I’d pay for YouTube premium if t wasn’t more expensive than HBO. It’s ridiculous. Especially considering YouTube has no production costs. It’s all user-generated content.
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You can get Premium cheaper through other countries. It’s super simple. I only pay about 1€ / month and that feels about right to me unlike the 15€ or something I’d have to pay otherwise.
I’m guessing via a VPN, but which country do you connect to for the low prices?
Argentina or (in my case) Turkey seem to be popular options. You only need to use a VPN when setting up the first payment. Your credit card can be from your home country, no checks at all. After that it’ll just work and you won’t need a VPN anymore.
I’m from India and it’s about ₹120 ~ $1.4.
Which country did you go through? I assume you purchase on a VPN and then after it applies normally?
Yep! I left another reply with more details. I’m using Turkey and it’s super easy to set up.
Idk if the price is that ridiculous, the family plan costs me 16 bucks and I have YT premium for my household+. I also have YouTube music from that as well, I find it better than spotify for my use and I dont have to put up additional cost for music streaming elsewhere. There was also youtube premium content (Youtube Red?) if that is still a thing, I remember the Vsauce series being available because of this.
Youtube having no costs is a hot take if ive ever seen one, but I dont think I can say anything about this that hasnt been said.
Only a kid used to having mommy and daddy pay for everything would claim youtube has no costs. It is amazing how many people on social media think everything should be free. The real issue here it is the lack of competition.
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It should be a crime the way they make you subscribe to YouTube Music to get YouTube Premium.
A part of your YT Premium payment goes directly to creators that you watch based on your watch time. That is their content expenses just like HBO for making new shows.
Yeah they just need storage for millions of people and bandwidth for billions no biggie, thank you for your expertise
lol zero production costs because they’re not a production studio, genius, lmao. they do have a shit ton of overhead costs though - look into it instead of acting like it costs nothing to be the largest video hosted site on the planet.
Keep 720p only for users who upload crap and aren’t generating revenue and keep 4k for the channels who are uploading quality content. I’ve seen a podcast uploading hours of content in 4k. That is incredibly costly to stream to people.
I’m not going to pay for a service that is so wasteful with their income and then they want more.
ublock origin users:
Sponsorblock and Return YT Dislikes FTW as well.
Does anyone know if the dislikes extension is actually accurate or is it a sort of estimation
For new videos it’s an estimation with added dislike data of people using the extension, it’s rather accurate for most videos. For old videos before the dislike removal it uses old archived data plus new data added on top using the algorithm and data by the extension users
I’m confused, if ublock origin and sponsor block and all those are bypassing this, then who is it actually targeting?
They want to frame it so that internet ID is the solution. That way you as a person can be banned, not just the account or ip. Good luck buying and selling when everything becomes digital and you get banned.
The reason people are talking about this new change is that it will bypass the extensions.
I understand that, but look at who I am responding to - they seem to think that they’re immune from it.
Dear Youtube: Bring back the downvote count, allow me to disable shorts, allow me to disable your bullshit annoying ass startup music, then half the price and then we’ll talk about paying for your “service”.
Being able did disable content you don’t want aside from ads with a paid membership would be a huge boon.
Killing shorts would be fantastic, and they shouldn’t care if I’m not using a feature as long as I’m paying.
That got me, the “you can only upvote stuff” bull. I should also have the option to block channels and videos.
Why would they ever do that when they can make the website more intrusive and annoying to use?
Why would they ever do that for free? Either the advertiser pays for the infrastructure, or you do. IT isn’t free. Hence YouTube premium.
The problem is that they make it unreasonable when they get greedy and many people don’t tolerate their shit. This isn’t a “people won’t pay for the service” problem. We’ve all paid for streaming services. I personally won’t when it feeds into their shenanigans.
Well, it was exactly as described and also free like 8 years ago.
I am paying for YouTube Premium, and yet I still have to skip over US-exclusive sponsor sections which almost every Youtuber has nowadays…
I just got my first 30 second UNSKIPPABLE ad on my TV the other day…I closed youtube, as watching a 1min video is NOT worth 30 seconds of ads
Ah YouTube, the site where I watch a video that tells me in ten minutes what I could read in one. And only 5 advertisements!
Oops, six. I forgot the ad the creator slipped in between minute 1 and 2.
I used SponsorBlock for a while and it worked pretty well. It crowdsources where the ads are in a video and you can choose to skip them automatically.
How can you possibly forget the mid-video ad read that is actually a part of the video, thus unblockable?
So I’m sure u wont have a problem avoiding it therefore this doesnt concern you
fuck YouTube premium. why would I pay £19.99 a month when literally the only defining feature for me is no ads. all this will do is allow for more complex ad blockers to be made to bypass this
The creators also get a good chunk of the money from premium as far as I’ve been able to verify (by asking some I follow directly).
