I will pay for premium when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities. Since they won't change, I won't pay.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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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.
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.
Homie missed the point. using ublock and sponsorblock is equal to petty theft. Disliking a company doesn't make it morally right to steal from them.
Imagine acting like removing unwanted content from MY screen is theft. My device my rules honey
Oh baby, you don't understand what you just said, do you?
Nobody forces you to watch ads. Close YouTube, don't look back, email content creators to have em send ad free video links directly to you.
Watching ads is your obligation as consumer, if you decide not to pay for their removal.
It's not my obligation and I'm never going to stop because controlling what appears on my screen, is my legal right ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
If people decide to pay for something they have no legal obligation to because they got brainwashed, that only makes them suckers
You are mixing two things. Nobody can just blast ads on your phone without your consent. But you did give consent by accessing YouTube.
You're not going to guilt trip me out of adblocking Google of all fucking companies lmao
No, I'm not here to defend Alphabet. I'm just saying it's equal to stealing groceries at Wallmart. They request payment, you deny. Just because it's so much easier to do on YouTube doesn't mean it's any more justifiable.
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.
Basically, not sure how Apple does it though. You have a Google family group. You can add individual accounts to that. The group owner cannot see any activities of other accounts, but he could remove people without their permission.
Removed users only lose active family subscriptions like youtube premium and google one (storage). Their watch histories and whatnot will remain the same. Watch out with Google one. If you have Google one and use more storage than google free, then remove google one, you only get a limited time period to remove data over the limit. Afterwards it gets inaccessible, I don't think they delete anything, but no insurance on that.
Thanks, now to convince 4 friends :D
Or 5. It holds 6 people... 4 € per person best case. As for now, they aren't enforcing same household sharing only, like Netflix do. I can't tell you about the future.
Also, not to support such behaviour, but if you aren't made of money, I'm totally okay with you teleporting to Argentina, subscribing to YT Premium at maybe 5 $ a month, and teleporting back to never go there again. That doesn't require an argentinian CC.
I'm not sure about legal technicalities, but I do know that it currently works. Personally, I don't risk it if they ever decide to ban associated accounts, because u know, they totally can refuse to service you, if they were to feel like it.
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.
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 ?
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.
Counterpoint. There used to be far less ads
Counterpoint. Still not making profits.
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.
They pass a lot of the income to producers. Youtube allegedly pays best. They have a ginormous catalogue of videos and allow any user to upload unlimited data.
imagine paying to remove ads
YouTube premium has millions of users and it makes them literally billions of dollars. There is no boulder.
Absolute numbers are meaningless. They also have to maintain infrastructure for that many users.
They should include sponsorblock with youtube premium, I won't pay 12€ per month to watch more ads than on free tv. Youtube doesn't even make their own content. 5€ max for youtube would be okay with no ads.
How is it relevant that youtube does little in house production. The revenue is passed to the creators anyway(by watchtime)
Man the astroturfing is wild in this thread. Didn't take long for them to follow us here from reddit.
Reasons not to buy premium:
- Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
- Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
- YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTube’s copyright claim system wasn’t so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. https://youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
- Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
- Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.
Point one: I'm pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you're on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want. Is it Ideal? No. But you should've acted 10-15 years prior if you wanted to stop this. It's still not ideal though.
Point two: I agree. There does need to be space for them to repent, but they aren't actively trying to, so don't trust them (see the next point as an example of that).
Point three That's a shame. They really need to fix that, though with how corpos do things nowadays, not sure that'll happen.
Point four: That's normal, expected and a reasonable business decision. Most of these features they likely added after premium, and they're meant as incentives. Why else would you want to but their premium, if not for the added features?
Point five: This is shitty and mostly inexcusable behaviour. It's god awful, and they really shouldn't do it. I do have to play devil's advocate a little. They are fully, 100% in their right to do this. If you don't like it, vote with your wallet (and time). If we stop using their services, they'll stop making it worse. They are still A-holes for doing it though.
I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions. I have mine set to delete cookies, cache and history (minus a few trusted domains) on close but I'd imagine it would be easy to differentiate between me and others in my household by browser fingerprints alone. The only question then is whether those guesses are reliable enough for Google to essentially treat those sessions as 1 person, or throw it away since there are bound to be quite a lot of cases where 10s or 100s of people on the same IP have very similar browsing habits and configurations and trying to figure out who is who would be incredibly difficult (think offices where everybody could have exactly the same laptop and share similar browsing habits due to working for the same company). That's my cope anyway. The alternative is Youtube over Tor for which would be painful.
Points 4 and 5 on my end are essentially two sides to of the same coin. I should clarify, I don't have a problem with YouTube introducing a new feature and making that Premium-only.
I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions
It's called fingerprinting
Lol if you think the adblock community represents a boulder that large. Remake this meme with a peasant throwing a pebble at a M1A2 abrams
if adblock users were a minority, why are they trying to stop them ?
I read everyone bitching about the ads but I don't get them, and I have access to an awesome music streaming service too.. you know, cause I have premium..
I use Firefox with ublock origin and get all that for free
You don't get access to youtube music with unlock origin. If you pay for a music streaming service anyway then going with youtube music and paying the few extra bucks to get yet premium is a nobrainer.
yep, and there's more problems:
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we really gotta think what we do with our time. Spending in on youtube tends to have lower value nowadays.
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most stuff on youtube is crap. It's there to make you addicted, to make you watch ads, to make you miserable. Long story short: "influencers" are a drug on society comparable in effects to Crystal Meth. It gives you a short high, but leaves you exhausted.
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most "content creators" really just practice, how to manipulate many people into listening to them. There's a lot of makeup, but not much really to say. Best thing is to not listen to them.
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"content creators" are waaaaay to often just people trying to make money. They're not trying to tell you something of importance. They're jus trying to squeeze money out of you.
Problems on Youtube's side:
- it's a centralized system with platform lock-in. "Related videos" never takes you to other platforms. Search query is intransparent. They ask for waaaay too much money for what it costs them to maintain and develop their systems. I see nothing at all honorable at trying to squeeze money from users.
Youtube has grown into yet another one corpo-speak garbage companies. They used to be respectable, making interesting recommendations, with a clear mission to make knowledge accessible to everyone. Nowadays, they just try to make money.
I agree with all of your points, but I am learning a lot on a very diverse set of topics from YouTube. There are some amazing people making educational videos there. The most time consuming stuff I watch is "let's play" videos. I kind of let them play in the backgrounds sometimes to relax, like white noise.
It's good if it works for you, but for me, it doesn't.
shows me 3 ads in a row
"oh, you don't want to see ads? too bad"
sounds kinda cynical