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.
Why would I pay YouTube that when I can give it directly to the creators though. I’ll just adblock and not put money in the hands of Google, while helping the creators more.
Without the content delivery system, creators don’t really have a way to share their creations with you.
YouTube is far from the only video hosting site, and far from the only way to do it. Peertube, Vimeo, Patreon, Floatplane, Nebula, bitchute to name some examples of sites already set up, with monetisation, with youtube creators actively posting on them. Twitch rivals like Kick and Rumble could also absolutely pivot into taking YTs market share too
I mean without YouTube/ Google the alternative for most creators would be to host the videos themselves. And then you would have like 20 Sites which you had to check yourself regularly to get new videos. I get that YouTube isn’t the best solution, but the alternative is much worse. There is a reason why we don’t all still have our own small WordPress blogs.
“most creators would be to host the videos themselves.”
And where the problem is ?
You know, RSS exists to literally circumvent this problem, albeit for articles. A lot of sites still have it, people just forgot that this is a thing. Little bit of a chore to setup, but its actually pretty nice. Obviously finding these sites is the hard part, but a good search engine (kagi btw) could make it work.
Also PeerTube exists as well, which reduces the cost of hosting videos.
Why would I pay YouTube that when I can give it directly to the creators though.
Do you?
If only they didn’t demonetize creators who accidentally say whatever SJWs don’t like.
Or remove the slowdowns they deliberately applied to those who use Firefox (it’s not a conspiracy, they really did it).
It would just be enough that Google aren’t sons of bitches and I would probably also be happy to pay youtube premium.
I prefer to pay my favorite creators with donations, patreon or merchandise.
What people call “demonetized” on YouTube is actually called “no or limited ads” inside of YouTube Studio. It’s not Google but the advertisers who don’t want their Coca-Cola ads shown on those videos. YouTube Premium views still pay out on those videos since they’re not ad views.
If everyone paid for YouTube Premium and didn’t use the ad-supported product, then advertiser boycotts would have no power.
Since alternatives that manage traffic in a better way exist, such as peertube and odysee, google can burn in hell, it’s a shitty company that slows down competition, I don’t give anything to a company that spends its budget on bullshit as manifest V3. I pay the creators with PayPal or Patreon, not with 70% of a subscription.
It’s wild to me that this is so often called “just business” when, described this way, it’s textbook racketeering.
The textbook this person owns:
service provider: “Hello, I’m a window cleaner, do you want me to clean your windows? I’ll actually do it for free this time! Please recommend me to your peers”
customer: “yes please”
service provider: “all done! Want me to do it again in three months time?”
customer: “yes, I love free stuff!”
service provider: “actually, I’d have to charge for that, can’t work for free all the time.”
customer: “Racketeering!”
“Racketeering” is definitely the wrong word.
I’ll put it like this. I think YouTube Premium is too expensive. I also think YouTube is too aggressive with it’s ads.
I opt to send them that message by using an ad blocking service tailored to YouTube and paying the content creators in other ways.
If the family plan weren’t 20 dollars a month to cover 2 accounts I would probably buy it. But they opted to offer only 1 or many never just 2.
I’m capable of affording it. I pay nearly every major streaming service monthly even when I am not using them, so long as their cost is reasonable.
YouTube Premium’s cost is not reasonable. Especially when you consider they are still collecting and making money off of your data in the end.
It depends on the how the contract is written but generally billing a client the full time to develop an existing feature that “could be turned on in 10 min.” is a good example of fraudulent misrepresentation. A business/industry that replies on that (like your example) is a racket.
Yes, I understand that’s how the world of ‘software as a service’ works and yes I am calling it a racket.
Could you explain to me how “if someone wants to use my work, they should pay me for it” could be perceived as racketeering, let alone “textbook?”
There’s “if someone wants to use my work, they should pay me for it” and there’s “intentionally sabotage the work/service provided in order to extract more profits.”
5 bucks? If only… It’s 12 euros per month here, which is simply too expensive for the kind of content I watch on YT. Especially considering the amount of baked in product placement (VPN, diet plans, that kind of crap) that I come across, I’m not paying that kind of money just to still get hammered with commercials. Sorry, but YouTube Premium is a bad deal here.
Either watch ads or pay for Premium. Or don’t watch Youtube. Those are the three choices most people will have. And it’s Youtube’s right as a private platform to give them those choices.
It’s worth it for me because I watch a lot of Youtube. In return, I don’t watch traditional TV, so I don’t pay for cable or similar things.
Those are the three choices most people will have.
LMAO
You forgot the simplest of them: Firefox, uBlock Origins, SponsorBlock. Works on desktop and Android.
Either watch ads or pay for Premium
Unfortunately though it is ‘pay for Premium and still watch ads’. So many videos have the ads baked in by the content creators. Yes, you can manually seek forward, but that’s annoying and defeating the purpose of Premium. Especially for the price they ask in my country.
Either watch ads or pay for Premium. Or don’t watch Youtube. Those are the three choices most people will have. And it’s Youtube’s right as a private platform to give them those choices.