Why not pay creators directly through Patreon PayPal or equivalent instead of Google as well?
If no one pays for YouTube how can they keep supporting their insanely costly infrastructure? Hosting all those videos is not free. Far from it.
I’m perfectly fine paying for YouTube if that means I can continue to have access to awesome creators under a easy to use platform. It would be a very sad day if Google decided to shut down YouTube due to not being able to cover it’s costs.
The only other company that could potentially take over would be meta. Which would probably be even worse. At least YouTube provides an option to pay to disable ads.
I just wish they kept the ads at the start and end. There is something off putting about watching some documentary about some horrible event only to have it pause for some perky Grammarly ad in the middle of it.
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I would be fine if YouTube crumbled and was put into second place by a better platform or two.
Yes it’s the best option currently which is why they can do such ridiculous practices.
But once they have actual competition, I expect them to bend over backwards for my attention. Because if they don’t change the current trajectory, they’ll go the way of the other digital giants of the past.
Do not worry about having a viable platform in a future without YouTube. I am 100% sure there will be one.
This is an extremely unlikely hypothetical. Google is one of the most profitable companies in the world and there is no sign of that changing, even considering all the people who block ads right now. There is no reason to squeeze everyone like this.
There’s a lite version that’s only for the ads.
It’s cheaper than the full 19.99.
While that might still be too much, I just wanted to point out that if you don’t want ads, it doesn’t cost the full 20quid.
This was news to me so I went looking and couldn’t find it on youtube. Reading articles seems to indicate it is only available in certain regions and at certain times. I finally found the link to the page (https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite) and confirmed it’s not available for me in the US at least.
I pay for youtube premium because I watch a lot of youtube and it is easily worth the price. I paid $12 to see oppenhimer and that was only 3 hours. I watch way more than 3 hours of youtube every week.
and this is why you should use third party clients/patches like revanced
No. This is why if you like a service, you pay for it.
Does YouTube pay their content creators properly? No, they have to rely on external partnerships. Does YouTube help their creators solve issues with greedy companies making copyright claims on not their content? No, they close channels because of such claims and strip creators of income they deserve. Does YouTube keep their platform secure to protect its creators? No, hackers managed to get access to the biggest channels on the platform despite YouTube being aware of the issues for months. Does YouTube at least use their knowledge from spying its users to stop bots posting comments? No, bot comments are all over the place. And I could go like that for ages…
The fact is YouTube is a shitty platform and people use it because they have to not because they want to. Because they have a fucking monopoly! People are paying thousands of dollars directly to content creators through platforms like Patreon, because they like the content. But people are not willing to support financially the platform that openly don’t give a fuck about their users and creators (which are the only reason this platform exists) and care only about their shareholders. Because why would they pay to make the rich richer while content creators struggle to earn money for rent!
Underrated comment
Google has been shamelessly destroying all their projects the last few years in a desperate fit to make money. They’ve weakened ad blockers on chrome, they’ve altered the search algorithm so random BS is mixed in with regular to drive towards sponsored content, their starting to setup browser level DRM and creating un skipable ads. None of this is for anything more than greed and desperation. They no longer see anything other than money as the end goal and don’t care if their selling a shittier product at a higher price than no one was ever even willing to pay for. F*ck google.
YT Premium costs less than $4 for me and I also get YT Music. It sure beats paying $4 for only a music service.
Until its no longer profitable like the hundreds of other BS google tricks you into supporting only to ditch later https://killedbygoogle.com/ . Also in what world are you paying under $4 the standard package today is $13.99
I’ll stop paying when it stops working. Also regional pricing. I pay around $3.9 for Premium + Music.
No. This is why if a service loses sight of its core value proposition, it dies.
If youtube is actually successful in killing adblocking on their service - which I suppose a server-side timer could actually do - then they will only succeed in killing their relevance, just like so many social media seem to be doing right now.
I pay for services like a debrid and VPN, because they provide me with the services I need. For very few dollars a month I can get 4K streaming from their servers 24/7. That is all hosting should cost. If the fediverse version of youtube, peertube, became mainstream then collectively people should have absolutely no problem maintaining those costs from the users’ side.
Once that happens and mainstream video streaming is part of the fediverse, I think the network effect that governs social media might snowball until eventualy centralised social media is a thing of the past.
Do not pay for youtube, whatever you do. Let them die.
You think too much of the average person. This sort of thing might affect you, but it won’t affect your friend’s 8 year old brother or his parents who just want a convenient way to watch pewdiepie
Social networks don’t succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won’t all leave right away.
If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren’t up to their eyeballs in ads.
We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.
