Does…. Any one, actually, you know, subscribe for YouTube?
It really boils down to a few reasons:
- I don’t like ads, and I prefer not to see them
- Running a platform like YouTube is not cheap, and I understand that Google needs money to keep things running.
- The revenue of Premium is split between YouTube and the creators, much like ad revenue is. So it also supports the channels that I follow.
For me its solely because of a ad free experience on my TV, since its the primary device I’m using it on. And i got it relatively cheap from turkey so it’s not that big of a deal. I might reevaluate if the price increases though.
It’s not bad if you max out the family subscription (5 members) and use YouTube music.
Still, I’m a hypocrite because I absolutely hate their habit of hiding features behind the paywall, and making ads more obnoxious to irritate users into paying for premium.
Because I use YouTube more than every streaming app and my Plex server combined. And the creators I watch get money and I don’t have to see ads
I got premium because I have ADHS and need to listen to something when I want to sleep or do chores. With premium I can turn my phone screen off of let it run in the background.
I use it so much for work that I just can’t rely on a typical ad blocker and I can’t justify not paying for it at this point.
I would dump Netflix before cancelling YT Premium. Everything on Netflix I can stream for free from pirate sites to my TV. YouTube actually has tons of informational and educational content and a premium subscription lets me support it without the ads. I probably watch YouTube twice as much as all my other vid subs combined.
I’m technically still sharing a Netflix account with my parents, though I rarely use it at this point.
Whenever I want to watch a movie, and I check Netflix, they don’t have it. (It’s worth pointing out that I’m not in the US)
In contrast, YouTube Premium gives me pretty much exactly what I seek from it. Videos from channels that I follow, but now without ads.
Ditto. It is my most used subscription.
I watch more YouTube than cable (never) or Netflix (maybe one binge a month).
I use it for music in the car and at work.
I play audio from some sciencey channels while I try to goto sleep.
I’ll probably keep paying. I do get value out of it.
you hopefully mean you had a prem subscription, the more people quit because of price policy the better it will be for everyone
Oh yeah, because historically, whenever a large internet platform starts losing money, things definitely get better for everyone. Nevermind Reddit and Twitter and Meta and Netflix and Hulu having to nickle and dime users for basic functionality of their platforms, things are definitely better. I love all those raised prices and lowered quality of service.
Right.
I don’t think the prices in Europe are increasing (yet). My plan is still 12 euros / month.
And regardless… It’s been 12 euros since it was launched in Europe in 2018.
If the price were to go up to 14 euros in 2023, that would pretty much be in line with inflation.
out of all the subscriptions, it’s probably the best one. you can get youtube for free but either you’re gonna get ads or you’ll block them, and the creators you like will start seeking other forms of revenue that are just as/more annoying, or just quit.
yt-premium makes youtube an actually nice experience and keeps money flowing to creators. There’s a limit to how much that nice-experience is worth but it’s better than paying for netflix, and a bunch of netflix execs get paid, and the creators don’t. then the show you like is cancelled and removed anyway.
I fee like premium is really the only way to make youtube more sustainable for content creators and the platform alike. However, youtube has currently deemed that demonetized videos should lose all youtube premium revenue. That’s incredibly stupid.
Imagine if premium revenue went to creators you watched, regardless of monetization status. Premium subscribers would be highly sought after for content creators, since it’s a more reliable revenue source that gives them the freedom to make what they want. It’s good for YouTube/google too because thats less reliance on advertisers.
It could use some adjustments, maybe taking some inspiration from patreon.
I fee like premium is really the only way to make youtube more sustainable for content creators and the platform alike.
I really don’t see how, unfortunately. You give Youtube the money and they decide what to do with it and they won’t do it in a remotely fair way because they want profits for themselves. There are many better ways to support content creators directly than over whatever Youtube decides to pay them at any given moment. Most content creators know that of course and are already linking to other services that you can use to help them out. At least for as long as Youtube allows it…
Personally I become a member of the channels I’d like to support or join their Patreon if they have them and then use AdBlock+SponsorBlock and uYou+ on mobile.