I fully agree, never suggested otherwise. But fortunately free speech allows us to have an opinion about a product.
I pay for family account (6 Gmail account subscriptions I think). And share it with family. Between my sister/BIL and a friend, I would be paying 5 bucks a month. I pay for it myself but that’s because I’m subsidizing it for them. She is an amazing cook and he’s a doctor one speed dial away. Don’t want to jinx that. But I digress.
My point is, it’s way cheaper when you get family account and share the cost. If that’s a possibility . Also, I don’t use Spotify, and I download music and videos for trips. So there’s that.
5 bucks? I am in. But it’s 16 swiss francs. That’s just too much for me as I don’t need Youtube Music.
Google tells me 24 bucks for family. That’s equal to what I do. I actually do pay that for all of em, but technically, it’s just under 5 bucks a person since I share with 4 others.
Can the other people still use their own accounts like Apple does it? As in I just give my subscription to other accounts and that’s it. Nothing actually changes for them except that they have a subscription now.
I pay for a premium account and I get more value out of it than Netflix or any other streaming service.
People are out to lunch on this whole situation. Try running a service that hosts somewhere between 2 and 3 billion Gigabytes of data. Where basically anyone on the planet can upload gigs of video and YouTube will still make it available 10 years later. You are never going to crowd source that, ever. I also pay for premium and I get at least 5x the value of any other streaming service. Just on home renovations, it’s probably saved me 10k+ being able to watch tutorials about every kind of repair.
Youtube Premium is literally the only subscription service I pay for. Apart from your reasons there is one very solid reason behind my choice:
I can find shows and movies for free online if I bothered trying, it isn’t difficult. I cannot easily do the same for Youtube content.
I’m very curious about why YouTube allow users to upload what seems like unlimited footage in 4K HDR and keep it around indefinitely. Only guess is they don’t want to miss out on the next big YouTuber. I upload a lot of video for very few views. There is no way in hell that Google make money from my account.
I’m starting to wonder, what will YouTube do once it stops being remotely sustainable to run?
Is more efficient video compression being developed faster than people are uploading content?
Like, at some point, they might just run out of space and will have to purge millions of videos.
Youtube can show ads and offers subscription without being this shitty though. Just look on how popular region-specific video services like niconico (japan) or bilibili (china) operate. They also have ads and subscription, but nowhere as crazy as google adding multiple video ads upon ads and pick a fight with ad blocker users (which used to be a minority when google haven’t aggressively pushed more and more ads. the current popularity of adblockers today is google’s own doing). This is only possible because google has killed off competitors in western market and now it’s time for cashing out.
YT Premium is the single most valuable subscription service on the net right now. Don’t regret mine a bit. I listen to hours and hours of YT Music a day, and I watch probably a few hours of YT content a night as well.
You say that today. Give it a couple years. I’m pretty sure that by 2030, the cost will be ~100 dollars/euros/whatever per month and you’ll see 2 minutes of ads for every single minute of content you watch. (Okay, maybe the number of ads is an exaggeration, but I don’t think the monthly cost is.)
Don’t pay the Danegeld. It never makes them go away.
Paying a business to provide a service you use is not ransom.
“They might raise prices later” is an idiotic reason not to pay for something.
Exactly, if they price it stupidly they’ll lose paying customers (I don’t buy into the free market ideology)
I get you’re saying its a great value because of what you get out of it, but I’m not comfortable pricing things in that way… I’d rather it be based on the actual cost. I know real prices don’t tend to work that way (or at least not in many cases) but it just feels icky and exploitative still.
If I compare the usage of Netflix vs Youtube
Last 7 days (from right now): 24h 30min
Last time I used Netflix in a high volume: Probably <12h. At absolute highest maybe 18-20h in total.
But: YT usage is consistant. Netflix/service of choice is at best a seasonal happening if a show is very good and you binge it.
So to me it’s worth it enough to keep. But I’d want to have an option to remove music as I prefer Spotify, have optionally Jellyfin and dont need yt music.
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 –hence the reason why all of us are here instead of Reddit– 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 –almost– 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.
Not everyone is on Lemmy because they’re anti-corporate, FOSS enthusiasts. For example, I came here because Reddit became a dumpster fire of unreasonable policies and very restrictive accessibility to the site. I simply will not install their app. Everything I’ve seen and heard about it is revolting. I’m certain I will hate it and I’m not going to bother trying at this point. Since a nontrivial amount of my time on Reddit was via an app, and that app no longer works, I’m just not going to use the service.
I like FOSS, and I support FOSS whenever I can, but I’m hardly anti corporate. The big G has tried and failed at getting monopoly status for most things. Arguably their most successful services are search, mail and YouTube.
Me, personally, I pay for Google’s services and share those benefits with my family. We have extra Google drive storage, YouTube music/YouTube premium, and all the benefits that come with that (I don’t recall all of them right now). One payment takes care of my entire household. So for less than $20/month we all enjoy all the benefits of those subscriptions. It comes out to less than $5/person/month.