This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it’s… well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let’s just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn’t quite hit that tipping point yet I don’t think.
With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They’re already selling views which could really sink them in the end.
Speaking of suicide, Tumblr found out that most of its content was porn and most people were coming for it when it banned it
Perhaps, but you can only crush so much blood from a stone and the masses are slowly becoming destitute.
“Soon we will have a new web. One far younger and far more powerful.”
You do realize the average person watches YouTube on their TV or their phone, with ads? You are not the target audience for Google.
So I fully expect YouTube to kill adblocking at some point and they might lose what? 10% of users? Of which 5% either come back to watch ads or pay the subscription because all the content is on there?
I’m 100% pro adblocker, the internet is a mess without, but it’s stupid to think YouTube wouldn’t cut you off the moment you don’t provide any benefit to their service (For example despite adblocking you might give Superchat money to streamers, or join Streamer memberships).
Audience is only part of the equation, arguably not the largest part. How many content creators use adblock? The big ones already know how completely meaningless ad revenue is because youtube doesn’t pay them enough and they are already aware of how easy it is to block ads. Also they’re more likely to be using youtube on a desktop because they use one to create, and they also are more aware of the alternatives like revanced. A lot of big creators have spoken out over the years in favour of adblocking.
If youtube makes it impossible for creators to use their own platform they’ll leave in droves, and they will have the voice to encourage their audience to follow. Youtube isn’t the main voice on their own site, the creators are.
Another thing this will impact is the ability for creators to collaborate, since they would have to watch others’ ads in order to see their videos.
Once that happens, the audience will naturally follow. That’s how social media sites have failed in the past. They’ve pissed off the power users to the point they finally left, then the content declined, then users followed.
Youtube is making the same mistake so many big companies do - of mistreating the people who actually make the product they’re selling. It’s a fundamental contradiction that only leads to decline in the end, it’s just a matter of when. This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, if this isn’t it, then something down the line will be.
Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…
Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.
The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.
Youtube constantly screws over and underpays the people who create all of the content that makes their site possible whilst also demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide. That could never backfire.
demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer
Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.
whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide
There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.
To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.
lol this post is nothing more than a tantrum from a leech of a service they’re too cheap to pay for and scrabbling for reasons other than said cheap-ness
you may get likes on the internet for this wholly selfish take but we all know it’s nothing more than that.
It’s just devastating when you invent unwholesome motivations for my words to attack as an alternative to attacking the ideas themselves.
My ego is in tatters.
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Because somehow paying $4 a month is unreasonable for a service that I use for 2-4 hours every day.
Right.
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I’m a premium user so I’m not affected (for now)
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And that’s how things die due to no revenue. Running YouTube is expensive af and the more people who used things like revanced, the worse things will become for everyone else.
It’s funny how you put all the blame on the users and none on the people that run the site. They fail to pay creators properly, fail to protect them from copyright claim abuse, and all the while they expect those creators to keep making content to keep their site relevant. It’s going to come crashing down eventually.
Also, in matters of taste the customer is always right. If people are so fed up with ads that they adblock en masse and/or leave, then youtube are the only ones to blame.
My point in my comment was about how YouTube is expensive to run and that the more people who refuse to generate revenue for it (I feel dirty writing that and strongly disagree with it, by my feelings have no effect on reality,) then it has to make shittier and shittier decisions to generate that revenue.
I 100% agree that YouTube should pay their creators more and protect them from bullshit copyright, but that would just compound the issue of the cost of running the site.
What is this entitled attitude everyone has where they believe they should be handed things for free? It completely unsustainable and childish. Corporations do not do things for free, they can’t. They exist solely to generate revenue and if they can’t, they die. I generally hate corporations on principle, but again my feelings don’t change reality.
Nobody is saying they should be handed things for free, we are saying that youtube is doing a bad job and shouldn’t be enabled.
Piracy is not a moral problem, it is a service problem. They are making their service worse with their decisions, and if it’s not sustainable long term then it will die, which I believe is inevitable at this point.
Again, this isn’t about individual behaviour, it is about mass behaviour. None of us can control that. If youtube wants to succeed, they have to navigate the reality that adblocking will happen on their service, and I don’t believe they can do that. It’s not that it would be physically impossible, they just lack the capacity to find a solution because of how they are structured. The problem is that they will not accept a lower bottom line, they have to keep increasing revenue so they are squeezing people, and eventually they will go too far. Once they get just a little bit too close to the sun they will start their death spiral and then they’re done.
Federated networks prove that we don’t need some central overlord to run our networks for us, and once there is a way to own our own video sharing network I would have absolutely no problem giving some money to support it. I’m not going to give money to a big corporation to enable them to keep squeezing us. They don’t make a good service, they make a shitty, awful service that we have to fight them in order to use properly. The only substantial thing they’re doing is server hosting, and we don’t need them to do that. The only real barrier is critical mass of users and creators, and eventually they’re going to push enough people away that that happens.
