I don't mind paying for YouTube Premium.
I don't mind paying for YouTube Premium.
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.
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.
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 also upvoted for an absurdly unpopular opinion, this is a shocking take.
It's like paying for Exxon Mobil "premium" oil out of respect that they were one of the first oil companies.
I wouldn't mind paying for YouTube Premium, if:
- They did not track or keep selling your info for money after buying it
- It wasn't so expensive
But both of them seem like things that can never become true (especially the first point), so yes. I am hoping for PeerTube to get attention when YouTube starts breaking down.
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.
Unpopular opinion, I agree.
I'm with you in this one (so expecting downvotes). I've got 5 people in my house that all watch a shit load of YouTube. Originally I used Vanced on my phone, but realized that my kids were watching YouTube on the TVs and on their personal devices. At one point, I went into my daughter's room at night and saw there were ads playing on her device where she had fallen asleep watching YouTube.
So once Vanced shut down (I know there is ReVanced and other alternatives) I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium. The reality is, being a tech nerd is fine for me, but it wasn't easy to scale up and protect my entire family from ads on all their devices. So I figured that a few bucks a month was worth it for me.
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 bought premium years ago as part of Google Music family (pre yt-music) and stuck with it, it was affordable. I am more than capable of blocking the ads over the years. Other members of my family want to use YT without ads on a myriad of devices. When the price got hiked at the start of the year I was really annoyed, and probably would have dropped the service if it were just me. However my family made it pretty clear that they did not want to jump through the hoops of blocking the ads.
I'm the same way. I bought Premium when I started sleeping to Thunderstorm Sounds videos and didn't want ads interrupting my sleep. And I found that it's nice to watch my ASMR videos and videogame reviews without struggling with ad blockers, etc. Overall I don't mind spending a couple bucks a month for it. I get that server costs are expensive and the platform needs a way to make money so it is what it is.
My lemmy instance doesn't support downvotes and I only see upvotes, so feel free to downvote me to oblivion - I'll have no idea.
I don't mind paying and I do pay but I do mind this disgusting bootlicking, OP...
You need to think big picture where this is going. Big tech has no limits or regard for us.
This is an adverserial situation and you are trying to be a good faith actor.
Never forget who you are dealing with here.
With that said... This is likely unpopular so got to upvote haha
I pay for it as well. I started when it was Youtube Red because I absolutely fucking despise ads. I learned later on that YouTubers get paid a lot more per Premium view, and that's helped to keep me paying for it. I tend to watch channels that don't do sponsorships, and many of those channels have videos that are quite expensive to produce (Project Farm and Torque Test Channel stand out in that regard). I like these people and what they do, so I want to help them.
It's expensive (I have the family version so my partner and her dad can be covered as well), but I have the means to afford it.
If YouTubers stop getting paid more for my views, I'll probably drop it and switch to NewPipe (which I already use on occasion for videos that have intrusive sponsorships).
Nice try Diddy.
I don't mind ads.
But I do mind having targeted ads. To be fair, most of what Google presumes about me is wrong, but from the ad patterns it's pretty obvious what's going on. Our data shouldn't be hoarded and we shouldn't be herded like cattle from which they can extract money through ad placement.
I'm fine with subscription services, and ads, but the steps they're taking to maximize their revenue is gross and I don't just mean youtube. This is just the stuff we know about for sure.
I also post for it and I also don't mind. I watch a lot of YouTube (nearly 2000 hours so far), I listen to a lot of YouTube music (nearly 4000 hours) and I find it to be a reasonable price.
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.
Good post, I vehemently disagree in every way
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.
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 also don't mind using ReVanced and getting the same features as YouTube Premium for free.
Upvoted for a truly unpopular opinion.
How voting works: vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it’s something that’s widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
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 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.
I think this is unpopular enough. Though I will always advocate people donate directly, buy merch, or figure out some other way to support the creators. Typically buying a single t-shirt will completely offset your personal adblocking of a creator pretty much for life.
I dislike the pricing structure. Their family plan indicates the true cost of YouTube premium. To me it indicates that for a single person plan, the price should be about 1/3-1/2 of its current price.
If it really came down to it and they continue the current pricing structure, they I'd begrudgingly pay. And don't get me wrong, I'd pay for it now if the price for an individual plan was more reasonable.
inescapable
Hahahaha, yeah, that’s probably because most people still don’t want pay for it, once your opinion gets popular, then it won’t be worth it.
I'm on the family plan, and it's certainly expensive compared to other streaming services. But I use YouTube both personally and professionally. I teach, and whenever I need to show a video, having a work account with premium is invaluable since I can't install ad blockers on campus. My wife and kids all have their own accounts under the family plan as well. We all use YouTube music as well.
Google pisses me off and I've been getting out from under their heel for a while, but YouTube premium is something that I genuinely find value in paying for. At the very least, I want to financially support the creators that I watch and this is the best way to do so while avoiding advertisements.
I watch a lot of YouTube streaming to my Roku and I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting premium. I spend far more time on it than the other streaming services.
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.
Honestly I'm with you. It recently told me I've watched > 1,620 hours of YouTube since switching to Premium a few years ago.
There's a lot to hate about Google and price gouging, but honestly this is a service that's well worth the convenience for me.
I would be fine with it if it were a privacy-respecting platform that was subscription-based first and foremost, then had an ad-supported tier as well, but unfortunately it's owned by Google so they're collecting untold troves of data even from paid subscribers and that's the actual product for them.
I paid for Google Music back before it was YouTube Music. It came with YouTube Red (I think they still called it that at the time). I'm still paying for premium because no ads is important to me. Also, according to now ancient videos by Hank Green, YouTube Red made a considerable, good impact for the content creators and I don't care that other video platforms are cheaper because I'm not watching random videos, I'm following particular channels. I can almost never get the same content somewhere else. I'm locked in because of that. If my channels put their content on other sites, I'd drop YouTube in a heartbeat. If every video went on patreon and not just the exclusive videos, I'd drop YouTube in a heartbeat. I believe in the patreon model and am not a member of a single YouTube channel.
I wish YouTube understood that they are not the content I watch, they are between me and the content I watch. Maybe then the relationship could be more respectful than ads on the pause screen.
If the enshittification works, it will be an ad service offering videos on the side (if you pay up).
I also use YouTube music. I think their algorithm is good
Just use Brave browser and you will not see any ads, anywhere, on any website... for free.