Not to be rude, but I'm struggling to believe half the comments in this thread are legit. Do you really mean to tell me that Lemmy, a platform notoriously populated almost exclusively by anti-corporate tech people that really value FOSS and privacy âhence the reason why all of us are here instead of Redditâ has this many users thinking it is a remotely acceptable idea to pay for a Premium service for one of the most invasive companies online?
I think most of us understand the many underhanded techniques used by Google to achieve an almost monopolistic control of some aspects of the internet, but when talking about YouTube, suddenly all the logic is reduced to "if you use a service, pay for it, or else let them show you ads"?? what????? Also, what's with comparing adblocking to stealing????
My own answer to the topic of this thread is that no, I won't be paying for YouTube Premium anytime soon, possibly ever. Google has betrayed my trust many times in the past, and on top of that I don't consider adverts as a legitimate source of income, so I will block any and all ads everywhere without paying an extra cent.
"But if you keep using their service, so you need to give them some form of revenue! Otherwise you just want free stuff!" I only keep using their service because Google has spent many years dumping on other platforms so that YouTube is âalmostâ the only platform that still exists where all the good creators are, so I will begrudgingly watch them on YouTube because there aren't any options. But I will resist Google's many insidious attempts to monetize me to the best of my ability while doing so.
That said, it's really dishonest to claim that people who block ads on YouTube just want free stuff and don't understand that services have a cost. Personally, I pay for Nebula because I do support the project and the creators involved. But YouTube won't see a cent from me, not with my consent at least.
Reasons not to buy premium:
- Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
- Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
- YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTubeâs copyright claim system wasnât so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. https://youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
- Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
- Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.
I had YouTube when it was YouTube red and I was a part of a family plan with my friend for a couple years. I split the family plan with a few people and ended up paying $3 a month. Eventually he moved across country and YouTube said that since we didn't have the same IP address that I could not be a part of the family plan so I ended up signing up for my own account. At some point I was trying to pay off my debt so I cancelled all my subscription services. YouTube premium included. I started watching YouTube and then I saw it. An ad. Something I hadn't seen in years. It was the most annoying thing ever. I couldn't believe that people put up with that. I was so annoyed by the ads that I looked at how to obtain YouTube and YouTube music for free without ads because I needed to save the money and the ads were so intrusive that this was what I was going to do and that is what I still do to this day.
Google really is the king of "you don't REALLY mean 'no'. Try again."
ITT: "it costs more than 5 bucks a month!" yeah, if you don't share with friends with family, it does. Also, music service included, deduct your spotify payment.
"You can just block ads" You can just miss the whole point.
"I rather support creators directly" I'm happy you do that. YouTube hosting is not free for Google/Alphabet, pay them too, or you'll have to teach each and every creator how to webhost + help em search a "real job" because selfhosted won't pay enough. Also, good fun browsing videos then.
IDK man, paying for YT Premium really isn't that bad. Assuming you already consume YouTube content, that is. And I'm pretty sure that's like 98% of first world population between 4 and 70.
Blocking ads on YouTube is no sustainable solution. Hosting Billions of Gigabytes of on-demand content is SUPER expensive. Like, it actually costs money. Other, wayyy smaller indie creator on-demand video platforms charge 5 bucks a month, but i'ts okay if they do it, because they aren't big bad Alphabet.
If that's your view, you don't have a problem with pricing, you have a problem with morals. And if you still do voluntarily consume YouTube content in private, with or without ads in any which way, you inarguably have a huge problem with your own morals.
YouTube premium is a good deal. It's priced very well compared with competition, it actually does pay indie creators and it let's you access to features that many users really do use.
BUTBUT THEY ARTIFICIALLY LIMIT FEATURES FOR NO REASON WITHOUT PREMIUM. I mean, it's subscription software and streaming, what else would they do? Every for profit subscription software provider and their mother does this. I develop hospital software and we literally do exactly this. If hospital A has feature x and hospital B also wants that, we don't just hand that out for free even when we just have to add it to their system in like 10 minutes... what did you expect? They already use our software (like you use YouTube), we don't have a huge incentive to just randomly add features if nobody paid for it. If we do, be happy about it, send me a gift card, if we or they don't, that's just business.
mpv + yt-dlp Enough said.
I would pay if it were more a more affordable price.
I havenât browsed apps in ages so idk if itâs still common, but I remember lots of apps having a lite version and a paid version. Lite version has ads and a sometimes couple less features. Full version ad-free and potential extra features.