If you pay for premium Google is still collecting all of your data and using it for their own gain. Why support them at all?
Yea I’ve been kinda watching youtube through this whole social media moment, suspicious that they’ve successfully taken a middle road here that will probably last. Ads and profiteering? You bet … but it seems that there’s a monetisation model for “creators” that kinda works (though I’m not sure at all about that). And so, for anyone that actually wants to make any sort of living doing the creative stuff that the rest of us lurkers want to consume, the inevitable question of how do you live within capitalism seems to have an answer of some sort in youtube while all the other platforms perhaps don’t have healthy or appealing answers.
As for the fediverse, I think there’s a massive opportunity for donations and crowd funding to become a much more central and normal aspect here so that making some sort of living by contributing to and being a part of this space is actually viable. Even some sort of subscription model for platfroms that are essentially non-profit creator-driven would make a lot of sense here.
That’s a problem that goes beyond any single platform though, and at the moment, cross-platform or fediverse-wide work seems to be lacking behind a little bit.
Unlock origin on the desktop, brave browser for mobile yt seems to work fine at not showing ads
it’s cool how the tradition of only reading the first half of the first sentence is alive and well on lemmy too.
I do, you get Youtube Music as well and no ads, which is a great combination.
Now i haven’t been subscribed to spotify since at least 2015 so things may have changed but when i’m controlling someone elses phone with spotify i pretty much always prefer it to youtube music which has been my main player pretty much since it launched (i wont change for as long as i have yt premium though :p).
I moved to YouTube Music from Spotify and I really miss being able to move the songs around in a playlist on the mobile app. I used to spend a lot of time curating playlists where order mattered (I might avoid having two songs back to back that are the same tempo/vibe, or I might tell a story with the progression of songs in the playlist).
I’m also annoyed by the fact that sometimes YouTube Music will hang forever on a blank loading screen instead of accepting that there’s no connection and sending me to my downloaded songs. I don’t know if Spotify does better about this because I never had Spotify Premium.
However, one good thing about YouTube Music is that you can find covers and unofficially released songs much more easily. I search for covers often, to see how others might interpret a song I like.
I use Youtube music and I think it is inferior to Spotify. Offline music is much more seamless, music quality is superior, shuffling a playlist is easier, recommended music is better, dedicated desktop app, and more. The only reason I use YouTube music is because there is more selection.
I’m not sure about Apple music though since I never had an iPhone.
Is it better than Google Music was? Cause I had that for years and swapped to Spotify when they first announced they were axing Google Music to combine it into YouTube Premium.
Yes, a family plan makes it cheaper. You won’t see any ads on your devices, from your TV to your PC, and you can listen to YouTube videos even when your phone is locked. It also includes YouTube Music. It’s a great deal, and I’m not sure why some people don’t see it that way. Sure, you could get a different YouTube client for your phone, install an ad blocker on your PC, block ads on your router to get rid them on your smart TV, and listen to music on Spotify for free. But the value of a good service is that you pay a reasonable amount of money and get all these features without any additional work on your part.
If you already have a paid spotify/apple music subscription, and already have a buttload of streaming apps subscription (netflix, apple tv, etc), suddenly the prospect of adding $13.99 youtube subscription into your list of monthly subscriptions seems a lot less appealing.
Yes, and you could even switch from Spotify/Apple to YouTube, because it essentially offers a similar service, but with added benefits. That’s their proposition. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to accept it or not. However, I find it hard to agree with the common online sentiment that YouTube Premium is worthless.
That’s where you get rid of the other streaming services and check !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com how to get your TV series ^^
But you don’t have to have all those subscriptions. You get YouTube Music included so you don’t need a separate music subscription. You also don’t have to worry about working out the latest app/add-on/plugin/site that lets you play YouTube without ads. It’s pretty good value actually. I get more from it than I do my Netflix subscription. I rotate my other subscriptions based on the shows I’m watching. I always have a YouTube subscription and don’t foresee stopping it just coz I can’t go back to ads haha.
