Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

They've been brainwashed, they can't help themselves.

Those billion dollar companies will layoff everyone if they lose one sale! The humanity!
(And then the do stock buybacks and lay everyone off anyway; "that's just smart business")

It is more than morality problem though. It is about having a sustainable industry because money doesn't grow on trees.

Imagine you are a creator, you spent money and time to create something. Maybe music, or a software, or a book.

Now you have a choice to sell them for money, or don't.

If you don't pretty soon you'll need a different job to pay your bills. So you'll have to give up on creating more stuff and get another job.

If you decided to sell it but nobody buy them because piracy, pretty soon you have to do the same thing: give up on creating stuff and get a different job that pays you bill.

Or imagine what you created need a team of 20 people, without people paying you how can you hire 20 people to work for you to create that thing?

Customers paying encourages people creating more things because they are rewarded from their creations. It means more (and hopefully better) products for us to choose from, otherwise the industry will die without money coming in.


I have never seen any customers go bankrupt because they choose not to pirate games.

However I've seen dozens of game studios shut down in 1990s when piracy was a huge problem, because people just don't pay them for their products. Studios shutting down comes with people losing jobs etc.

Some customers can't afford games without piracy v.s people losing jobs, which one is a bigger problem in our society? The answer is obvious.

This pretty much only works if ALL the creators and farmers in the world get paid without needing to sell their own products to pay their bills. And even then I am not sure if they'll ended up getting lazy without money as an incentive to push them do their work.

I don't care about morality. I only care about what is sustainable and what is not.

If YouTube doesn't have ads, who pays content creators and streamers who makes your favorite YouTube videos? Someone has to pay them so they can make money for what they do. Either a sponsor (ad) or YouTube (ad or sub).

You already watch YouTube content for free what's wrong with spending a few sec on ads lol.

I see you wake up inspired today.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/964789/netflix-content-spend-worldwide/

Netflix's content cost was only 1.75b in 2012, 17b in 2024. They needs more revenue because they are investing in way more shows than before.

Same can be said for paid cable TV. I wasn't borned in that generation but I don't think running a TV channel needed 1000+ employees back then. You need a lot of quality content to run a TV channel these days which needs a lot of employees and revenue to support them.

At least the ad revenue generated goes to economy growth and created more jobs so whatever. I'd take a washroom break during commercials and forget about it.

A few seconds of ads is reasonable.

However, Youtube takes the approach often of giving you ads longer than the video you're watching, often in the form of ads that take several minutes.

You can skip them about half the time, if you're lucky.

On top of that, though, Youtube itself takes most of the ad revenue for themselves, and then dice up your videos to anyone who makes a solid enough copyright claim on any of the material you used in the video. Doesn't even have to be a legitimate entity with claim to the material. Just has to be legitimate enough to fool Youtube.

Youtubers make most of their money nowadays through Patreon and other crowdfunding sites. Adrev these days is like the cherry on top.

Thus, U Block Origin is always morally correct.

Something something, Killdozer. Something something I was always reasonable until I was given reason not to be.

The problem with YouTube though is that they pay peanuts in the first place. They're almost like an insurance company, looking for any reason to not pay you out, and then pay you almost nothing anyway. They'll change what they consider a "view" all the time without even telling the creators. If someone flags a video as anti-TOS, it's automatically demonetized and then it's up to the creator to prove (usually to another automated system) that it isn't.

That's why almost every channel now accepts money elsewhere. It's impossible to make money from YouTube anyway. They've escalated from skippable 5-second ads to unskippable minutes-long ads, allowing them to net $15,000,000,000 ($31Bn gross) in spite of ad-blocking software.

I'd be OK with ads if I knew the revenue was going towards the creators themselves. But unless they're stars, they aren't paid enough. YouTube is a scam that only gets away with it because they hold a total monopoly on the service.

A lot of content creators that I followed don't even run Patreon, may be cultural difference. I am not part of online content creation industry but I've heard most of their revenue came from donations and sponsors. The latter is pretty much the same as ad.

If you want to see what a large video platform is like without ads, check out Bilibili(Chinese YouTube pretty much). Bilibili doesn't have in stream ads so many creators who runs both YouTube and Bilibili said they make more on YouTube.

Accordinf to a creator They made roughly $1 per 1000 views on YouTube, versus 1 rmb per 1000 views on Bilibili. A lot of Bilibili content creators pretty much needed other sponsorship or donations if they want to full-time this job.

