I’d pay for YouTube premium if t wasn’t more expensive than HBO. It’s ridiculous. Especially considering YouTube has no production costs. It’s all user-generated content.
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the users do get paid though, although i’m sure it’s a fraction of what youtube makes.
Hmmm. $20 a month for the big budget action of Westworld, or $20 a month for a cooking show filmed in someone’s basement. Decisions, decisions.
To be fair, YouTube has far more variety and far more content overall. Personally, I have seen pretty much anything worth watching on the major streaming services. My wife and I can just ignore any top 200 list of shows or movies because we have already seen it all and anything we haven’t seen doesn’t look interesting to us. We just have to wait for new shows to come out.
YouTube though. It’s functionally unlimited considering the length of a human lifespan.
For some insight, a quick Google search says that Netflix has about 4 years of content if you sat down and watched everything they have to offer. Meanwhile, YouTube has about 18,000 years of content.
Are they including all those 10-hour long loop videos I uploaded?
I’d take 10h shreksophone over 3 of those 4 years worth of netflix content any day of the week!
I’ve never been one to really get into the loop of watching YouTube endlessly. It’s felt like my use has been more like a search engine.
For me it’s not really been a great source of entertainment. At best background noise. Quantity of hours is a useless metric for me when most of it is stuff that feels like unnecessary content. I think it’s most telling that what makes YouTube watchable for me is sponsorblock with one of my most used functions skip to highlight, and blocktube to block the popular channels that dominate search results. And lately youtubetranscript to just save myself time watching and overly long 10+ minute long segment in favor of quickly skimming over the words.
I feel the algorithm promoting long videos has ruined the quality with now more videos trying to fit that minimum length.
The irony of this comment is you can find the cooking show but not Westworld on HBO lol
honestly i will watch westworld once, but i never use my netflix account but i watch stuff like physics lectures and chemistry videos all the time. i just find it fascinating, in a way scripted TV isn’t for me.
I’d pay more for YouTube rather than HBO/Netflix. There’s much more content that interests me on YouTube.
I sleep to lectures on youtube so I probably clock up a lot of hours a day and ads would ruin that forever - so I pay
but i do enjoy a lot of creator channels too, so it’s worth it for that as well. plus i really fucking hate ads.
part of me also thinks - it must cost a bomb to deliver that much data and storage, plus the bandwidth for 4k video at any time, plus paying the people who make content. some of them are millionaires, youtuber is kind of a career and it’s not all in-video endorsements.
at some point, someone has to pay, and it’s the advertisers paying to access me, or it’s me paying. i’d rather pay. i’d prefer it if it was free but i kind of get that it’s not. I couldn’t pay to host youtube and develop the platform and have everyone watch free.
Or $20 for thousands of different channels of all kinds of content.
At least be honest about it.
How much of those channels are actually quality content let alone manage to keep the attention of viewers to watch an entire video? It’s like a cable services advertising that it has thousands of channels. Videos that manage to hold my attention even for 10 minutes on YouTube has been rare, and mostly aided by 2x speeds to shorten it down by half.
I watch documentaries on youtube, 30-60 min on avg
I’ve got close to 100 channels that I subscribe to and watch regularly. Probably another 300 that I watch occasionally. YouTube makes up 90% of my visual content. The other 10% being sports that isn’t broadcast on YouTube and stuff I watch with my wife.
YouTube has literally anything you could want in visual content.
If you’re having problem keeping your attention span focused, maybe go see a doctor or therapist for adhd or something? Because there is so much shit on YouTube that you should 100% be able to find content to suit you.
If you’re having problem keeping your attention span focused, maybe go see a doctor or therapist for adhd or something? Because there is so much shit on YouTube that you should 100% be able to find content to suit you.
Uh… That seems unnecessarily hostile haha. That’s good for, but my point was that for me. Not you. For me that I haven’t found anything that provides the type of content I’ve found on Netflix, HBO, etc on YouTube on a consistent basis. I’m not talking about the ability of something to just keep people fixated for hours the way tiktok has become king in that area and YouTube is trying to catch up with shorts. But, more general conventional entertainment beyond those that are fun time passers the way mobile games are, but might not meet expectations of a Last of Us or Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild type game release on other old school platforms if that makes any sense.
I think we are talking about different things. You more about ability of content to take up time and keep people in a loop. Me more whether the services has the type of medium I want. Which regardless of the amount of content YouTube has it doesn’t really have, which makes the whole channel numbers for my case not really matter. Apple has made much more progress in original content I want to watch than YouTube has.
What do you care about ads on a service you don’t use then?
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I’m sorry but I find this deeply comic and I can’t stop giggle
At the same time, clickbait has always existed. There’s a reason trash emerged from tv to become his own subgenre
The DeArrow extension “fixes” thumbnails on Youtube to make them less clickbaity. Sadly content makers have to do it if they want the blessings of the algorithm god.
We actually don’t know what percentage they’re making. They can tell you how much they’re paid, but no one but Google can tell you how much of the subscription cost goes to them versus Google.
This was maybe 5 or so years ago, but I remember Game Grumps did mention something along the lines of how they get more from someone watching their video on YouTube premium vs someone who watches their videos with ads playing.
It’s still not a ton of info, and I’m not sure if it’s still true. Or maybe it’s different for every channel or something.
It’s such a low number most people would be disgusted.
