You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services)
Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.
And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.
I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.
Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage.
Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.
First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
I hear you, but I can only live in the now and not whatifs. I refuse to watch ads and will pay to avoid them. If a service I use makes that impossible, then I’ll no longer use the service.
And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.
But you don't need to drop a service. You can keep it as good as it is. You just don't reward google predatory tactics by paying, as you are literally making YT worse.
But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into. If we agree that being exposed to persuasion always has negative value, then ads are bad. Watching ads is the only behavior that causes them to persist. If everyone blocked them, YouTube would go out of business or switch entirely a paid model. If everyone paid, then they switched to a paid model already. The only choice the causes ads to persist and increase is to both refuse to pay, refuse to block, and still watch. So don't do that.
So if I don't pay and I don't want to watch ads then what? I'm not going to jump through mental gymnastics to not pay creators and Google for offering the service. If you truly don't want to reward Google, then don't use anything from Google.
How did it work until now? Anyway, we both know that care for "creators" is "think of the children" thing, but I will play along: pay them using patreon (or, I have bought this: https://theduranshop.com/the-duran-gold-eagle-premium-t-shir..., triple time overpriced but they deserve it).
For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.
On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.
Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.
Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.
So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)
Not sure what you mean. I was a test subject? The test still seems to be ongoing after 10 years. I fail to understand how any of these alleged experiments involve me.
Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable.
> I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years.
I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.
It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".
Yes, it’s mostly just the ads. There are some nice-to-haves like video downloads and background audio on the iOS app. I almost never use search, recommendations, or shorts, but I’m sure you’re right to criticize those features.
Can you download the videos to mp4 or is it some proprietary DRM thing that only plays on YouTube? If not that just sounds like a worse version of yt-dlp
Definitely the latter. On the iOS app you choose videos to download, and I believe they only work for 30 days without Internet access. I use yt-dlp for videos I want to archive, but I use the YouTube app downloads for one-off stuff like loading up my iPad before a flight.
I've stopped recommending this (except for in-person to friends) because it's so valuable, and I'm seriously worried about it getting stomped by YouTube.
> difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.
Yeah. That's the difference. That's literally it, the rest is window dressing. You are choosing the monetization strategy: ads or money. If you're not living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you watch a lot of YouTube, paying $13 or whatever is the sensible choice.
Yes, lots of things about the product suck, as you've described. But the content on it is good and the recommendation algorithm is pretty good, at least in its obvious goal of bringing me to new-to-me channels on a regular basis.
> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video
If they do this then the right arrow becomes your best friend. If it's part of the stream then they have no way of blocking things so you can't skip past them. If they embed some way of notifying the app that it needs to block skipping here or there then that's what adblock would start triggering from. I'm assuming that's why they don't do it now.
> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.
Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death"
Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.
Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc.
None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators.
Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube.
Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads.
And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment?
That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?
Yes, I know.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism
They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?
Looks like it worked and it works, without any changes, while the number of views is keeping their earnings to small group that will not increase as there is not infinite number of time to watch the movies. And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
>And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.
Looks like the planet will. It has already started to sanitize flee infestation called humanity. And, contrary to what it was told to you, planet is fine. Nothing wrong with it. Scratching. And will joyfully survive for millions years to come. We wont.
Sure I do, by suckers watching ads, like it always was.
The whole thing about Google is that they are not software company (as people like to falsely believe), they are advertising company, financing everything else from ads. Including search, youtube, android, gmail and all other side projects.
And those side projects brings them data, to advertise more efficiently.
Now, seeing a trend to monetize their side toys is just pure greed, they don't really need that.
This is also the reason, why no one can compete with them. As competing with free products is impossible unless you have side financing.
It worked until now for, what, 20 years? And it worked very well, check Google stock.
Don't be afraid, they have calculated people not paying into the strategy.
And it wont stop working because you wont pay Google extra money. But it will become worse for most of people, including you, if you set yourself into position of slave and pay, confirming their theory that they can exploit you so much more.
Btw, did you check the link? You should really learn from it.
"vote with your wallet" is like trickle down economics, it's like if only everyone used paper straws we could prevent climate catastrophy. Split up FANGM should be the bare minimum.
It is not, but discipline is needed instead consumerism. And every half intelligent marketing guy will make it harder than to just pay.
Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws.
Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
> Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws
No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.
> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?
Ok, I wanted to avoid it, but since you didnt understand, paper straws are just straw men. They have absolutely nothing with voting with wallet, it is just some lame scenario, comparable at nothing and kicked instead of the real thing.
Or said differently: plastic straws are only a minor part in ocean pollution, while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing.
And yes, I agree it depends on number of pieces, but I don't put any trust into USA as state, even without Trump, being able to persecute billion $ corporation.
> while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing
That's what I'm getting at is wrong. The paper straws are an analogy, if everyone stopped driving cars and lived in the woods we could reduce carbon emissions significantly, therefore the reason we can't stop climate change is people not voting with their wallets. Everything is people not voting with their wallets, it applies to everything, that's why it applies to nothing.
Or stratify users into creators and viewers and force both strata to pay, where viewer users cannot upload and creators cannot watch (even if they paid).
Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.
I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to.
I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
> I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. [...] The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.
The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price.
Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.
Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
> Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Then stop watching youtube. You're just free-riding on the backs of whatever mechanisms exist to motivate the people who make videos to keep doing so. Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music.
If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.