I do agree that YouTube took the bigger pie, which is how it goes when it comes to platforms. Platform/service providers always take the biggest pie, platform users/sellers take smaller ones, leeching from the biggest winner in the industry.

But small pie is better than no pie. Like I said, YouTube still paid 7 times better than Bilibili which uses no streaming ad, because YouTube just makes more money than Bili. You people's opinion is like "YouTube is the biggest winner so we'll fight them", that'll just gives small sellers on the platform no pie, that's it.

Same mentality goes to piracy. You people wanted to fight the biggest winner in the industry with piracy, that'll make smaller sellers on the platform get nothing in the end.

Define "paid peanuts" or "almost nothing".

Does 55% of ad revenue count as "almost nothing"? Why? What is the more reasonable revenue share percentage in the industry in your opinion?

Afaik YouTube pays roughly the same as Tiktok and Facebook etc, paid way more than Bili. 55% is certainly far from nothing.

You can argue that creators deserve 65% or 75% or whatever, or say "55% is not enough". But to say 55% industry standard is "almost nothing" is exaggerating.

Same can be said for "insurance company look for any reason to not pay and paid almost nothing" I have never encountered "insurance company not paying when they are supposed to" yet. In fact last month I had a car accident that had my insurance company paid 100% repair fee (which is like tens of thousands USD) np. I have no idea why you have to make blanket statements about insurance companies not paying. It wasn't the case for me.

To me "those companies pay nothing" is either blanket statement/exaggeration or our life experience is just too drastically different so we have very different pov on these things.



What matters is % shared. Of course it is big money if view numbers are large. But when we calculate reasonable rev share it is always discussed in percentage.

It probably is this, honestly.

I've never used Crunchyroll so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but from the outside it seems:
-Seasons may be missing because of licensing issues, which illegal businesses don't need to give a ***about
-Subs/dubs not being there even though they exist could be because of licensing issues, which illegal businesses don't give a ***about
The rest are probably just being a shitty business, IDK what to say. When you have access to all the content for free, you can spend more time/money on perfecting the player?


I did very few of these, and even if I did, that doesn't mean I can't stop doing those things because I matured and learned right from wrong. Also two wrongs != right, so IDK why you feel so justified because some teenager 30 years ago recorded a tape. That doesn't in any way mean that you're justified in downloading every movie, TV show, video game, or other software you want for free because you "don't like their video players" or whatever other BS excuse you come up with to pirate.

The player doesn't provide the content. Plex is a free server/client software that plays stuff you already have saved to local storage on the machine running the server to a client anywhere. There's no content involved in the creation of plex; it's just better because the people who wrote it cared to make it better. It has the option of transcoding video to the format your device expects, or streaming it as is to save server performance/source material integrity. It runs cleanly.

If streaming services had any open APIs, it's likely someone would've made better clients for them too, that still incorporated a valid paid and authorized session. But, they don't, so they are offering a worse experience than piracy. The sad thing is, the cost of making a solid client/server model is nothing compared to the cost of content creation. The companies voluntarily ignore any non-critical issues with their clients because they have a monopoly on their content and feel they don't need to provide a good client.

It seems to me the difference between an IP owner trying to sell access to their content and a video streaming service offering to let customers stream their own video is still the cause of the problem though.

The IP owner has to ensure that the customer can't actually access the video itself, which means they need to provide the content in a different manner than a service which has and grants the user full access to the actual files.

I know next-to-nothing about the technical parts of this, but it's definitely a fundamentally different experience to say "give me your files and I will host them and then play them back to you" vs "Give me money and I will temporarily allow you access to my files, but you can't touch them"

Even outside of having to pay for the content creation, the companies also have to pay lawyers to hunt down all the licenses required (for music involved in a movie, who owns which season, in which countries can it be shown, etc.) for every piece of content, they need to pay employees to handle customer support, handle billing, plus all the other nonsense that comes with being a streaming service. How's the Plex customer service phone line compare to the Disney+ one?

They're not even remotely comparable services, TBH.

nothing inherently wrong with plex, just like bittorrent. all in how it is used. incidentally plex was the last access i had to pirated movies, and that was years ago so no idea what else is out there now. was actually a guy in a ffxi ls that shared his server with me, no idea how he got the stuff though.

random tidbit: started with newsgroups getting music as a wee lad, got a nostalgia kick from all this.

