I get that it started for free with less intrusive ads, but YouTube has had a huge impact on the way we all share and consume information. Understanding how much money it takes to run a service with the technology needed to provide high definition videos on a site that is up 99.9999999% of the time, I have no issue paying for a service that has changed my life in many positive ways. Now I do hate price gouging like everyone else, but it’s inescapable from gas & groceries to all streaming platforms.
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There was a time where I would have been happy to pay for it too, back when the ads were less intrusive. However, the number of ads increased drastically when they started pushing premium, and it’s only gotten worse - not to mention the fact that, even though they make more money, the content creators (employees) are paid less per view. I don’t mind paying for a product or service. I do mind paying to make an engineered inconvenience from a mega corporation that has a de facto monopoly go away.
I miss Metacafe and Big-Boys/Break.com. You know, from the days when YouTube actually had competition.
I was under the impression premium views result in more revenue for the creators you watch compared to views with ads.
They do but it’s not that much more significant than overall ad revenue. Having a Patreon or a merch store will probably outperform 10 fold anything that YouTube pays from both ads and premium views combined.
They do!
I have a family plan but it’s not for any reason other than my children use it and I can afford to pay to reduce their ad exposure. We live in a swing state so they were previously bombarded with political advertising.
The way I see it, I swapped the Netflix account for a YouTube account because that’s what the kids favor now. If they move on, I will drop it immediately. If the price goes up then I am very likely to drop it. It’s already overpriced for what it is.
I subscribe too. I’m an expat in a SE asian country where the subscription cost is a bit lower so, I do have that going for me. (~$5.50)
My consumption of YouTube is primarily through the official app on my Xbox. I also have a Pihole but it doesn’t work for YouTube.
This subscription lets me watch the creators I want to see, on the device I want, with the least amount of friction.
The problem is that the paid premium is NOT better than free with extensions. Piracy is a service problem, and the paid service is NOT better than the “pirated” one. Even if premium was completely free, if it didn’t allow extensions I would still use the ad version with extensions.
Revanced android apps also exist, and I won’t use them with premium accounts (no point) and they are the only way of having sponsorblock, return youtube dislike, manual HDR and many other small but very useful features.
I would gladly pay for the content if and when the youtube official apps and website had features similar to those extensions.
I already paid for a lifetime of free Google services with all the data they stole from me before I had any sense that something so massive and invasive could even exist.
Thanks to ReVanced and Freetube and some others, Google can effortlessly pay out their equitable share.
Good post, I vehemently disagree in every way
I didn’t really mind until the recent pay rise. It was ok value (for me) before. Now it’s getting expensive. Not sure if I’ll cancel or not yet.
I cancelled Disney+ after the last increase, if YouTube premium does the same, I’ll have to reconsider, I can’t justify paying over $20 to only get rid of ads.
I also don’t mind using ReVanced and getting the same features as YouTube Premium for free.
It made economic sense for us to get the YouTube Premium family plan. When we dropped several streaming services and also Spotify, it was a bit more expensive than Spotify’s family plan, but YouTube without the ads was worth it, especially considering they have a huge library of movies that they are offering in high quality for streaming.
Honestly, I’m more satisfied than when I was paying for Spotify Family and Disney+ and Paramount+. And if I must see the eight billionth Marvel show of the year, which I generally don’t, there’s always the high seas.
I agree with this, though part of it is that I am still grandfathered into the $7.99/mo original Google Music launch promo price. It is worth it to me not to see ads to continue paying for it. The current monthly premium at $14/mo for new users is insanity.
You like it now, just wait though. In another year “YouTube Premium” will probably split further into basic and premium plus tiers. Basic will cost exactly the same except you now have to watch “limited” ads again, while Premium Plus will cost twice as much and be basically the same thing you’re paying for now plus some new bullshit feature no one cares about.
This is what YouTube has become. It’s what all the corporate services that like to make you think they care about you do. As long as we all keep shelling out more money for less services they will all just keep pumping us for every dollar they can possibly get.
It’s an unethical strategy called a “loss leader” where these companies offer a service they actually lose money on for a limited time until they get you to the point that you take it for granted. Then they make that same price point terrible and jack up the price for the good service you’ve come to expect.
Same with all of them. Remember when Netflix was $8 and you got all of the features? People said back then that they didn’t mind paying for it either.
Same for Disney, it was $7 a month in 2019, it is now $16. That is an increase of over 40% in 5 years.
Technically that’s a 228% increase increase from what you were paying 5 years ago. Now, inflation is a thing… but I don’t think it’s up 228%.
No. That’s an increase of 129% to 229% of the original price.