We’re talking a few bucks for a million views.
the big guys get sponsors to fund them, not ad revenue
That’s a symptom of a broken system. It’s literally users creating their own ads because the platform’s ads aren’t getting them paid.
On a related note, you can skip those ads with a plugin, or the right app on Android and Android TV.
cpm = cents per million
You can get Premium cheaper through other countries. It’s super simple. I only pay about 1€ / month and that feels about right to me unlike the 15€ or something I’d have to pay otherwise.
Isn’t there a risk of getting your Google account banned for doing this?
It’s definitely a TOS violation (as is using any kind of VPN to access their content apparently) but I never heard of anyone having trouble with it. Either way, I moved off of other Google services completely, so it would not be a huge loss for me at least.
That’s not a bad idea. I could consider making an extra Google account just for that so that way if for some reason it went screwy it doesn’t affect being able to log into other services.
Man, I hate Google.
I’ve been doing it for four years and never had a problem with it. There are so many people from India that live and travel in my country so how would they know that I’m not one of them?
I’m guessing via a VPN, but which country do you connect to for the low prices?
Argentina or (in my case) Turkey seem to be popular options. You only need to use a VPN when setting up the first payment. Your credit card can be from your home country, no checks at all. After that it’ll just work and you won’t need a VPN anymore.
I’m from India and it’s about ₹120 ~ $1.4.
Which country did you go through? I assume you purchase on a VPN and then after it applies normally?
Yep! I left another reply with more details. I’m using Turkey and it’s super easy to set up.
More video is uploaded every minute than anyone can ever watch in a lifetime. It costs money to store and serve all that.
Then they shouldn’t store everything.
Isn’t their issue more hosting costs and not production costs? Unless they start telling people they can’t upload videos (exception being copyright of course) Youtube greatly outpaces the storage costs of other social media sites.
They probably still store more than other video-hosting sites too.
their problem is probably paying $2 billion a year or some crazy number for nfl football.
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It should be a crime the way they make you subscribe to YouTube Music to get YouTube Premium.
The pricing feels like it only makes sense if you want to use YouTube Music (and thus also don’t use one of the many streaming music competitors). Paying a couple of bucks extra for ad free YouTube is fine and that’s why I pay it personally. But if I wasn’t a YTM user already, I don’t think I would.
And most people don’t want to switch streaming music services. I did that years ago and it sucked. Music is the kinda thing where you really benefit from the service knowing your tastes. I only did it because back then, Spotify was missing some of my favourite artists while Google Play Music had them. I don’t even know if that applies today.
That’s a bit disingenuous, IMO. Of course they don’t pay to produce content, but they definitely pay quite a lot to store all of the video that millions of people are uploading daily for free.
A part of your YT Premium payment goes directly to creators that you watch based on your watch time. That is their content expenses just like HBO for making new shows.
Idk if the price is that ridiculous, the family plan costs me 16 bucks and I have YT premium for my household+. I also have YouTube music from that as well, I find it better than spotify for my use and I dont have to put up additional cost for music streaming elsewhere. There was also youtube premium content (Youtube Red?) if that is still a thing, I remember the Vsauce series being available because of this.
Youtube having no costs is a hot take if ive ever seen one, but I dont think I can say anything about this that hasnt been said.
Only a kid used to having mommy and daddy pay for everything would claim youtube has no costs. It is amazing how many people on social media think everything should be free. The real issue here it is the lack of competition.
Yeah they just need storage for millions of people and bandwidth for billions no biggie, thank you for your expertise
lol zero production costs because they’re not a production studio, genius, lmao. they do have a shit ton of overhead costs though - look into it instead of acting like it costs nothing to be the largest video hosted site on the planet.
Keep 720p only for users who upload crap and aren’t generating revenue and keep 4k for the channels who are uploading quality content. I’ve seen a podcast uploading hours of content in 4k. That is incredibly costly to stream to people.
I’m not going to pay for a service that is so wasteful with their income and then they want more.
Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube
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ad blockers are not “on youtube”, they are on my devices
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allowed by whom?
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fuck you
- ad blockers are not “on youtube”, they are on my devices
based
- allowed by whom?
checked
- fuck you
and redpilled
ad blockers are not “on youtube”, they are on my devices
By the same logic, they can make any changes to youtube they want and that is perfectly OK. Youtube isn’t on your PC. It’s on their server. You don’t own that server. They can reject your connection to their server for any reason they want.
Technically, YouTube runs on your computer as well as their servers. They could put a crypto mining script on there if they wanted,and I think most people would concur that that is unacceptable.
Rare to see there valid points in a row.
Just click the “not using an adblocker” button. If everyone does that it’ll probably whitelist the blockers, we can hope.
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ublock origin users:
Sponsorblock and Return YT Dislikes FTW as well.
On desktop blocktube has improved things so much too. It has made search results so much better, since YouTube suppresses smaller channels in favor of the same large youtubers depending on the subject. Really wish it could be integrated into mobile YouTube options, but until then my hope is waiting until mobile firefox getting desktop extension support.
Glad you brought that up, never heard of it. Thanks!