IDK...if you're paying a monthly subscription to HBO Max but think their player is ***and you wanna watch pirated HBO content on your Plex server, IDGAF. That's not been my experience with pirates though, it typically goes like this:

The service they offer is ***so I pirate instead since it's better
OK why don't you buy the game/movie/show/service and THEN pirate?
Screw that, I'm not paying them, they suck

So...it just seems to me that people want free ***and don't want to pay the content creators and they're desperately trying to justify their piracy by coming up with 101 excuses why they shouldn't have to pay.

If you don't think a game is worth what the company is charging for it, don't buy it.
If you don't think a streaming service is worth what they're charging for it, don't pay for it.
If you don't think a movie is worth a $5 rental on Amazon, don't pay for it.

The consequence of that is you don't get to watch/play it. You can't have your cake and eat it too, without doing (IMO) immoral things.

Aside: if you love Final Fantasy (or any other series) but hate the company's practices so you always pirate all their games, guess what? The low sales figures are going to convince them that they shouldn't make any more FF games. I'm sure every individual pirate thinks their one sale won't make a difference but there are millions of people doing it so it has a real chilling effect en masse.

yes, it's the people not the service. i guess third parties could step up and offer ways to prevent their services from being used with pirated goods, but people will always find a way to abuse it. not gonna get any easier with people becoming accustomed to having on-demand everything via technology.

It is not even the problem of moral too, it is about sustainability. When I was in college people told me "if you don't want other people take your work away and not paying you, don't take other people's work away and not paying them." If nobody wants to pay the industry, then nobody gets paid period. Without money coming in we'll just have a dying industry with less jobs as a whole.

Admittedly I copied a few CD and downloaded a few ROM when I was a kid, when I didn't know about any of these. so I can't criticize anyone for doing the same from a moral standpoint.

But I haven't done such things since college. It is all from the belief that using someone's work without paying them will bring karma. (By hurting the industry's growth).

***, because:


You absolutely have a right to criticize people who do things you have done in the past.

This is like kids who tell their parents they can't judge their use of cigarettes/drugs because the parents did that when they were younger. A person making a shitty decision, learning from it, and becoming better absolutely does not make them ineligible to critique the behavior of those who are doing that thing, nor does it make it any better for the people still doing it.

If a former drug addict tells someone not to do drugs, it doesn't suddenly become bad advice or invalid criticism because they're hypocritical, and frankly I'd say someone who USED TO do something and then stopped doing it isn't even being a hypocrite at all in these scenarios, because they saw the error of their ways and stopped.

It's fine. I prefer to tell people the consequences of people not paying instead of being super focused on right or wrong. To me moral is far more subjective, if not far-fetched, than actual consequences of an action.

If creative professionals lose jobs or starve or quit is people's goal then go ahead and pirate.

A lot of people's reasons aren't even that though. It is mostly "umm but platform/big companies make too much, they are not supposed to." As if a portion of money in the entire industry never go into each creator's pocket. Which is totally not true.

If you people argue that YouTube or other platforms should pay more money to creators I would probably agree. When you start saying Youtube shouldn't have ads and people should pirate games that's when you leave all the creators involved no pie at all.

what an amazing Session Today in EQ2 leveled from 1 -10 grouped from level 2 to 10!! 5 hrs to get to 10 XD

Ehh, companies aren't your friend. They aren't trying to make sure each creator or user gets a fair shake/deal.

As an example, again, Youtube crushes small creators all the time with its algorithm but also by stifling their own partnership program. Certain modes of video making cannot bring in any revenue due to how they are structured, and they do not get in on that algorithm hustle.

But the partnership program was changed in 2018 or there abouts from needing something small, like 50 subscribers and 1000 hours watch time in a year to what it is now, 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours watch time in a year OR since the introduction of, "Shorts" 10 million views in 90 days.

And they add in the qualifier, "valid" meaning there is some automated system that is throwing out views based on some arbitrary criteria Youtube isn't transparent about.

Keep in mind, too, that within the last 5 years, Youtube made the move to monetize videos that the creators themselves cannot even monetize, because they don't qualify for the partnership program.

Take my Youtube channel, for instance. I put out scrub tier Let's Plays of RPGs and the Final Fantasy MMOs. I average around 380~440 hours of watch time per month or 4500~5000 hours watch time per year. My subscriber count is about 270, and it used to be lower, having risen by about 150 since I started my FFXI LP back in 2021.