You are right that you always use the original price as the base, but if it were still $7 that would be a 0% increase, not 100% as by your math.
Ah yeah you’re right
I miss that :( my partner and I always talk about how that was such a nice time. I gave them my $8 every month and had access to all the shows I wanted to watch and it was great. I completely gave up on piracy, and I was more likely to rent/buy the occasional movie that wasn’t on Netflix.
Same, streaming was the cure to piracy, but they got greedy and now piracy is the cure to streaming overload.
Funny how we want one monopoly for streaming but any other kind of monopoly is bad.
Ikr? Nowadays, I’m quite fond of the idea of forcing media companies to license to all comers if they license to one company. Movie theaters don’t have exclusive rights to movies, so why do we let streaming services pull this shit? Having the same content across all platforms would mean that streaming services would have to compete on price and service quality.
Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve (Steam) had this to say
“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”
So many people are willing to pay if it’s a good experience. But if the experience sucks, people with money will find a better service, which in many cases ends up being free. If I wanted to have ads dumped everywhere while I watch videos, there are services that offer that “experience” for free.
Well as a counterpoint, that’s when you bounce. I had HBO MAX for years but their latest price hike was unjustifiable for me. I suppose I should prob shitcan Netflix too. And of course Amazon Prime went the exact direction you’re talking about.
That’s always an option sure, but since EVERY company does this now it means we all just stop watching TV basically. Maybe that would be the best thing after all though lol
Similarly to the “just move” when people talk about home prices, this argument holds up as long as there are alternatives.
I think now is the reference window op is describing
Would rather pay the creators directly instead of it going 80% to anyone in ceo position and maybe 5% to the creator.
At least with ads, 60% goes to the creator and 40% to YouTube. I had a video go viral because it was newsworthy, and a CDN (Storyful) offered to help with licensing and marketing, and their price was 40% of my 60%. I wasn’t really expecting the video to go viral, so decided “why not.”
I only got 36% of the money from the YouTube views, but Storyful delivered and got it on the news and a few documentaries and I ended up making thousands of dollars for a few minutes of video. 10/10 would do again, but then YouTube changed the rules and now you need like 1,000 subscribers for your video to even qualify for monetization :(
Interesting !
Where are you getting this 5% number?
I enjoy making Google hurt by blocking the ad revenue.
I would be ecstatic if they failed as a company.
Google is evil, supporting them financially is unethical.
I enjoy making Google hurt by blocking the ad revenue
I’m sure they’re in agony…
They would not spend so much effort blocking adblockers if it wasn’t hurting them to some degree.
It is about more. There must always be more. They aren’t hurting but they would like MORE.
Upvoted for a truly unpopular (and valid) opinion.
In a vacuum, I agree with you. Had it started off as a paid service, or if the paid version was substantially better on its own merits, I’d consider it. But in order for them to incentivize people to pay for Premium, they intentionally made the “standard” experience worse. I just cannot bring myself to reward that behavior/business practice.
I’ve been a youtube premium subscriber since like 2017, long before the enshitification went terminal. I have a family plan so my kids can watch videos on the TV or on the tablet for the older kid without being bombarded by ads. I get not wanting to encourage youtube’s shitty behavior these days, but I’ve always gotten plenty of value out of my youtube subscription, more than I ever did out of hulu or even netflix or paramount most months.
Yeah, It would not be uncommon to see my largest use of data by far on my phone would be YouTube.
Hard agree. I’d love to have decided to most due to the convenience and quality of the service but I decided to pay because the frequency and number of ads wa ramping up. These fuckers know exactly the point that which I broke and they’re going to use that information to break others.
I got grandfathered in when they shutdown Google Play Music and it made Youtube so much more enjoyable of an experience. If I were to sign up today, I wouldn’t pay for Youtube Premium, but I’ve been spoiled and don’t want to go back to how shitty Youtube has become.
I’m not rewarding them for bad behavior, I am paying them for running a sophisticated system that delivers any and all information in a digestible format to my fingertips. I do agree their free service has gone to shit, but it should have been a paid service from the start. I’ve built my own personal cloud and it is prohibitively expensive for me to have it stream HD video. Definitely more than a YT Premium subscription.
Don’t conflate services with goods. If your grocery bag boy showed up at your door when you were 3/4 through your loaf of bread and said you owed an extra dollar before you ate the rest you’d tell em to get the fuck off your property before you called the police.
If you want to compare them as the same, you’ve got to use every example.
No I would ask my partner if they did a doordash order and ask how did they do it for so cheap…
I only wish they’d kept the “premium light” option (which I paid for until they canceled it). I don’t need another music service or locked screen playback, so I wish I could still pay a bit less for not using those.