Does anyone know if the dislikes extension is actually accurate or is it a sort of estimation
For new videos it’s an estimation with added dislike data of people using the extension, it’s rather accurate for most videos. For old videos before the dislike removal it uses old archived data plus new data added on top using the algorithm and data by the extension users
I’m confused, if ublock origin and sponsor block and all those are bypassing this, then who is it actually targeting?
have you ever searched “ad blocker” on your browser of choice’s extension store and scrolled down? or had a cheap/free VPN that advertised ad blocking functionality?
those. for some reason people install those. and they never get updates.
(some of them are actual malware too)
Not sure what you’re on about, Google is absolutely capable of detecting if you’re using Ublock Origin, Piped, ReVanced, whatever. The question isn’t if they CAN break those things, it’s just if they WILL.
And if they’re beta testing this system right now, I’d say it’s just a matter of time.
I wouldn’t be absolutely sure about this. In the end, everything on the web still boils down to (mostly) simple HTTP GET requests. If you open a webpage, then you are served the file you requested (usually HTML with CSS for styling and JavaScript for special actions) and your browser handles the display of them and the execution of their scripts. This means that you can program a browser to detect and remove ads directly from the code and also eradicate malicious detection scripts potentially employed by Google that are meant to find out whether the ads are displaying correctly. If Google would want to circumvent this, they would either have to make YouTube available solely over their own app or block such behaviour on the client’s end, for example by manipulating the browser’s code to block ad-blocking functionality. Google is actually pursuing the latter with their Chromium browser, which is also the foundation for some others, including Microsoft Edge. This is why it’s important that people start to move away and use Firefox for browsing, THE free/libre software non-profit web solution since decades. Because then Google is essentially powerless, if they don’t want to take YouTube off the web.
Making YouTube available solely in their app sounds entirely possible and not unlikely here. They already sorta do that with age-restricted videos and videos that have voluntarily disabled embedding.
Watching all this from the sidelines, I’m very pleased that I took the time to de-Google my critical daily services, already.
Yeah, I’m glad I already have a cheap annual subscription to Curiosity Stream + Nebula. I’ll have to look for some other decent video platforms if they’re going to start being dicks about YouTube.
Yep, they are ramping up to disable all of the scripts and extensions.
Lately, I’ve been getting 403 errors in Newpipe after a video has been playing for about a minute. I think they’re starting.
They are capable of detecting it because they aren’t putting much effort into being undetectable. If there was a need, uBlock Origin itself could be made entirely undetectable.
Of course the YouTube script running in your browser will be able to detect changes made to the page and request blocking. However, the said script can be modified by a different extension to either receive incorrect data about blocked requests and page information, or to send a fabricated result back to the server. Google can react to it by modifying the script, and the extension would need to adapt accordingly. It’s a game of cat and mouse.
If there was a need, we could have YouTube running in an entirely clean headless browser with no adblockers, while the real browser we use pulls data from it and strips out the ads.
Ultimately, currently we have the last word on what happens on our end. Unfortunately, Google’s webDRM, pushed by traitors to humanity Ben Wiser, Borbala Benko, Philipp Pfeiffenberge and Sergey Kataev, is trying to change that.
I mean, you could do all sorts of wild shit but at a certain point it’s impractical for most people. You think Google has actually put effort into this so far? You haven’t seen effort yet, they’re just beta testing.
It drives me mad when I use PCs of friends and relatives and I see AdBlock Plus installed, but they still get ads and they never seem to stop and wonder why this “ad blocker” is not working! I do however enjoy their facial expressions when I install uBlock Origin for them and start refreshing pages.
They want to frame it so that internet ID is the solution. That way you as a person can be banned, not just the account or ip. Good luck buying and selling when everything becomes digital and you get banned.
The reason people are talking about this new change is that it will bypass the extensions.
I understand that, but look at who I am responding to - they seem to think that they’re immune from it.
Dear Youtube: Bring back the downvote count, allow me to disable shorts, allow me to disable your bullshit annoying ass startup music, then half the price and then we’ll talk about paying for your “service”.
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Yep, on Smart TV devices there’s a startup tune.
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Yeah this is new to me
Being able did disable content you don’t want aside from ads with a paid membership would be a huge boon.
Killing shorts would be fantastic, and they shouldn’t care if I’m not using a feature as long as I’m paying.
That got me, the “you can only upvote stuff” bull. I should also have the option to block channels and videos.
Why would they ever do that when they can make the website more intrusive and annoying to use?
Why would they ever do that for free? Either the advertiser pays for the infrastructure, or you do. IT isn’t free. Hence YouTube premium.
The problem is that they make it unreasonable when they get greedy and many people don’t tolerate their shit. This isn’t a “people won’t pay for the service” problem. We’ve all paid for streaming services. I personally won’t when it feeds into their shenanigans.
Well, it was exactly as described and also free like 8 years ago.
I am paying for YouTube Premium, and yet I still have to skip over US-exclusive sponsor sections which almost every Youtuber has nowadays…
That’s why I still use Vanced. Sponsorblock is something I can’t live without even though I have YouTube premium.
You should try revanced.
And SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
Yup. Just be careful the only real website is revanced.app and the github. All others are unofficial and can sometimes spread malware
Yeah, almost exclusively either Us-centric and not even available where I live, or so gosh darn expensive that I just will never use the stuff advertised (looking at you, magic spoon)
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Linus’s video on their sponsors gave them way too much benefit of the doubt for scummy practices I would have dropped a company for
To be fair a lot of us here on Lemmy are likely to be more principled or have staunch opinions on companies and products - we’ve abandoned the orange R, and likely centralised social media for one thing.
