Or… do both. Buy premium because you are actually getting something for your money… a platform. And support ad blockers to stop the ads where the product is just a webpage.
Yeah. I’m actually okay with paying for a service I use daily. Google does a bunch of evil shit to drive its advertising business, but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.
We can pay with money or we can pay with ads and personal data.
What I would like to see is a law banning data collection for paid accounts. Because right now Google datarapes you even when you pay.
but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.
Youtube gained its market share and stopped any competitors arising by offering a free video platform. Now that there isn’t much hope for competition they have enshitified, plastering ads and demanding money. They endured massive loses for years just to kill competition. So boo fucking hoo when I continue using a monopolists products on the terms they originally offered.
A privacy law that only works for paying customers? I think we can do far better than that.
The economic reality is not everything can be free for everyone. Privacy is the price people pay to have “free” access to services.
But right now, even those who pay to skip ads or have additional features on a service are still being mined for data.
Wikipedia isn’t video hosting. The angles of nenual hosting cost for Wikipedia is around 3 million a year. YouTube probably costs nearly as much per hour to keep running.
500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s gonna be like 60 terrabytes every hour just in storage space increases.
If you were to try and host that on a cloud server like AWS the cost would increase millions of dollars every day. Google self-hosted, but it’s still unfathomingly expensive. There’s still questions over whether YouTube profitable even with all the ads and the subscriptions.
Selling personal data at all should just be banned. It says personal right in the name… Giving away free services with forced adds is exploitation in my opinion. The first step to solving the issue is to require everything have a paid option that gets rid of adds and doesn’t sell personal data for additional profit. The hard part with that is preventing them from just setting the price unreasonably high.
I’d imagine there’s a point where the money from subscriptions is greater than the money from advertising and data hoarding.
The “unreasonably high” prices should be self-solving in that context, because the company won’t make more money by selling ads for less than the price of a subscription.
In fact, in order to justify raising the prices too much they’d have to change more for the ads, which in turn would hurt the ad industry by reducing the ROI in marketing.