I wonder if most of the complaints of ads on YouTube are coming from people who subscribe to something like Netflix, but spend just as much (or more) time streaming YouTube.
I do. I watch a ton of YouTube. Revanced and NewPipe are rad but there’s no effortless way to have an adfree experience on the TV.
Yeah, got YouTube music after they shut down Google play music. All my friends dog on me for not having Spotify but not having ads on iOS is so nice. I tried it once without youtube premium subscription and idk how people can sit through advertisment hell for every video.
Also having the creators I watch get a larger share of the YouTube money pie cause I watch them as a YouTube premium sub is a nice feeling too.
That being said though, I’m on a family plan and not this specific plan that got its price raised (although I’m pretty sure the family plan prices have also gone up recently if I remember right).
I do, and YouTube is my primary Media consumption for both video and music.
That said, I have the family plan which went from $15-23 back a few months ago and it was difficult to keep. I actually cancelled it and used Spotify and some of the available ad-blocking apps, but ultimately didn’t like Spotify, so I came back.
If it were to go up again anytime remotely soon I’d be gone.
Subscriber here. I use YouTube pretty much all day long. I usually have it playing something for background noise while I’m working. I’ve got a family plan with 4 other people on it, who all also get the benefits of ad-free viewing.
I also use YouTube on several devices of my own. TV, PS5, phone, tablet, three laptops… Trying to manage adblockers on all of those is such a pain in the ass. I’ll never go back to troubleshooting Pi-holes and adblockers and adblocker-blocker-blockers. It’s an objectively worse experience having to manage all sorts of goofy tools that keep getting circumvented by Google every week.
Also, the content creators I watch get paid for my views. I spend hours watching these people’s content, so making sure they’re getting paid means something to me.
I actually dropped my other subs (Netflix, Deezer) in favor of the YouTube family plan. My kids watch a ton of Minecraft vids and I don’t really care to have them digesting all those ads. My wife also uses it a lot and I get a music service that just works with all my casting devices flawlessly.
I also love the ad free experience when I use a how to video etc.
I strongly dislike ads, but want to support good platforms and content creators. I eagerly waited for it to become available in the Netherlands back when it was still called YouTube Red. I subscribed the day it became available.
Ethical ad free YouTube: you support creators and the platform that hosts them, much better than through ads.
Too bad most videos now feature sponsored segments so creators are effectively double dipping in my premium support and advertiser money. That is honestly more annoying. I have more respect for creators who have Patreon and don’t feature sponsored content.
Question for you: I looked into trying this approach myself, but Google would not accept my non-Indian payment information.
As it happens, they also refused to take my payment information when I visited Argentina and Turkey, too.
How did you do it?
I did, sorta.
I subscribed to Google Play Music All Access from day 1, because (at the time) it was like Spotify but also allowed me to upload my own music. I added a family plan when that became available for my friends/family who wanted it as well, and was grandfathered into that price when GPMAA eventually turned into YouTube Music, which was also bundled with YouTube Premium. Ad-free YouTube isn’t something I specifically sought out but it was bundled into a service that I was using as a perk.
I kept that subscription going at the grandfathered rate until I got an email from Google one day informing me that they were increasing the price, which was last October, and would only allow me to keep the grandfathered cost for an additional 6 months before hiking me up to the new price. That would bring me from $14.99/mo to $23.99/mo, so I said “fuck that” and canceled. The service only got worse after they killed GPM anyways.
Yes, the whole family watches YouTube on the TV, on the iPad/mobile phone apps, that it’s worth it not to see the ads there, plus background play of audio, plus the whole family can stream their music from YouTube Music so no need for an aditional Spotify subscription.
Anyway, I just wish they’d remove the sponsor stuff on the apps like SponsorBlock does on the desktop for me.
I used to when I used have it when subscribed to Google Music—which was amazing but then they tried to replace it with YouTube Music and yet another big amazing Google product died—and there was no point anymore.