I don’t blame anyone for not wanting those services. I certainly don’t hold that against them. I completely understand the viewpoint. YouTube is very aggressive about everyone having premium. I see ads on YouTube when I’m using it on my work PC for music or to look something up on there; because my personal Google account is not and will never be associated to my work PC. I see what it’s like “on the other side” so to speak. I can see how aggro their efforts are to get people to subscribe to premium. How invasive the ads have become, and how annoying it is to deal with all that. I get it.
I also don’t really hate Google for it. They want people to buy their premium service and they have taken steps to try to encourage that. I understand, but I don’t necessarily agree with their choices.
In my mind they’re not the most egregious offender for being anti consumer in their methodology. Good examples of anti-consumer behaviour is Netflix trying to put an end to account sharing, or Reddit’s API changes that basically kicked out a nontrivial number of its users for seemingly no good reason. There’s plenty more anti consumer actions from other companies that I can point to that are far worse than what YouTube is doing.
In my mind, Google has supported FOSS more than most big tech companies. Android, at it’s core is FOSS, built on Linux. Chrome is based on chromium, which is FOSS as well. There’s numerous other examples of Google supporting FOSS. Sure, they have their own versions of that integrate Google services into the products and provide extra features on top of what the FOSS versions do. But I can’t think of any company that even comes close to the support of FOSS that Google has. In my mind they’re simply not the worst offender. They’re not innocent, but not the worst.
That’s my opinion though and it’s just one of many possible opinions. Far be it for me to impose my opinion on anyone else. If you want to distrust Google and use FOSS things instead, that’s fine. It’s your choice. If you agree but still don’t want to pay them for premium, that’s okay too. Or if you want to drink the Kool-aid and pay for all of their services, that’s also your choice.
Have a great day.
I’m only here 'cause it was the first lemmy instance I joined after the reddit bullshit.
I pay for YT Premium.
I’m also back on reddit arguing with people.
So, yeah… I’m everything this place hates.
No one hates you, some people just think youre an idiot for still using reddit after leaving it
I don’t hate you. I’m sure there are plenty more that feel similarly.
I also feel like there is a nontrivial number of people who could not possibly care less; and as always, a silent majority of people who are simply lurking, who express their voice through voting only. (Special shout out to all the lurkers. You’re awesome)
It’s all personal choice and the opinion expressed in the OP is just that, an opinion. Same as me. I can only express my opinion. If that upsets people, then I’m sorry for that. I’m not going to change my opinion to gratify someone else in their opinion or position. If anyone wishes to have a discussion about why they think my position is not properly informed or wrong in their eyes, then that’s fine. I can engage in conversation about it, but at the end of the day, I make my choices, you make yours, and everyone else makes theirs. My decision to pay for YT premium doesn’t really affect anyone but me, and Google.
I’m only here because Reddit pissed me off. I toss money toward my instance and I’d be fine tossing a few bucks per month to YouTube if it meant no ads.
I’ve been riding an old “premium” subscription from the introduction of Google Play Music (or whatever it was called) years ago when it was introduced, for like $3/month. Seemed like a reasonable deal to me.
They did just (finally) jack the price up on me, though, so as soon as i get some free time i’m canceling.
I started using nebula which costs $30/year (discounted price, easy to get). It has some of the YouTube creators, shares revenue with them, has no ads, and isn’t google.
Sure it has a fraction of the YouTube content, but there’s more new stuff there every day than I could watch. And it isn’t toxic like YouTube.
For me it’s a matter of practicality. I wouldn’t pay if I didn’t feel I had to. It’s easy to block ads on PC, sure. Other devices, less so. I could get a Pihole or similar but then iirc you have to basically be playing cat and mouse with Google ad domains and that just sounds like a headache.
Im not holding my breath for someone to start hosting petabytes of videos for free. I don’t like ads, so I’m just going to pay.
Used to be ads on the side of videos, and they were still scams like “Hit the target to win a FREE ipad!” At least they didn’t block the actual content. No one should ever feel bad about blocking ads lmao.
You say that as if it’s the only option while being on a platform that explicitly isn’t a single organization hosting the entire thing. There’s no way this is a serious comment.
Lemmy has 50 thousand users and hosts mostly text and static images. YouTube has 2.7 billion users and hosts mostly high quality video. Pretending it’s even remotely the same is pointless.
Counterpoint to the counterpoint: Youtube made $28 billion in revenue in 2021. Bandwidth and storage space are expensive but i can’t believe they’re that expensive. If they’re not profitable then i have to assume that’s a decision they’re making.
It’s also cool that YouTube Premium pays a bigger cut to creators when compared against regular YouTube ads.
If you want to support Youtubers, then buy their merch or something like that.
The cost of supporting every YouTuber I watch with merch greatly outpaces the cost of a few years of premium
Then give us a fair price. YouTube is not making any content, so I just wish to pay for the hosting privileges. That shouldn’t cost me 15€/month. Give me simple prenium that removes ads for 6-7€, and I will jump in. It’s all about what I feel I’m getting.
For instance, I fucking bought a 1300€ pixel 8 pro ROFL.