From my POV, Linus seems to tone down his views in videos, and his writers are the ones doing the research for the video rather than him. He’s a lot more critical of companies on the WAN show from what I’ve seen
Doesn’t really matter if he is critical on one segment but not so much either. Or that the blame is shifted to the writers. But, I guess it’s just to say whoever it is sponsored segments are not to be trusted by default, and best being ignored.
Like even pro athletes end up shilling and using products that end up hurting them despite being in the 1% in their field like Lonzo Ball and his crappy shoes.
Here in Germany, the national soccer team has been advertising Nutella for decades. I don’t think they eat the chocolate flavored sugar-fat as much as they are paid to pretend…
My first impression for anything on YouTube is untrustworthy spam. Don’t matter who it is. It’s just the reality of paid sponsorships, and anyone being paid is going to generally talk up the positives, and talk up how much integrity they have. It’s not just a YouTube thing either. I assume the same for celebrity endorsements even if it is in an area they are an expert in like sports, since product they use isn’t the quality that reaches consumers. Sometimes even the products they use is crap and ends up hurting them. Example Lonzo Ball and the shoes he endorsed.
It’s just general good skepticism towards the marketing machine. Nobody is to be trusted when it comes to what they are paid to shill.
Linus is getting sponsorship from either actually useful tech software that is for enterprise or it’s some weird niche software or product that no one ever needs.
If you’re not already using it, this is gold: https://sponsor.ajay.app/
It’s funny how we need uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and maybe even DeArrow (same dev as SB) to make Youtube tolerable.
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Yeah, those are frustrating. Some channels I watch have a ton of annoying YouTube ads, where premium becomes a must for sanity. But some others have baked in sponsors that can’t be skipped (but no native YouTube ads). I wish they’d reconcile the two. It doesn’t make sense that you can pay to only block some ads, and depending on what videos you watch, that could be either the majority of ads or none at all!
Why’s everything going to shit? The world is already shitty enough, lemme enjoy some escapism ffs.
Eshitification is a result of end stage capitalism. People are trying to extract their last bit of value before society goes tits up due to climate change.
well they better be investing in bunkers and 100 years worth of canned beans.
They’re also betting on Aquaponics, sea-steading, and flying to Mars.
Let’s hope they also make close friends with their bunker guards, else the millionaire residents will be the first to get slaughtered.
Squeezing max profit has been part of it from day 1.
Ironic, thats u trying to leech off youtube for free
You meant lemmy enjoy?
lemmy lemme lemmon same thing. What even is a word but words that someone worded, if you reword a word enough times the word doesn’t even sound like a word anymore. Word?
The markets tanked which meant the cheap VC money dried up. Tech companies are rushing to implement the monetisation and cost-saving strategies they withheld before because it ruined the user growth now to ensure they are maintaining as much revenue as possible.
For close to 2 decades we had near 0 interest rates. V daddies used that as an excuse to throw loads of money at every itiots pet project because hey, why not? They were able to absolutely roll in money and take out loans at criminally low rates.
But now rates are getting back to actually sane levels again, and suddenly the vc daddies are all sad because the infinite money pit has dried up and they actually have to be responsible with their money again. So now they’re turning to all of the companies that they gave money to and are saying “hey remember when I gave you money? Pay me back now. I don’t care if it means you have to fundamentally change the service that’s making you money, get me my money or I’ll bring you down with it.”
And since our economy is structured such that the money of wealthy people is more important than literally anything or anyone else in our society, the companies have no choice but to comply. So they all raise their prices and shore up the holes that weren’t letting them milk every cent out of their users.
Ah YouTube, the site where I watch a video that tells me in ten minutes what I could read in one. And only 5 advertisements!
Oops, six. I forgot the ad the creator slipped in between minute 1 and 2.
You might want to follow other people, my friend
No, they have a point. Because you earn money by views, people now make videos about everything instead of writing something somewhere that can be found by search engine. Video has its uses but it’s far overused nowadays and it sucks.
That’s why I use YouTubetranscript now to read through the video to see if it is even worth watching, since so much stuff is unnecessarily long due to how algorithms push those videos to the top.
Ctrl+F’ing my way through the transcript of a 38min crafting video to see when they’re ever actually going to do the thing they made the video about, if they ever get around to it at all.
Somehow, more than once, the answer was no.
I would like to use this opportunity to make more people aware of YouTubetranscript.
Sites been a huge time saver just reading through the video instead of sitting through 10 minute long videos that turn out to be a waste of time that could have been said in a couple minutes.
How can you possibly forget the mid-video ad read that is actually a part of the video, thus unblockable?
“Modern problems require modern solutions” -> get sponsorblock
I mean, if it is an ad that actually directly gets the video creator paid, I’m not even mad about those, especially when it’s quality content. Not a fan of those who just take common searches for questions online and create a long video to explain the answer when it should have just stayed as a stackoverflow question and answer or something.
+1 to InternetHistorian’s ads, the only channel where I purposely don’t skip over the ads even if I know I’m never gonna actually get said product
It’s like how they expect you to pay for things at a store now too! Like “I just wanted some milk dude!”
If my grocery store required me to either buy an unwanted, overpriced store-specific subscription or stand there listening to multiple minutes worth of sales pitches for shit that I also don’t want and could never afford, and this kicked in every time I took an item from the shelf, regardless of whether I decided I was even interested in said item, then yes, shockingly, I am going to do anything except what they’re demanding. At that point, especially if they don’t like me doing it.