I’ve considered it to stop ads on the TV app, but always thought it wasn’t worth it. I can’t even be bothered ad-blocking the network to include the TV, so raising cost of Premium now may as well make the product cease to exist in my mind.
Yep, Family Plan here as well. It’s 4+1 of us, we all watch YT pretty much continuously at different age levels (two adults, one teenager and one preschooler), and since there was one extra seat left grandma also got ad free experience on her mobile. All 5 of us are also into different kinds of music so having access to YT music is also huge plus. The only other subscription I don’t mind paying for is Amazon Prime, for obvious reasons. Netflix, D+, Apple TV+ and such got the boot long time ago, with no plans to resubscribe any time soon.
People with overpaid white collar jobs do that plenty and there are plenty of them who will pay probably up to $50 a month or more. Youtube is already testing predatory measures to make chrome users ditch adblockers by giving out warnings to people who use them. Many more will go Youtube Premium in the near future because of such measures and Youtube will keep ramping up prices of course.
So you are pissed off that people are actually willing to pay for service? Youtube hosts millions if not billions of videos and streams them to billions of users, dozens of times a day and they do all this essentially lag free. That infrastructure is not cheap.
Additionally youtube actually shares their premium revenue with content creators allowing people to actually make a successful living with their creative pursuits and you control how that revenue is shared by which videos you watch.
My YouTube subscription costs 0. ublock Origin.
Unlock origin and ReVanced is great, but it doesn’t allow casting to the TV without ads…
Its the only way we can watch TV in our house.
Im just afraid that they might remove thr ability to install custom apks altogether.
All of these options are unreasonable when you are talking a whole household and catering to a family that is not tech savvy. I have a pihole and it does not block ads from the YouTube TV app.
I have a plex going with content enough for the adults, but the kids consume so much media there is no reasonable way to get enough and fast enough and to meet their current interests. Youtube is the only streaming subscription we have left in the house because nothing even comes close for kids. Even Disney+ completely fumbles when it comes to appealing to what used to be its target market.
You can also use Apple TV which is hands down best streaming box, use ATV remote on your couch without faffing with computers and pay for good service that YouTube and content creators on YouTube provide.
It’s easy to avoid paying but the experience is just worse.
And if you’re really short on cash, subscribe from Argentina or India and pay ~$2.
There’s catt which can be installed in termux on Android or directly on your PC easily enough. AFAIK there’s also a few (T)UIs for it out there. I personally have set up a bash script in termux as a share target and send the links from the revanced app to catt for casting. But yeah, it’s definitely more work and needs more expertise setting it up than hitting the cast button in the app, fully agreed.
Does ReVanced still work? I know YouTube Vanced was killed a while back, but I think I tried ReVanced recently but couldn’t get it to work.
Best solution is PiHole. If you can find RaspberryPi, but any replacement will work. Essentially local DNS which ignores requests to ad servers. There are also some other DNS servers which filter ads. But I’ve had less success with them.
In my experience PiHole doesn’t stop YouTube ads on the mobile app. I imagine that it won’t fix on a TV either.
Pihole won’t keep you from watching ads,for what I know its because google uses the same servers to serve the content and the ads.Pihole is great to browse the web though… I have it at home. For me what gets the job done is newpipe for my android phone and Smartube on my Android TV.
They started blocking users with advanced adblockers completely in some places. It’s expected they’ll roll out that policy in most countries. Prepare to either ditch Youtube completely, watch dozens of ads as well as sponsored segments every couple of minutes (because why would Google pay content creators who make them a huge pile of money by providing content for free adequately, right?) or pay hundreds of dollars a year. Even then they might start showing you some ads because why the hell not? Big tech stole the internet from us and now they’re banking in on it big time. Needlesly to say this is not a sustainable business model, but since when did that ever bother mega corporations?
It’s a cat and mouse game, and history has proven that in this case adblockers will win. Or we’ll get ad blocker blocker blockers.
Firefox is pretty much the only browser Google doesn’t own directly. I’m afraid all of the other browsers will soon malfunction on that front so we’ll have to see.