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Maybe they shouldn’t operate in the first place if they cannot think of a sustainable business model without f*ing their users up.
Basically everything within capitalism fucks over someone that’s just business as usual 8n out society. Usually to a much worse degree, think the children who likely made your clothes for next to nothing. I’m all for tearing down the system, but there’s not a whole lot as an individual that I can do.
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You’ll care as more and more people have to quit YouTube or make progressively more shit content to appease the algorithm. It also makes it harder and harder for new people to start on YouTube.
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I support the sentiment, but today everything is a service that wants your money, this resource is finite. And when it comes to YouTube, it’s not even about whether you like it or not: YouTube is a monopolist.
I’ll gladly pay for a service that doesn’t thrive on pushing propaganda down people’s throats to maximize watch time and that isn’t actively trying to make my user experience miserable by removing downvotes, forcing shorts and so on.
I’d rather pay someone to kick me in the nuts. Sounds like a better deal tbh.
I use SponsorBlock.
And you realize that YouTube will do everything in their hands to stop you from using these apps in the future right? That was kinda the point of the article.
Making people pay (with their time and attention) while they are already paying for subscription will not encourage more people to buy premium.
The worst part of YouTube ads is super long ads (sometimes even multiple hours long). It has happened to me multiple times. And coincidentally it always happens when I’m feeling sleepy.
Here is a screenshot.
Seems like a way to check for attention. Not clicking the skip indicates you’re not actually watching. The benefit to them is probably more ad revenue.
In other words, taking advantage of their own users!
And advertising customers. Great company all around.
Man, all these companies just pushing me away from using their services. I don’t need it.
Next they will detect if you mute the tab and go to another one to wait the ad out.
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[Raises hand] I’ve been paying for a family music plan for years now. YouTube Premium was always just bundled with it. If they ever stopped the bundling I’d hop back over to Spotify.
I pay 6$ using a student discount for YouTube premium because I like watching YouTube on my android TV and I can’t use ad blocker there. In fact I’ve been using it for so long that it actually shocks me when I see someone open YouTube and an ad pops up it feels weird
I like watching YouTube on my android TV and I can’t use ad blocker there.
Yes you can.
https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
it actually shocks me when I see someone open YouTube and an ad pops up it feels weird
Same but I haven’t been giving Google money so they can further ruin the internet.
Omg thank you I’m gonna try this!!
This is one of these problem with multiple unsolvable issues:
- people are used to ad block and won’t change
- the price is too high for part of the population (-> ad block for part of them)
- $1/month, $10/year would attract new paid account but not that much
- people can’t afford/don’t want a subscription everything
- users don’t see any value in it
- a fraction of the paid will go ad block with the price increase
- people will circumvent the ad block block
- capitalism
- …
They already solved it. Premium was way cheaper before they started bundling it with Music which is just utter garbage. I’d pay like 5€ / month for YouTube Premium without Music IF the experience was actually good and they didn’t shove shorts in my face everywhere like that non-dismissable panel that breaks up my subscriptions now.
I think a lot of people would subscribe if they had a lower price tier where they have a reduced amount of ads (like an ad every few videos). Without ad blockers, youtube is unwatchable, you get more ads than you would on TV (where in many places ads are legally capped at around 15mins/hour).
I think they are likely to pull a Netflix and create a lower premium tier with ad support and missing other premium features like picture in picture
clicks on link
It looks like you are using an ad-blocker
NewPipe, and YouTube Revanced are great apps you can use on mobile. They aren’t attached to any Google account so you can just use them and skip adds all day without getting any account theoretically banned.
For those who continue to use YouTube and adblockers on PC, simply just make a new throwaway Google account. In the case that they aren’t actually bluffing (they are) then at least your temp account will be banned.
for PC there is also Freetube and Invidious
Thank you! I’ll keep these in mind
Revanced is great because it lets you watch without ads WITH Google account. I know that if you’re focused on privacy the last thing you want is Google account but for me the benefit of YouTube algorithm suggesting me exactly what I want to watch is enough the reason to not use any platform/app that doesn’t support login. Of course they need to try more before I’ll pay for premium. For now if that dialog ever shows up to me I’m setting my UA to Android and see if that happens on mobile YouTube as well. Since they don’t care too much about that version of YouTube it’s possible that dialog will not show up. If that’s blocked too I’m installing waydroid and revanced on it. Also I hope that development of VueTube will speed up because currently it’s so slow I’m not sure if it will ever be finished and it would be great to have alternatives to revanced.