“Try not to make your customers’ experience repeatedly miserable or you will lose them” has fallen out of the playbook for no particular reason.
I used SponsorBlock for a while and it worked pretty well. It crowdsources where the ads are in a video and you can choose to skip them automatically.
Recommend hitting ‘4’ (40%) straight away on how to videos, its usually the start of showing you how to do the thing.
The Wadsworth constant
So I’m sure u wont have a problem avoiding it therefore this doesnt concern you
and this is why you should use third party clients/patches like revanced
Ehh. I wouldn’t suggest someone go use any old patched client. Do your due diligence and be safe.
Hard to believe people down voted this. I’m just saying make sure you get stuff from official sources like https://ReVanced.app
No. This is why if you like a service, you pay for it.
if google made youtube premium like $3/month no one would bat an eye and sub. but they’re approaching netflix prices and that’s just way to much. i rather support the creators directly than throwing money at google who will give the creators crumbs until they demonetize them because google is doing google things. also won’t solve the privacy problem that comes with using their native site/apps.
I think part of the problem is that they’re hosting so much more content than Netflix. It really is crazy that it’s free to upload to YouTube to just store all your videos on there. Probably 99.9% of YouTube content does not get enough views to justify the cost of storing it.
All that being said, YouTube premium comes with a bunch of shit nobody wants so surely they could cut that stuff to lower the price (or tiered pricing for people who want it).
In some places they are more expensive than Netflix…
Does YouTube pay their content creators properly? No, they have to rely on external partnerships. Does YouTube help their creators solve issues with greedy companies making copyright claims on not their content? No, they close channels because of such claims and strip creators of income they deserve. Does YouTube keep their platform secure to protect its creators? No, hackers managed to get access to the biggest channels on the platform despite YouTube being aware of the issues for months. Does YouTube at least use their knowledge from spying its users to stop bots posting comments? No, bot comments are all over the place. And I could go like that for ages…
The fact is YouTube is a shitty platform and people use it because they have to not because they want to. Because they have a fucking monopoly! People are paying thousands of dollars directly to content creators through platforms like Patreon, because they like the content. But people are not willing to support financially the platform that openly don’t give a fuck about their users and creators (which are the only reason this platform exists) and care only about their shareholders. Because why would they pay to make the rich richer while content creators struggle to earn money for rent!
Google has been shamelessly destroying all their projects the last few years in a desperate fit to make money. They’ve weakened ad blockers on chrome, they’ve altered the search algorithm so random BS is mixed in with regular to drive towards sponsored content, their starting to setup browser level DRM and creating un skipable ads. None of this is for anything more than greed and desperation. They no longer see anything other than money as the end goal and don’t care if their selling a shittier product at a higher price than no one was ever even willing to pay for. F*ck google.
YT Premium costs less than $4 for me and I also get YT Music. It sure beats paying $4 for only a music service.
Until its no longer profitable like the hundreds of other BS google tricks you into supporting only to ditch later https://killedbygoogle.com/ . Also in what world are you paying under $4 the standard package today is $13.99
I’ll stop paying when it stops working. Also regional pricing. I pay around $3.9 for Premium + Music.
No. This is why if a service loses sight of its core value proposition, it dies.
If youtube is actually successful in killing adblocking on their service - which I suppose a server-side timer could actually do - then they will only succeed in killing their relevance, just like so many social media seem to be doing right now.
I pay for services like a debrid and VPN, because they provide me with the services I need. For very few dollars a month I can get 4K streaming from their servers 24/7. That is all hosting should cost. If the fediverse version of youtube, peertube, became mainstream then collectively people should have absolutely no problem maintaining those costs from the users’ side.
Once that happens and mainstream video streaming is part of the fediverse, I think the network effect that governs social media might snowball until eventualy centralised social media is a thing of the past.
Do not pay for youtube, whatever you do. Let them die.
You think too much of the average person. This sort of thing might affect you, but it won’t affect your friend’s 8 year old brother or his parents who just want a convenient way to watch pewdiepie
Perhaps, but you can only crush so much blood from a stone and the masses are slowly becoming destitute.
Social networks don’t succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won’t all leave right away.
If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren’t up to their eyeballs in ads.
We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.
This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it’s… well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let’s just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn’t quite hit that tipping point yet I don’t think.
With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They’re already selling views which could really sink them in the end.
Speaking of suicide, Tumblr found out that most of its content was porn and most people were coming for it when it banned it
“Soon we will have a new web. One far younger and far more powerful.”
lol this post is nothing more than a tantrum from a leech of a service they’re too cheap to pay for and scrabbling for reasons other than said cheap-ness
you may get likes on the internet for this wholly selfish take but we all know it’s nothing more than that.
It’s just devastating when you invent unwholesome motivations for my words to attack as an alternative to attacking the ideas themselves.
My ego is in tatters.
You do realize the average person watches YouTube on their TV or their phone, with ads? You are not the target audience for Google.
So I fully expect YouTube to kill adblocking at some point and they might lose what? 10% of users? Of which 5% either come back to watch ads or pay the subscription because all the content is on there?
