ago

It's tough for everyone when they find out they aint the main character.

tracker18• 2 years ago

Mostly use it on Android TV... Almost never see shorts as a suggestion. They're there, but I don't really use them or notice much.

dacryn2• 2 years ago

It just caused me to stop paying for Spotify. Spotify is clearly better, but Youtube music is really 'good enough'

scarab923• 2 years ago

Same.

Isn’t this behaviour exactly what got Microsoft in anti-trust hot water?

tracker18• 2 years ago

Same here... I did keep Spotify for a while for Joe Rogan, but their Android TV app is crappy and video support sucks badly. YouTube Music is good enough, but the previous incarnation was slightly better IMO.

TulliusCicero• 2 years ago

I mean it's a pretty reasonable price if you do the family plan with a few people.

flanked-evergl2• 2 years ago

I recently started paying for YouTube, it sucks way less without all the ads, and I generally feel I get my money's worth. I know I could technically use AdBlock or something, but it feels really nasty to do so. YouTube Music is okay, but I still use Spotify, as the interface of Spotify is better.

key_peace_pulse• 2 years ago

I still do.

I just started using a minimal ad skipper chrome extension called Clear Skies and youtube is back to being usable.

happytiger3• 2 years ago

Tv has become so insufferable boring that my entire household has stopped watching, except for YouTube. Audible has been picking up and people who live in my house are actually reading books again.

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

With American television at least, I think you need brain damage to tolerate it. This is why most of the people still watching it are people with dementia in nursing homes.

happytiger3• 2 years ago

The core audience has finally been explained to me. Lol. Nice.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

I’m on the verge of getting Youtube Premium

I didn't really like their “annoyance” style of advertising that, but competitors got worse

There are no DJ mixes on Soundcloud or Spotify any longer, and other platforms are a combination of unused or no mobile app

so I’ll go ahead and get rid of the ads now for just that, but along with everything else on youtube

input_sh3• 2 years ago

no DJ mixes on Soundcloud

I'd say there's two types of them: independent mixes (someone just recorded a DJ set for the fun of it), and podcast-like radio shows, usually backed by a label. The first group is getting kinda smaller, but the second group is definitely more on Soundcloud than anywhere else -- it's just completely undiscoverable. Sometimes it goes to the artist profile, sometimes it has its own "radio show" profile, and Soundcloud does fuck all in terms of displaying such "podcasts" separately.

For me the most interesting of the platforms in this niche is Mixcloud, whose whole concept is streaming DJ mixes, legally, with some of the money somehow going back to the artists whose records you play. But to negotiatate that sort of legality they had to introduce some rather unexpected restrictions, like how many songs you can play by one artist, how many from a certain album, how many consective songs by artist/album... So it's fine in most cases, but doing something like "best of Daft Punk" mix would go against the rules.

And with YouTube it's pretty much a dice roll. A common tactic is to upload an unlisted blank video with the snippets of the music you want to record yourself playling and see how lucky you get with the copyright algorithm. Sometimes a certain song you want to play is just a no-go, so you have to swap it for a different one before recording yourself, otherwise all your effort goes straight to trash, never to be seen by anyone. And you get up to three strikes in a 90 day period, so you can't be too regular with your uploads.

elcritch3• 2 years ago

You also get Youtube Music with premium. That's pretty nice. It's not as good at playlists as Spotify, etc, but it's got most music you wanna listen to.

ishanAhuja• 2 years ago

Stunning that they don't invest more in their TV apps, especially the Apple TV app. Their single-row horizontal scroll UI is so frustrating.

tracker18• 2 years ago

Not sure on that... Amazon prime is pretty atrocious. Similar for Netflix anymore. And the CBS/Paramount TV app won't work right at all with my pihole blocking their tracking service. WTH.

It wouldn't take much for Rumble to do better, but it seems like the TV app experience is such a minimal priority for them.

Max was decent and so was Discovery... Since the merger both are worse and they aren't even merged. Just worse than before.

barryrandall2• 2 years ago

The YouTube app is one of the best steaming apps available on Apple TV...because it's not constantly signing you out.

lynx235• 2 years ago

Not just in the USA. YouTube is my only vvideo source. And to add insult to injury, local legislation has it that I have to pay 60E/month for the local, basically state-controlled TV/radio/news station, although I dont consume its content. YouTube, which is what I use daily, only costs about 1/6th of that. Oh, and there is only one democratic party against this practice. The far-right. All the others seem to love this practice. Thank you democracy, you're useless.

madog• 2 years ago

What country is that? That's a lot. At least in the UK if you don't watch regular TV you don't have to pay the licence fee (£159/year).

lynx235• 2 years ago

We used to have an the ability to opt-out from TV and only pay for radio, which is what I did for many years. However, since January this year, the system has been reformed and the ability to opt-out from TV was removed. So now I pay 35/mo more for a service I dont use. Besides, I am blind. So billing me for TV is a joke by itself.

shiroiushi3• 2 years ago

The far-right. All the others seem to love this practice. Thank you democracy, you're useless.

