when youtube first launched in 2005 there was no ads, so why all the ads now

When sites are launched there's often a large amount of investment which allows them to run ad-free for a period before they start actually having to make money. This helps draw viewers to the site but after a while the investors expect a return on their investment and so either people have to pay or watch ads.

Youtube does have a paid model too - if you subscribe you don't have to watch the ads.

Youtube had ads to both pay for the running costs of the site and to pay for its partnership scheme where content providers make money. The ads were doubled in the late 2010's to make up for those who use adblockers. Simply put, no adverts would mean no Youtube.

YouTube is a business, not a charity. Ads make them money. It's long overdue that they clamped down on ad blockers

So either you buy YouTube premium or deal with ads

Y'all ever had an unskipable ad that was longer than the video u wanted to watch?

Then the horror continues when you see ad 1 of 2.

I remember using YouTube when I was a little kid.
YouTube was made for people.

The costs to operate, store and the bandwidth cost to host and broadcast millions and millions of videos must be huge. I'm ok with the ads as long as it remains free... I don't like seeing the ads either but I see them as a necessary evil...

Any time i visit Youtube i think it's original creators must be laughing their socks off.
Use other peoples content to create (what is essentially) on online tv channel) and then Google come along and buy it for what was it ? 1.5 billion ??

And then they dissect it into bits they think are worth watching and charge folk to do so.......Hmm !
Also have to wonder how much longer Spotify can continue in it's current form before it too heads in the same direction.

Noi "highjacked" but Google bought it and now run it as commercial site whose income is from advertising.

I used to watch videos of interest to me on but its fetish for plastering all the videos with peurile advertisement breaks for nothing related to the topic or even useful, every minute, put me off.

I think you can pay for a subscription version free from the ads but I refuse to take out a direct debit with an American company I would not trust well enough not to keep taking my money even if I want to withdraw from it.

You know when its free, or add free you are the product. YouTube has to make money to make ends meet, and since most of us wants to be free loaders adds the way forward. Alternative they could sell all data Related to you to make a profit.

There wasn't that much of content there back then either.

Ads mean money, and you can use money for golf courses

they do it...because they can
and we will continue to watch

It is all about making the money and the ads are YouTube money!

i guess they forgot
or was being nice
or greed came along ಠ╭╮ಠ

Use ads blockers

Money

That sounds about right. It also seems to me there was a time you could watch the entire video without ads for other videos blocking the last moments. I think now maybe it doesn’t appear if you have a paid membership.

Can you really not imagine how much it costs to operate a site like YouTube? How do you imagine a site could keep providing this completely for free, particularly a site whose only purpose is to show videos, which have much, much higher resource requirements than a site that only displays text content?

Moreover, think of how much traffic YouTube gets. It's one of the most popular sites on the Internet. That is a HUGE strain on servers. By contrast SW doesn't even get a fraction of such traffic, and SW has ads too.

Twitter was not as heavily focused on hosting video content and yet just one of its data centers in Sacramento was costing it USD 100 million per year.

I honestly don't know what you were thinking, if you really believed that YouTube could just magically show you videos for free, forever, regardless of whether a Big Bad Corporate entity like Google bought YouTube or not. How did you think even a still-independent YouTube would fund all that it takes to show you those videos????????????????

Oh Jesus it isn't that bad.


The reason YouTube didn't have ads in 2005 was because it was a totally new concept and a model for advertising wasn't devised yet.


Don't like ads??? Then get ready for a steep subscription fee. Want it to be totally free? Well then welcome to becoming the product instead of consuming the product.