I’m 100% pro adblocker, the internet is a mess without, but it’s stupid to think YouTube wouldn’t cut you off the moment you don’t provide any benefit to their service (For example despite adblocking you might give Superchat money to streamers, or join Streamer memberships).
Audience is only part of the equation, arguably not the largest part. How many content creators use adblock? The big ones already know how completely meaningless ad revenue is because youtube doesn’t pay them enough and they are already aware of how easy it is to block ads. Also they’re more likely to be using youtube on a desktop because they use one to create, and they also are more aware of the alternatives like revanced. A lot of big creators have spoken out over the years in favour of adblocking.
If youtube makes it impossible for creators to use their own platform they’ll leave in droves, and they will have the voice to encourage their audience to follow. Youtube isn’t the main voice on their own site, the creators are.
Another thing this will impact is the ability for creators to collaborate, since they would have to watch others’ ads in order to see their videos.
Once that happens, the audience will naturally follow. That’s how social media sites have failed in the past. They’ve pissed off the power users to the point they finally left, then the content declined, then users followed.
Youtube is making the same mistake all capitalist entities do, of mistreating the people who actually make the product they’re selling. It’s a fundamental contradiction that only leads to decline in the end, it’s just a matter of when. This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, if this isn’t it, then something down the line will be.
Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…
Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.
The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.
Youtube constantly screws over and underpays the people who create all of the content that makes their site possible whilst also demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide. That could never backfire.
demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer
Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.
whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide
There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.
To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.
$20/mo would have kept me fed for the better part of a month a couple years ago. Money has almost never not been tight, often to the point of being inhumane.
If they start forcing ads, I’ll just do what I used to do when I didn’t have home internet and start downloading videos instead. Which is nicer to be able to hold onto anyway. If someone doesn’t like me “stealing,” they can fucking pay me.
Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur’s Gate 3, even I’m waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that’s just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.
$20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we’re being honest.
I don’t like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That’s the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we’d see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.
And let’s be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It’s difficult to find a person who doesn’t have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).
Oh nooo, who will think of the big tech who continue to get record profits every year?
I want creators to get paid when I watch them but I also don’t want ads. YT Premium is affordable (it costs less than $4 a month for me) for me and I also get YT Music with it. I watch hundreds of hours worth of video from multiple creators so it’s a fair deal.
Quit bragging and start sharing that code you’re using for $4/month YT Premium that the rest of us have to pay $13.99 after last month’s price hike.
Woah dude that’s crazy. Anyways, I’m still going to AdBlock them and pirate yt music. Big tech can suck my
Personally I don’t want to pay Google out of principle tbh, the creators I support can benefit from my Patreon donations and Nebula subscription
That’s way too expensive and I can’t afford it. YTP is less than $4 a month so at least the creators gets at least a few cents from my views, and I watch a lot of creators.
Where the hell are you paying less than $4 a month? It’s $14 here in America. Even with a student discount, it’s still twice the price you’re quoting.
I find this take wierd. If you do not want to support Google, stop using services created by them.
The content creators can upload videos to multiple platforms if they want to
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Because somehow paying $4 a month is unreasonable for a service that I use for 2-4 hours every day.
Right.
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I’m a premium user so I’m not affected (for now)
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And that’s how things die due to no revenue. Running YouTube is expensive af and the more people who used things like revanced, the worse things will become for everyone else.
It’s funny how you put all the blame on the users and none on the people that run the site. They fail to pay creators properly, fail to protect them from copyright claim abuse, and all the while they expect those creators to keep making content to keep their site relevant. It’s going to come crashing down eventually.
Also, in matters of taste the customer is always right. If people are so fed up with ads that they adblock en masse and/or leave, then youtube are the only ones to blame.
My point in my comment was about how YouTube is expensive to run and that the more people who refuse to generate revenue for it (I feel dirty writing that and strongly disagree with it, by my feelings have no effect on reality,) then it has to make shittier and shittier decisions to generate that revenue.
I 100% agree that YouTube should pay their creators more and protect them from bullshit copyright, but that would just compound the issue of the cost of running the site.
What is this entitled attitude everyone has where they believe they should be handed things for free? It completely unsustainable and childish. Corporations do not do things for free, they can’t. They exist solely to generate revenue and if they can’t, they die. I generally hate corporations on principle, but again my feelings don’t change reality.
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Nobody is saying they should be handed things for free, we are saying that youtube is doing a bad job and shouldn’t be enabled.
Piracy is not a moral problem, it is a service problem. They are making their service worse with their decisions, and if it’s not sustainable long term then it will die, which I believe is inevitable at this point.
Again, this isn’t about individual behaviour, it is about mass behaviour. None of us can control that. If youtube wants to succeed, they have to navigate the reality that adblocking will happen on their service, and I don’t believe they can do that. It’s not that it would be physically impossible, they just lack the capacity to find a solution because of how they are structured. The problem is that they will not accept a lower bottom line, they have to keep increasing revenue so they are squeezing people, and eventually they will go too far. Once they get just a little bit too close to the sun they will start their death spiral and then they’re done.
Federated networks prove that we don’t need some central overlord to run our networks for us, and once there is a way to own our own video sharing network I would have absolutely no problem giving some money to support it. I’m not going to give money to a big corporation to enable them to keep squeezing us. They don’t make a good service, they make a shitty, awful service that we have to fight them in order to use properly. The only substantial thing they’re doing is server hosting, and we don’t need them to do that. The only real barrier is critical mass of users and creators, and eventually they’re going to push enough people away that that happens.