If you poll the voters, and the non-far-right voters generally approve of this, then democracy is working as intended. Just because you don't like the results doesn't mean the majority of your countrymen don't.

lynx235• 2 years ago

Its not that simple. Since the only party opposing this practice is far-right and mostly non-votable, nobody in their right mind has the option to vote for a party which does not support this practice. That is when democracy fails. When all the parties team up to support something they want done, and the people basically have no option to vote against.

paul7986• 2 years ago

Hollywood streaming services are in trouble as the world gets hooked/accustom to free, user generated(those documentaries on every little random thing users create are great.. low budget TLC/Discovery like shows) and short form content.

In 2023 I canceled all hollywood streaming services and watch 2 to 6 hours of youtube (in the background while working) a day. As well through a Mac Mini connected to a LCD TV use wireless mouse as remote (provides everything the Internet offers on a big screen).

Hollywood if they were smart would start putting all their shows on youtube and split them up .. if it's 20 minutes show .. split it into two. I bet they will!

internet101010• 2 years ago

Because entertainment is a largely a commodity and whoever has the most wins. Not that complicated.

flanked-evergl2• 2 years ago

The quality of stuff I get on YouTube is way higher than most of the garbage that Netflix pumps out. YouTube is largely a meritocracy, if a creator doesn't make something that viewers want they just don't get money or views, while Netflix and Amazon Prime, on the other hand, are mostly just corporate crap factories where people keep failing upwards even if nobody is watching the crap they produce.

thih9• 2 years ago

Why is the article mentioning only Apple Vision Pro in the context of “spatial reality”, ignoring other products?

alkonaut8• 2 years ago

Those who use youtube as TV, what do you watch? Is there a way of consuming YouTube that is more like consuming Netflix, where the 1% (or 0.001%) that is "professional" content is curated somehow? I mean I have no interest in scrolling videos of people eating detergent, I just want to watch shows/films/content that I heard people recommend to me (not algorithms - people). How do you even start doing that on youtube?

I have used youtube since it launched, but I still haven't found more than one or two "channels" that I enjoy (is that what it's called? Interesting people who make interesting videos?) but I haven't bothered logging in or subscribing to one. Should I have? Does it help consuming in any way?

Timshel4• 2 years ago

If you want any recommandation subscription is needed. I use multiple profile to separate things like more learning focused vs gaming or whatever.

Never watch a silly random video in one of those profile.

_dark_matter_• 2 years ago

This sounds like an exhausting amount of work for a paid product

krisoft3• 2 years ago

I just want to watch shows/films/content that I heard people recommend to me (not algorithms - people). How do you even start doing that on youtube?

I don’t understand your question. You talk with people you care about, they tell you what they recommend and then you use the search bar to locate the content and watch it.

This is so obviously the answer to your question that I am worried I am misunderstanding you in some way.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

I think their point is that discovery for authentic content is really awful which is true. The homepage never shows me subscriptions, there's a gigantic amount of shorts. The subscription page itself has no way to group or find anything and it also shoves shorts in your face.

The Youtube UI is actually so bad and Tiktok-ified that I just use Feedly to follow individual channels and avoid the website. Even creators talk about this quite often. "ProZD" most recently encouraged people to support him on Patreon because his long form content essentially is algorithm-punished. Apparently only 10% of his views ever come from the subscription page.

I think it's quite telling that the people who make the kind of content that I think the OP is after so heavily encourage people to support them outside of the actual platform.

alkonaut8• 2 years ago

If someone mentions a TV show and I search for it, there will be 100 reviews of the show, 1000 short clips of the show. Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube. Whether or not the actual content is ON youtube (which is the question my search is trying to answer) you'll get thousands of search results. In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero.

Another example: a huge use of TV is news. Every big news outlet has a presence on YouTube. But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

Youtube is a mirror, it shows you more of what you watch (at least most of the time.) If you can't resist the temptation of clicking on clickbait/trash, it will show more of that to you.

How to use youtube:

1. Log out, clear your cookies or clear your watch history.

2. Turn off autoplay.

3. Search for a few high quality videos/channels you have seen before, to seed the recommendation algorithm. I use the "Applied Science" channel for this but you use what suits you.

4. Never click on clickbaity trash.

alkonaut8• 2 years ago

I just fail to find much of the content interesting. TV for me is 99% news, sports, or traditional entertainment (Internationally known example: "Jeopardy", just for the sake of discussion). I find YouTube just isn't geared for this. I mean I have lots of narrow interests, but I don't want to watch a 1 hour video of someone discussing the latest stuff in my area of interest no matter how good it is. Because the people in my family who is also in the room would protest. And there is no one I can discuss this with when I have seen it because it's such a slim topic.