Oh no my dns provider broke and it cant resolve the ad servers. Pihole for the win
Personally, I like it when the content creators I spend time watching get paid for their work.
So pay them directly or through other platform. Why would you pay them through Youtube rather than Patreon when using Youtube Premium is going to make them get a lower share of what you paid?
My resources are limited. I’d love to support them all in more direct ways. And a few of them, I do support outside of YouTube from time to time, as well. But I only have so much money to give, and there’s so many creators whose works I’ve benefited from. It’s the most conscientious use of my limited expendable income.
Because the platform does actually deserver a share, too?
We’d be living in a very different world if we hadn’t grown entitled to free shit because ads, and were actually paying for services that, you know, cost money to provide. The “ad supported” business model is utterly broken, dead, and gone, and was only ever able to support low-cost services like email and social media… But video streaming? By all accounts, it makes no sense.
And on top of that, YouTube’s revenue share is by far the most generous in the industry. There’s a reason creators ditch twitch, tiktok, etc. for it, even without the sign-on bonuses that other platforms have to resort to.
I have SmartTube Next on my shield which requires no casting. No ads and sponsor blocks.
I don’t have the money to sustain the “everything is a subscription” simple as that. So adblockers and piracy is the only way to get media content.
I still go to the cinema, but some cinemas over here are already experimenting with subscriptions.
I’d be willing to pay for a few subscriptions if I didn’t feel like subscription services are trying to gouge me left and right. I miss the days when subscriptions to Netflix and Spotify gave me access to 90% of content online.
Contrast this with Steam, which gives me centralized convenience, seamless updates, online sync, achievements… No wonder that’s where I spend almost all of my entertainment money these days.
It’s like what cable networks did back in the day, if you want to view a channel, subscribe to it. We have come full circle.
Good lord they are going to put ads again in streaming services aren’t they
Software subscriptions are what really bums me out. Back in the day you could just buy your software and have it forever. Now Microsoft Office is a subscription, Adobe Photoshop is a subscription, and so much more. Nothing pisses me off more than when I install a basic app on my phone and find out it’s actually a subscription app.
Literally the only major software I can think of right now that isn’t subscription based or insanely expensive is Apple’s Final Cut Pro at $300.
“buy your software and have it forever” was not really true other than in the very early days. everything that was in active development like office, photoshop, all the pro music software i used, was updated regularly and had an upgrade cost. my music app had a paid upgrade every year like clockwork for $150. it was essentially a subscription in all but name. yeah i could stop paying and stay with the last version forever but operating system and hardware advances would make it so those versions would stop running on newer machines eventually.
Fortunately Microsoft Office isn’t fully subscription yet, but with how much they’re pushing Office365 it’s not too surprising that people don’t seem to realize this. You can still buy a permanent license from MS directly (with some digging around to get to the correct page) or from 3rd party websites. Only downside is it locks you into the current version of Office, but for the average user (me) that’s not too much of a big deal - I can’t recall them releasing any major must have features over the past 10 years.
Just wait a few more years - Windows 11 will probably be the last “desktop” license you’ll be able to buy. Microsoft really, REALLY wants the next OS to be Windows 365 Cloud OS, run on Azure (of course) and available only via subscription.
I just don’t care 🙌
I seriously couldn’t give two fucks about supporting influencers or tech companies. Uploaders can pay for the infrastructure for all I care. Like people use to host websites out of passion, now everything is about profits, and politics, why would I want to support that? Why should I give two fucks about making someone else rich?
Fuck that shit. You can get cracked copies of the YouTube App that give a much better experience.
I do pay for a couple subscriptions, but in the 2000s I had a subscription service for video games called GameTap and it was great except they could add and remove games on a whim and when you stop paying you lose access to all of it. So you need to remember a subscription service is ephemeral and there’s long term benefits to having the files yourself.
A single ticket to my local movie theater costs $16.50 for an adult ticket to a typical movie. That is already more expensive than a month of unlimited Youtube premium, even at the inflated price.