I liked that. Let me decide if I enjoyed the app enough to pay for the better version.
Before Reddit went down in a fire, I paid premium even though I already had adblocker and no need for the premium features. And I would do the same for YouTube now, if it wasnât so high priced.
I am consciously learning now what I think I subconsciously already knew. If I value something enough, pay for it. And I DO value YouTubeâs videos. The current cost is just a bit uncomfortably steep for a monthly subscription fee.
FTFYIâve been slowly whittling down my subscriptions over time. At one point I think I had like 12-14 subs to various services, be it streaming, games, etc. But I was also up to my eyeballs in credit card debt and I had extremely poor personal finance skills and practices. When I met my wife, who was the exact opposite of me (extremely responsible with her finances, knew where every single one of her dollars was going), I knew I had to cut back significantly.
Right now I have the following 5 subs per month;
Apple 50gb data (1/month) YouTube Premium Family (22/month) Crunchyroll (8/month) Prime (15/month) ChatGPT (20/month)
Basically 66/month in hard earned dollars.
Prior to this I had the equivalent of an overblown cable package with all the bells and whistles, spending easily 350+ per month.
I donât judge anyone who decides to save their money, because weâre getting nickel and dimed to death. And by decentralizing the cost of subs to the point where it makes an Applebees menu look small, it makes it incredibly hard to figure out where your dollars are going, and hard to cancel as you need to contact a laundry list of independent service providers.
My wife and I use YouTube and Crunchyroll as our primary entertainment sources, so we can justify those expenses. But all other sources (Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, Hulu, etc) are so infrequent that we only sub for a single month if there is something we absolutely want to watch, and even then, we wait until the season is wrapping up so we can binge it in a week and then cancel the sub immediately.
Just my perspective on it, and if we didnât watch YouTube almost every night, weâd probably just figure out a way to hack the AppleTV to circumvent ads.
Permanently Deleted
yep, and there's more problems:
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we really gotta think what we do with our time. Spending in on youtube tends to have lower value nowadays.
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most stuff on youtube is crap. It's there to make you addicted, to make you watch ads, to make you miserable. Long story short: "influencers" are a drug on society comparable in effects to Crystal Meth. It gives you a short high, but leaves you exhausted.
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most "content creators" really just practice, how to manipulate many people into listening to them. There's a lot of makeup, but not much really to say. Best thing is to not listen to them.
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"content creators" are waaaaay to often just people trying to make money. They're not trying to tell you something of importance. They're jus trying to squeeze money out of you.
Problems on Youtube's side:
- it's a centralized system with platform lock-in. "Related videos" never takes you to other platforms. Search query is intransparent. They ask for waaaay too much money for what it costs them to maintain and develop their systems. I see nothing at all honorable at trying to squeeze money from users.
Youtube has grown into yet another one corpo-speak garbage companies. They used to be respectable, making interesting recommendations, with a clear mission to make knowledge accessible to everyone. Nowadays, they just try to make money.
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More ads? MORE ADS!!!
I just saw something similar on DuckDuckGo, and Firefox too - it's f-ing everywhere.:-(
Haha yea, shame on them for trying to transition to a business model that's actually a great value for the customer compared to other music and video playforms, no longer relies on datamining customers to maximize ad-effectiveness, and brings in more income for creators than ads ever did...
It's a totally stupid idea, YT should just eat the costs and be subsidized by Google search revenue forever.
Why can't we just keep taking from the platform while its expenses are covered by some shrinking group of shmucks who don't know about ad-blockers yet, drowning in commercials?
/S
I don't understand this outlook. Like, sure, you can use adblock. One person stealing a mars bar isn't gonna hurt Walmart... But if literally everyone just took their shopping cart home, never once paying, Walmart would just... Cease to exist.
What makes people think that math is any different for online services?
Last time I talked about YouTube here, people liked to throw their money to Google....
It seems to be easy to turn a free service into a subscription service... I should probably buy Alphabet shares to profit from that...
"They do want to pay for premium! They just don't understand what a great value it is! SHOW THEM THE AD AGAIN! SHOW THEM ON EVERY VIDEO SO THEY WILL UNDERSTAND!!! "
I started paying for YT Premium a few years ago when there was an election on, and one of the absolute worst minor parties that's run by a billionaire just threw money at YouTube advertising.
I haven't looked back. I watch YT content on my ShieldTV poetry much exclusively, so adblock doesn't work anyway :/