I mean if you sit down at lunch today and want to grab a 30min news summary for national news, from a reasonably trustworthy news source how would you even do that on YouTube?

sph3• 2 years ago

I enjoy paying and watching Youtube Premium on my TV (through a sideloaded app), but whenever I open the official app on my iPad, I am bombarded with Shorts, every search I make returns clickbait, unrelated content among the real results and that annoys me so much I keep thinking I should stop giving Youtube any money.

Google, the bloody search engine company, keeps making sure that every search I make about video game videos, returns totally unrelated clips about very sexualised Twitch streamers ("how is this allowed on Twitch??" with some very prominent cleavage in the thumbnail), or any other thirst bait that has nothing to do with what I have been looking for. Funnily enough, they don't even let you choose "don't recommend this channel" for these results.

I tried clearing my watch history, disliking the video, reporting them, Google doesn't fucking care. They are force-fed to you, hoping every single time you click on it.

Honestly I just wish that company burns to the ground. Literally making their platform as shitty as possible to increase their bottom line. Yes, clickbait works, it does not mean you need to turn the entire place into clickbait. Jesus that makes my blood boil.

I know I could just read a book instead of watching my favorite content creators on the platforms, not all of which are on Nebula. But it takes some effort to create a product that pushes people away from it. Or that they hate themselves for using it.

tracker18• 2 years ago

I wish that Rubble or others worried nearly as well. Also a TV user (NVidia Shield TV) and it seems every other time I check Rumble I have to sign in again. The recommendations are garbage and half the content feed is just noise.

I'd really like something similar but not so heavy handed as YouTube gets on suggestions and content filtering.

I've also tried a few also ran video services and none haber been even as good as rumble as bad as their TV app is.

phatfish• 2 years ago

Yup, I'm not sure how anyone uses the standard YouTube app. Even with adverts removed you get bombarded by shorts and nonsense clickbait/disinformation.

I use it currently with a patched Revanced apk which is not logged in (in case Google suddenly take to banning accounts) and some UX tweaks like blocking shorts.

For the couple of channels I actually would like to support in some way I stomach using the official app and give them some ad impressions.

danpalmer3• 2 years ago

How much do you use YouTube? Because as a fairly substantial user, this doesn't match my experience at all. When I wasn't watching Shorts they were present but not in-your-face. Search pretty much always returns exactly what I'm looking for, there's no clickbait except for the low level of clickbait that the channels I like use... I pay not to have ads, but that's about it. Honestly, I really enjoy it. The app could be a little more iOS-ified, but that's a minor gripe.

I wonder if you're just a sufficiently light user that it's not learning your preferences, or, I wonder if much of the personalisation comes from client-side event logging which, by using a third party app, you're skipping, meaning that in many ways your profile is missing data.

guitarbill2• 2 years ago

My experience is much closer to parent than yours, and I don't use any third party app. Yes, I have paid. And no, I'm not "just a sufficiently light user". That's pretty dismissive actually.

The official app sucks, and the desperate Shorts push is annoying at best.

Shorts are injected into the search, and search is otherwise as bad as discussed. On the bottom menu/bar, the five things are "Home", "Shorts", the plus/capture/upload button (why would I ever want to use this on mobile? oh yeah, I don't and only accidentally press it, but Youtube wants people to upload Shorts), "Subscriptions" and "Profile". This is the same on iPad.

At least with YT Music, seems they realised that the UX of the main app was so bad, they just needed a separate one. But with Shorts, the desperation for those sweet Zoomer ad views was too high, so into the main app it goes.

mobilemidget• 2 years ago

Besides the regular gaming content on twitch there is a bunch of weird stuff. I noticed there is this ASMR type content where people lick plastic ears in front of a microphone. The amount of views they get, concurrent streams was mind boggling for me.

But regarding 'sexy' content they recently made some policy updates, they initially hammered down on such content, but I think it hurted their income stream.

https://safety.twitch.tv/s/article/Updating-our-Approach-to-...

sph3• 2 years ago

Twitch has become a soft-core porn website. But it's easy to avoid. Youtube blatantly promoting clickbait videos, injecting them into search results, with no way to tune the recommendations is worse.

lapcat• 2 years ago

It seems misleading to say that YouTube "dominates" TV streaming when according to the Nielsen report with a less clickbaity title, Netflix is only 0.7% behind. https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2024/colder-weather-and-nfl...

amadeuspagel6• 2 years ago

Netflix doesn't appeal to people that haven't grown up with TV. Youtube is just a website for videos. You surf Youtube like you surf the web. On netflix, you can't even have multiple tabs open.

ArunRaja2• 2 years ago

YouTube has reached a few other milestones in recent months, including the 100 million users who pay for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium.

Purchase price parity based pricing of YouTube premium according to the country is awesome, in comparision to other services like Spotify, X. Thats one main reason for engaged buyout.

YouTube dominates TV streaming in US, per Nielsen's latest report

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