Am I the only one that pays for YouTube Premium? I get not wanting to pay for things. I don’t feel bad for Google here, but I also don’t understand what people expect. The government happily subsidizes Musk to litter outerspace. Maybe the government should be subsidizing YouTube?
I want to pay for the content on youtube and I believe that the creators deserve it as well as I understand that the platform costs money. But the UX is so bad and youtube very obviously does not care at all about their viewers, that I morally just can’t justify giving them money for that level of service.
I’m okay with seeing an acceptable level of advertisement. Content creators have ad reads within their videos which are skippable, and they’ve resorted to that because YouTube doesn’t pay very well. It used to be that you’d get a short ad at the start of every video or two, and maybe another short ad per 7 minutes or so. Now, it’s pretty common for every video to have at least 20 seconds of ad before starting and another 10-30 seconds of ad every 3-5 minutes or so. I like watching on my PS5 while doing chores, so I’m subject to all of these ads. I actually have fully abandoned videos halfway in because of ads that were 60 seconds before I would have the option to “skip” the ad.
I pay for enough things in my life that I was okay with the trade-off of the ads on YouTube. Now, it’s (no joke) about 5 minutes of ads interrupting a 20 minute video, and there’s usually a 2 minute ad read within that 20 minute video, so really 7 minutes of ads per 18 minutes of content. But it’s not really 18 minutes of content because there’s an intro, an outro, and a “remember to like, comment, subscribe, and smash that bell” bullshit too. It’s roughly 2:1 ratio of actual content to ads and fluff. I’m not fucking paying to take it from 2:1 to 3:1 and they can eat my entire asshole for even suggesting such a thing. Maybe instead of trying to hold eyeballs ransom with the choice of either subscription payments or and overabundance of ads, they should charge for uploading videos to their servers. Sound like a terrible idea? Then I’m sure they’ll do it within 5 years. Because fuck everybody, that’s why.
Yep. Google treats their service like television, but it’s not television. We all watch the videos on computers and computers are owned by users and each user gets to decide what their computer does, full stop.
The ad model for youtube will always be circumvented by the fact that our computers can run whatever code we want it to (despite Microsoft’s and Apple’s efforts). If that means that youtube goes subscription only, so be it. If that means youtube can’t sustain itself as a business with ad revenue, then so be it. It would mean that decentralized alternatives gain popularity and it would most likely be to the benefit of everyone who isn’t a corporation.
Youtube has a stranglehold on creativity, open speech, and fair use. Youtube will demonetize a video for saying too many swear words. They’ll demonetize or restrict a video for talking about non-sexual lgbt content. They’ll take down legal and legitimate videos for copyright infringement even though it’s fair use.
Youtube is bad for creators and it’s bad for users.
You might want to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE
Did you mean this? https://yewtu.be/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE
I’d pay for it if they didn’t overcharge so much. Their content is provided to them for free, but they charge more than Netflix to distribute it. Fuck that.
YouTube ad tier: $0
Netflix ad tier: $6.99
YouTube premium: $13.99
Netflix standard: $15.49
Huge caveats incoming.
They don’t charge more than Netflix, but most of their content is definitely provided to them for free. On top of that, most of YouTube’s original content is behind their premium subscription paywall. I tried to see how many of their originals shows are actually viewable with their ad tier and it’s hard to pin down a number. My speculation is it doesn’t matter because either so few people are willing to pay for premium or their originals aren’t very marketable. Off the top of my head I’d heard of exactly one YouTube original.
Netflix lowest ad-free price was $9.99 until three days ago.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/2/24190632/netflix-ad-free-basic-plan-discontinued
oh no, anyway now you have more time to watch stuff that people put actual talent into like movies and tv shows and documentaries (this is a jab at youtube in general and not this specific video)
You’re minimizing the abuse. Used to be fine with ads when it was 1-2 max but then it got abusive and greedy. Someone who yells at you once or twice may just be angry, upset, or so on. Someone who yells at you constantly is abusive
At the same time they are enforcing the ban on adblocks they are creating solutions for sponsor blocks to skip the ads that actually bring some money to youtube creators.
Funny how the paying for media content works, you can pay youtube but not the creator of that content, the creator himself gets next to nothing if the youtube algorithm doesn’t favour the content. Not a boring dystopia at all.
Google cornered the video market and killed all competition by mining all of our data and selling it for years.
Now that they are too big to fail they want to turn around and extort us all. The price for premium is NOT reasonable.
This isn’t some mom and pop company trying to serve videos. They abused their size and are now abusing it again.
And the fact that there’s people like you defending them is a problem. We have to fight the mega corp and the bootlickers in our ranks.
Wait, how did they kill all competition by mining our data? Because they could do things cheaper than compwtitors, or…?
The literarily made money off our backs by selling our privacy. Using those I’ll-gotten gians they pushed out the competition.
They didn’t do things “cheaper” they just stole from all of us and now they want more money on top.
So you neither pay with money nor by watching ads for a very expensive to maintain service, but you won’t leave it be either.
I know I’m making myself Unpopular here, but what is it that you’re bringing to the table? Currently you cost YouTube money because streaming video is really expensive. You block out all the ads so every creator is cut off monetization too. This is not a publicly funded library (yet).
Streaming data is expensive, but when you’re vertically integrated to the point Google is, it starts to get significantly cheaper. I’ve been paying creators directly through Patreon for literal years now, and I’ve said before I’d be happy to pay for my usage on Google (including a markup), but paying a flat fee and giving a handful of creators a watch a few cents while Google keeps the lion’s share isn’t good enough for me.
Try Brave browser. It work
Not the browser itself, but the CEO of the company that develops it. (He used to work at Mozilla, but had to resign because of his homophobic actions) https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-ceo-eich-resigns-after-controversy/
Yup. Brave works great on iPhone, too. PiP, no ads, even downloads work fine. And thanks to Airdrop I can watch ad free on TV.
Until yesterday I had a cheap Premium subscription going on but YouTube cancelled it because they found out I don’t live in Asia. Like fuck, it’s not about the money. 5? Maybe 6 or 7? That would have been fine by me. But 20 fucking bucks a month for that? Yeah, nah. Either fix your prices or I will continue to look for workarounds.
Yattee with this guide is another good option for iOS, iPadOS and tvOS (you could also use it on macOS, but I prefer FreeTube or just using Piped or Invidious in the browser). It’s also fully open source: https://github.com/yattee/yattee