I have the requisite watch time, even with a small subscriber count, but have to hit that subscriber count of 1000(and really above that because you can lose subs at any time(I have lost more subs than I currently have, over time)) to even qualify for partner. But then, even if I qualify for partner, I can't really monetize LPs, because they aren't transformative enough on average to qualify as fair use, as far as I am aware.

However, Youtube can and does monetize them. And they also get copyright claims all the time from Bitchboy McChucklefuck Shitstain Lofi Hip Hop remixer #412, so even if I could get monetization on them, it would be, at best, split.

So basically I get to watch Youtube make a few cents off my channel for the rest of time, always knowing that even if I do qualify for partner, some audio copyright hustler is going to get a cut of whatever I upload.

And as it stands, since I can't even make that pittance for myself, funding the hobby has to come solely from me, so I have to work a regular job and keep what I do as a mere hobby.

Even doing it with no delusions that I deserve any of that, it's just disheartening. If somehow we fell into bizarro world and my channel skyrocketed in popularity, and I could make partner tomorrow and monetize all 1300 videos on my channel, then I still wouldn't actually make that 55% you're talking about.

Nooo, et tu Vyre-kun?

I think the problem with this line of thinking is the assumption that making a unique protocol will actually stop people from pirating. It is trivial for anyone with any IT knowledge to rip anything that they can display on their monitor in essentially original quality. Using a unique stream doesn't stop piracy, it just makes things worse for the user. Case in point: Piracy still exists and is widespread, and anything offered via streaming service is available within 2 hours on torrent sites.

Expending energy into trying to lock it down, at the expense of customer experience, is stupid. Same argument applies tenfold to DRM around music. You can pirate it and use any player you want on any device you want, or you can buy it through a storefront and have to use that app everywhere and get hit with DLM errors on certain devices and have all sorts of hassle.

Pirates may be free but content isn't.

I think the more accurate term would be "platform service providers" and "content creators".

People keep using the term "companies" like they are some evil entities. This is not the accurate term. Many YouTube video content creators are also "companies", owners hire a team of employees to make the videos for profit. YouTube is run by a company so does many content creators. If you use companies you can't differentiate them.

you are correct that platform service providers are not always "friends" with content creators. Sometimes they are allies with mutual benefits, sometimes they are not. Platforms provides exposure for content creators, in return content creators bring more users and ads for the platform. But of course both parties will want more splits.


It's true that algorithms favor more competent content creators. But it is more of a market competition problem than YouTube's fault to be honest. A lot of companies doing video content creation have a budget. So they can hire professionals to do the market research ,graphic and sound design, video editing and traffic generation.

If you are an individual with a full time job doing this as a hobby, it is very unlikely that you can compete with other content creation companies with way more resources than you. Because they will win more traffic than people without resources.

But that doesn't invalid any of what I said above, those companies still paid employees with creative skills for their videos, therefore creating more jobs in the entire creative industry. So a portion of what YouTube made from ads still enters those people's pockets.


Well yeah, that's also money entering composer's pocket.

Overall I think it is just the problem of content creation market becoming too competitive. But the money still goes to people working and hired in this field so I'd say it is better than no money at all imo.

Piracy hurts no one. In fact there are several (Harvard Business School) studies (EU sponsored study showing no negative impact was withheld) showing piracy has no negative impact and may in fact help sales by essentially advertising the product to others that otherwise will not have heard of it were it not for piracy.

The vast majority of people will not pirate even if their friend told them about it and he got it "off the internet".

This myth of piracy is killing <industry here> is propaganda and has been going on since the 70s with "cassette recording is killing music". Oh what do you know, music is still here and a more profitable industry - for the license holders - than ever.

If you want to argue that games studios were closed down in the 90s, or ever, as a direct result of piracy I call BS and you will have to show some proof.

Try again.

I get what you're trying to say, but drugs have ruined countless lives. No ones life got turned upside down because they downloaded linkin_park_-_crawling.mp3 off kazaa.

buying something is still by far the easiest way for a consumer to show their support, and probably the best way to encourage more from the creator. its a conscious decision and you're literally invested in the product. to some people this isn't important, fine. i won't say your choice is immoral or illegal, but i will probably think poorly of you.