Maybe they shouldn’t operate in the first place if they cannot think of a sustainable business model without f*ing their users up.
Basically everything within capitalism fucks over someone that’s just business as usual 8n out society. Usually to a much worse degree, think the children who likely made your clothes for next to nothing. I’m all for tearing down the system, but there’s not a whole lot as an individual that I can do.
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You’ll care as more and more people have to quit YouTube or make progressively more shit content to appease the algorithm. It also makes it harder and harder for new people to start on YouTube.
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I support the sentiment, but today everything is a service that wants your money, this resource is finite. And when it comes to YouTube, it’s not even about whether you like it or not: YouTube is a monopolist.
But I hate the service, it’s the only service around though.
There’s a reason why they are the only ones. It’s very hard to scale a platform to YouTube scale. Like insanely hard and very expensive. The only other players that could take over are Meta and maybe Microsoft. Not sure if they would be any better.
I’ve been thinking that pornhub might make a good competition if they made a safe for work version.
You hear that Texas?
There’s others that are at that scale. Amazon, Valve, battle.net, Netflix, pornhub, CloudFlare, to name a few.
lol you hate the service so it makes it ok for you to steal? K good sirs, keep on pirating
Is pirating stealing? Nothing was taken from YouTube. You could say it’s unauthorized access, or unauthorized duplication of data, but none of that leaves YouTube down any data.
In their defense, it costs bandwidth to Google.
In my attack, fuck Google. Costing them money is a good thing. They are literally trying to lock down corporate control over the Internet.
Right. It really pains me to see how many people simply buy into nonsensical corporate propaganda. This is a matter of our freedom and our democracy, and every single day that the mega-corporations are expanding their hold of our information retrieval and processing, we get one step closer to not being able to control what’s happening to us anymore, to tell reality apart from deception, to innovate, to build our own futures. 1984 is such a good piece of literature because it is shocking, but I find it even more shocking that we are accelerating ever more into such a future.
I’ll gladly pay for a service that doesn’t thrive on pushing propaganda down people’s throats to maximize watch time and that isn’t actively trying to make my user experience miserable by removing downvotes, forcing shorts and so on.
I’d rather pay someone to kick me in the nuts. Sounds like a better deal tbh.
Good thing I don’t like youtube.
I meant that if you use YouTube a lot, it would be fair to pay for an ad-free experience.
Like Cable Television, right?
I use SponsorBlock.
And you realize that YouTube will do everything in their hands to stop you from using these apps in the future right? That was kinda the point of the article.
Making people pay (with their time and attention) while they are already paying for subscription will not encourage more people to buy premium.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a service that shows more ads than content.
fuck YouTube premium. why would I pay £19.99 a month when literally the only defining feature for me is no ads. all this will do is allow for more complex ad blockers to be made to bypass this
The creators also get a good chunk of the money from premium as far as I’ve been able to verify (by asking some I follow directly).
Why not pay creators directly through Patreon PayPal or equivalent instead of Google as well?
Well, for one thing it scales more efficiently. If you watch 50 creators, giving Google a 45% cut is more efficient than paying processing fees on $20 split 50 ways. If you want to be truly fair, the logistics become basically impossible without massively increasing your budget. That’s why, when most people opt to give directly, they’re effectively choosing to reward only their most favorite channels while giving nothing to everyone else.
I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s not objectively superior to Premium, which does fairly distribute the creator’s cut. Google is able to endlessly split your $11 creator’s cut into micro-contributions based on exact watch-time in a way that individuals cannot replicate. Every creator you watch gets their share. Not as much as a direct donation, true, but nobody gets left out and it’s considerably more than they’d get from an ad-watching viewer.
Finally a good argument, thank you.
I agree that premium splits the percentage of my cash equally and easily but only 55% bugs me. That’s an arbitrary number based off of some black box calculation.
I do not trust YouTube to have my or the creators best interest in mind.
If this number was 90% for creators I would consider it fair. The majority of the work comes from creators and is the reason YouTube has any people at its doorstep.
In the meantime, I can still far less effectively make use of my money the way I want to until a better alternative comes around.
I’ll just have the sweat it and try harder to be a better consumer, I guess.
That’s an arbitrary number based off of some black box calculation.
It’s not arbitrary. It’s the same 55/45 split that creators have gotten from ad-revenue as part of the YouTube Partner Program. I can’t seem to find a source to prove it, but IIRC the split percentage has remained completely untouched for a very long time, maybe even since YPP was originally introduced in 2007.
I should also stress that this is a revenue split, not a profit split. Youtube pays all of their operating expenses after creators take their 55% share. It means that the final balance sheet for Youtube works out to something like (fudging): 55% creators, 25% expenses, 20% profit. I won’t shill for the shareholders – the deal could be better, but it’s not exactly highway robbery, either.
Thank you for the information. I needed some brushing up on all of it.
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If no one pays for YouTube how can they keep supporting their insanely costly infrastructure? Hosting all those videos is not free. Far from it.
I’m perfectly fine paying for YouTube if that means I can continue to have access to awesome creators under a easy to use platform. It would be a very sad day if Google decided to shut down YouTube due to not being able to cover it’s costs.
The only other company that could potentially take over would be meta. Which would probably be even worse. At least YouTube provides an option to pay to disable ads.
