Having to pay for something so that's "less annoying" is the worst business model. YouTube Premium is very expensive. I had it for a while when I got a Pixel smartphone with a few months of YouTube Premium included. It was great. I also understand that streaming on this scale must entail incredibly high operating costs; the money has to come from somewhere. It's simply a dilemma. But there has to be a better way. Any ideas?
its creating a problem and selling the solution to that problem. im surprised there isnt more of a distaste for youtube out there for just their overall product... ads aside. One of the better things ive done for myself this past year is remove the right sidebar as well as almost all of the homepage.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.
I would pay that 130€ / year if I was alone. I have to be responsible with the money I earn as I have to feed 3 kids and my wife is not working. We also use other different streaming services like netflix, spotify family... adding youtube premium seems not reasonable for me at the moment.
Commenting to share my experience: I ran into and ended up with youtube because it bundles youtube music as well, allowing me to consolidate. I was able to invite my household to the same account.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
In the USA I subscribe to Youtube Premium family. The rate is just $3.00 a month more than Spotify family. For that price you get both the Spotify-equivalent Google-owned service (confusingly called YouTube Music) AND you get ad-free Youtube as a bundle. Basically just $3/month for no ads on Youtube is worth it and much easier to justify for a household on a tight budget.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
Is it actually expensive though? Or does it just feel that way? A movie costs $15, or roughly 13 cents per minute of watch time.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
Premium is a good deal if you would have already had Music, and Music is pretty great while also being a good deal. They also have a cheaper 'Premium Lite' these days, though apparently some content still has ads if you use it.
They’re attempting that now with “memberships.” I’m not a heavy patreon user, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I expect they’ll be able to iterate on it.
An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row
In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
YouTube gives, I think, 55% of revenue (not just profits) to creators, which could be considered similar to production costs making up a majority of expenses.
You're not wrong, but the amount of content on YouTube (that they need to index, store, and stream) is several orders of magnitude more than what's on Netflix.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music a couple of years ago because of Spotify showing disruptive ads/promotions on the premium plan. YT Premium for Music + Videos is worth it for me, being about 2.5USD more expensive per month than Spotify where I live. But I agree that one should just be able to subscribe to them separately.