Video streaming is a consumable product. What model would you prefer. Ad supported is still available. A la carte is reasonable in theory, but doesn’t seem like it would work well for a site like youtube (even though youtube does have some a-la-carte offerings such as movies)
We used to have a movie subscription service around here. It failed because it was essentially sellings dimes for nickels.
From an actual cost perspective, a video streaming on YouTube is not even remotely the same as a movie ticket. The company selling the movie ticket has to price each ticket to ensure that the company can make enough money to cover:
- Rent/lease for the building
- Wages for employees
- Purchase/rental of movies from studios/distributors
- Purchase/rental of equipment to project movies onto screens
Google has its own costs of course, but for essentially the same thing (showing a person a video), Google’s costs are vastly lower per person, because the video they are showing you is a digital file that lives on a server, and the same file is shown to everyone who wants to view it.
Another example: A book printed on paper requires a lot of physical materials - ink, paper, cardboard, glue, etc. Selling a paper book requires machines to print the pages, trucks and trains to transport raw materials to and from factories, and to locations where they book can be sold.
For a paper book to end up in your hands, lumberjacks need to be paid to cut down trees. Miners need to be paid to dig the materials required to make ink out of the ground. Printing press operators need to be paid. Truck drivers need to be paid. Warehouse workers need to be paid. Delivery drivers need to be paid.
A Kindle ebook is a digital file that has been uploaded from the publisher directly to an Amazon server, and Amazon is certainly able to provide itself with server space at far lower than retail cost.
A brand new printed paperback version of the lastest David Baldacci novel costs $19.99 on Amazon. The Kindle version of the same book costs $14.99. Considering that the Kindle version has almost zero of the costs associated with the print version, and is literally the exact same digital file that is sent to every single person who purchases the ebook, the ebook, compared to the paper book, generates almost 100% profit with almost zero additional costs or overhead.
Given this, should an ebook cost almost as much as a real book? Should a YouTube Premium subscription cost as much as a movie ticket?
Or are two of the most profitable companies on the planet simply charging “real” prices for digital products because they have a de-facto monopoly in their respective markets, and they can basically just do whatever they want?
A) Phyical books cost way more to buy than they do to print. You are mostly paying for the writing/editing.
B) Youtube is nor charging anywhere near “real” prices for their subscription. Renting movies on youtube is generally in the $3-$5 range, far cheaper than seeing a movie in a theater. The subscription gives you unlimited access to almost their entire library of videos and music. The only physical analouge is a library, but those only exist due to government funding and a quirk of copyright law that does not apply as well in the digital realm.
I pay $22 per month for the family plan because I don’t want my kids or my folks to have to be constantly inundated with ads. And I enjoy being and to play free music that is exactly the songs I want.
I was really upset when they raised the price on me, and kicked me off the grandfather plan. But in the end I decided it was still worth it.
But what the real cost to Google is here is that they have evaporated my loyalty and good will. I now see them as a company that will squeeze me when they know they can get away with it, and that my loyalty and being an early adopter means nothing to them.
That will definitely affect every future buying decision I make for future products and services.
Yeah I love Youtube Premium on the family plan. People on the internet act like there’s no benefit to it as long as Adblock and Youtube Vanced exist. Meanwhile I have an iPhone, smart TVs, and my whole family does too. My nieces and nephews don’t have to get bombarded with ads, and that’s well worth it to me. But the way they silently jacked the price up $5 per month was a total dick move that I’m not happy about. If they keep pulling this shit, it’s only a matter of time before I find another solution.
The amount of downvotes on comments trying to help people not get price gouged and comments supporting these subscription price increases shows me just how many corporate shills are actually out there. No wonder these corps keep getting away with this bullshit.
Edit: Wow so many people took personal offense to this…almost like it they know it’s true but are afraid to admit it. Everyone is hurting financially right now, some more than others. Yet year over year, the prices keep going up even with record inflation and record profits. Keep shilling folks, enjoy emptying your wallets for the millionaires while you struggle.