Good. Let them close it.
They won’t, because it’s still making money hand over fist. This is all because tech profits are down a smidge now we’re all getting back to normal after COVID, so they’re all cranking up the enshittification dial to compensate.
None of these companies are “losing” money. They’re just making very slightly less than they were before. Fuck 'em.
I would be fine if YouTube crumbled and was put into second place by a better platform or two.
Yes it’s the best option currently which is why they can do such ridiculous practices.
But once they have actual competition, I expect them to bend over backwards for my attention. Because if they don’t change the current trajectory, they’ll go the way of the other digital giants of the past.
Do not worry about having a viable platform in a future without YouTube. I am 100% sure there will be one.
I just wish they kept the ads at the start and end. There is something off putting about watching some documentary about some horrible event only to have it pause for some perky Grammarly ad in the middle of it.
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This is an extremely unlikely hypothetical. Google is one of the most profitable companies in the world and there is no sign of that changing, even considering all the people who block ads right now. There is no reason to squeeze everyone like this.
There’s a lite version that’s only for the ads.
It’s cheaper than the full 19.99.
While that might still be too much, I just wanted to point out that if you don’t want ads, it doesn’t cost the full 20quid.
This was news to me so I went looking and couldn’t find it on youtube. Reading articles seems to indicate it is only available in certain regions and at certain times. I finally found the link to the page (https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite) and confirmed it’s not available for me in the US at least.
I pay for youtube premium because I watch a lot of youtube and it is easily worth the price. I paid $12 to see oppenhimer and that was only 3 hours. I watch way more than 3 hours of youtube every week.
Up next: An AI-enabled Web Browser extension which
- mutes the YouTube ads and overlays it with cute cat videos
- clicks the “skip” button for you
“While the duration of this timer isn’t revealed, we expect it to be somewhere around 30 to 60 seconds.”
Peak journalism.
I just got my first 30 second UNSKIPPABLE ad on my TV the other day…I closed youtube, as watching a 1min video is NOT worth 30 seconds of ads
The really annoying part is YouTube gets all their content for free, while every other subscription video service pays for content.
They do, but the costs to store all of that high resolution video is enormous. Especially since it must be replicated to local repository for quicker access as popularity raises and removed when popularity falls on videos. The amount of content stored and served is significantly more than Netflix houses. That being said, ads are getting way too intrusive.
other streaming services dont let pretty much anyone upload gigabytes of video
Me gesturing at gazillions of porn sites that lets anyone upload any videos…
If YouTube implodes, pornhub will immediately launch an sfw version to grab the fleeing content creators.
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Honestly I’m surprised they haven’t done so already, they already have the tech to do it, probably need to scale it a bit.
Now I wonder if there aren’t SFW videos in pornhub from people that want to upload videos but don’t want to use YouTube. Or NSFW video that aren’t really porn, like a random guy reviewing videogames naked for some reason. I’m not checking either.
I remember people from certain subreddits used to upload full movies to pornhub and share them for shit and giggles.
Creators no longer get ad revenue? What did I miss?
The ad revenue is a portion of what the advertisers paid.
YouTube DOES get its content for free. They pay YouTubers per view, essentially a portion of profit, whereas something like Netflix pays for the creation of content and then also a portion of profit made.
Who pays for the severs and billions of gigabytes of storage required to hold all those videos?
We do, with the data google sold about us all.
How much data left is there to sell about me? Pretty sure they know pretty much everything about us already.
My surfing habits change a little, but it’s mostly cyclical.
They don’t need new data to sell, they just find a new client who doesn’t have your info yet.
The point is that that’s in their own interest, because if they wouldn’t host it, they wouldn’t make any money.
I know you’re mostly joking, but Google does sell your data/browsing habits for advertising, being able to show car dealership ads to someone who’s browsing history indicates they’re in the market is extremely valuable. It’s not just about things “about you” like demographics/location, but an active, rolling profile about where you’re most likely to spend your money.
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I believe he is referring to the fact that YouTube don’t have to pay upfront for new content, they even get new content without hunting for it, and many smaller channels don’t have partnership and so on.
Sure they have a platform, backend and so on. But Netflix needs to have all that too plus buy things to show to their customers.
That’s what I thought, and it’s kind of a silly point to make. You’re just moving around the order of the steps. They still pay for it.
I believe he is referring to the fact that YouTube don’t have to pay upfront for new content, they even get new content without hunting for it, and many smaller channels don’t have partnership and so on.
Well, sure, but on the other hand, those smaller creators couldn’t attract any attention or grow their audience without a platform to do it on. And, like it or not, youtube has that and doesn’t charge those new creators anything to use the platform (unlike platforms like Vimeo, as one example).
Most of those large profitable channels wouldn’t have been able to grow totbhwir current size without a free to use platform to spread their content to a wider audience.
There’s give and take on both sides.
;
Of course, the payment share on ads and memberships is fair and equitable is a separate discussion…
The worst part of YouTube ads is super long ads (sometimes even multiple hours long). It has happened to me multiple times. And coincidentally it always happens when I’m feeling sleepy.
Here is a screenshot.
Seems like a way to check for attention. Not clicking the skip indicates you’re not actually watching. The benefit to them is probably more ad revenue.
I think back in 2015, there was the Tai Lopez ads that were also very long.