This is a big part of it. It drives the price up a lot but I don't want it so I pay for nothing,
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
I don't pay and I use adblock and sponsorblock. I don't watch enough to make it worth it and with ads YT is literally unwatchable now. I watched a mentour pilot video the other day without the blockers and every 2-3 minutes there was an ad interruption, every time for the same stupid car. Not even relevant because I don't buy or use cars.
And there is no competition for YT right now.
Also, I really don't care about the ethics. I don't care if you think it's wrong. I'm just saying why I do it, not trying to justify it ethically. Because I have no ethics when it comes to big corporations. Just like they don't towards their customers.
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."
I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
YouTube is providing these videos through the standard html ports with no authentication necessary, like most websites on the planet. This is how you give away information away for free on the web. I don't feel entitled to free stuff, but if someone is giving it away, why not take it?
And since I'm taking what they are giving me for free, then whether or not I decide to watch the parts they try to force on me to try to entice me to buy something I have no intention of buying is none of their business.
If they didn't leave this door wide open then I would be forced to decide if it's worth enough for me to pay to use it. But since they do I do what I want. It's not up to me to make sure that YT's and creator's business models are making them money.
You'll notice that it's always YouTube that is the target, though. People feel entitled to free YouTube as though by birthright. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they cancel and move on, they don't usually claim they deserve it free.
Maybe because it was not monetized originally, and so those who were around back then argue it must remain that way?
> If someone doesn't like Netflix, they cancel and move on, they don't usually claim they deserve it free.
Not really. I cancelled netflix and I went back to torrents. And I'm sure there were many like me.
I don't think I deserve it free, but by doubling the price for the adfree option they just got to the point where I didn't care anymore.
I just get it free because I can, not because I think I deserve it. I don't have ethics when it comes to megacorps. Just like they screw us over whenever they can.
Previously I subscribed because watching on netflix is less hassle than downloading. But now the price is too much of an annoyance to bother with downloading. I used to be on the 720p plan which is enough for me, and when they dropped that and included ads on the cheaper 1080p plan, I would have had to move to the ad-free 1080p and that was just too much. Literally double the price.
Even worse, it's come to the point where it is actively destroying the internet. Everything from every news site being paywalled to click bait mania to brain rot content focused on the bottom suckers who can't ad block.
Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?
maybe, hard to say. but the people who make videos, and get 55% of the revenue (give or take a bit), frequently are not (unless you insist on watching mega channels only).
While I think there is certainly a lot of questionable content because of monetization, some of my favorite YT channels exist because of it.
For example, there's a guy who rebuilt a early-1900's sailing boat from scratch, funded almost entirely by revenue from his channel. The videos are crazy high quality hand-construction porn and would never exist without the monetization aspect. Oh, and I had no prior and no current interest in boat building.
Most of the channels I follow (via RSS, rather than YT itself) are like this, and YT generally does an excellent job at putting new channels in front of me from time to time that marry my interests (even one's I didn't know I had) with phenomenally great story telling via video.
I know that it creates opportunities for people. The question is, could that guy have done it without the monetization part? Certainly, would've just taken a lot longer...
Exactly. All those screaming clickbaity headlines etc. Even serious youtubers have this now. And all the horrible sponsor fragments. It's just no longer usable without sanitation plugins.
They screw us too though. For premium viewers they already get more money, but you still have to put up with their sponsor stuff. They could put clean videos on their patreon or something but almost nobody bothers
This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some
self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;)
On the rare occasion I watch YouTube via my Roku stick, ads cause me to mute the tv and skip when I can. I guess I could put a mini pc behind the TV and get all the browser extensions but this compromise is good enough for my lazy self.
I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs.
* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.
* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.
* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.
* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)
Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:
It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
>...only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows...
I'm extremely skeptical that the company that makes most of it's money on the collection of data isn't still collecting data on your viewing habits (and other assorted account-related activities) just because you clicked a checkbox. I don't have a lot of great evidence to back this up but I would still see videos related to my viewing history in the after-video suggestion grid as recently as a few months ago ( before I realized I could zap it with Ublock)
Absolutely there is no reason to believe they aren't still collecting data.
But the checkbox claims that they aren't logging, and so by clicking it they know your intention is not to cooperate in their fundamental business model.
It's just yet another little deniable dark pattern pressure, making the service suck a little when you don't do what they want.
And my outrage point is you get this dark pattern pressure even while you are actually paying money at the same time.
They make more money from the free users and ads than they do from subscriptions. They actually don't want paying users, they just kind of hsve to offer the option to keep those users pacified.
> * I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
The whole point of YouTube is watching your subscriptions or recommendations based on your previous history. What is your use case if you don't even want to be logged into it?
But there are still ads. You still get the ones the creators put in. That alone shouldn't happen, there should be a requirement for creators to upload sponsorfree vids that only premium subscribers can see. That would be a whole lot fairer.
After all the creators already get paid more for premium views.
Still a non sequitur. Irrelevant. The comment claimed that paying for youtube makes it good. Not using youtube does not address the claim thst paying for it makes it good.
Yes. If I'm paying money, why can't I have what I want instead of what they want to shove at me? I thought paying for it made it nice? It's not like it would be either a technical or ui challenge.
Answer is paying does not make it nice. Paying does one thing, which is significant, but the experience ovarall still sucks, including even that one thing, ads, because you still get ads.
I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less.
Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website
At least it respects it for 30 days, the Facebook app (which I use to keep in touch with family) is a desolate place where literally every time you open the app your feed is filled with shorts and posts from people you aren’t friends with. And those aren’t event the ads!
Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.
Specifically it's about $14 a month in the US, from what I see.
I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.
