9 ms·

The YouTube Premium Concept Is All but Done

75 points by elemeno 8y ago

agnokapathetic 8y ago
I’m a YouTube premium subscriber and I never watch any “original content”. I simply enjoy zero advertisements. Paradoxically the target demographic willing to pay to be ad free is probably worth far more to advertisers than those who don’t— making it difficult to justify the product offering. Though I’d certainly use YouTube significantly less if I had to sit through the ads.
- minitoar 8y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. You also get google play as part of the subscription, which I find to be just as good as spotify.
  - viraptor 8y ago
    If you keep music downloaded it's better - play doesn't force you to refresh/re-download every few weeks.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanworl 8y ago
  Not dealing with ads and being able to play videos in the background on iOS are the two reasons I pay for YouTube. If I were no longer able to do that my YouTube consumption would drop dramatically.
- kylecordes 8y ago
  As with many other posters, I don't care one bit about the original content, have not even looked at one minute of it. But it's worth $15 for my family to not be subject to stupid ads. I'd pay twice as much. The business model here is not subtle, it doesn't require a big long-term investment or deep understanding. Just charge people money for the thing they want. I consume a fair amount of technical content, on YouTube. If I had to watch ads, I would probably stop rather than watch. I've seen some technical content with sponsored products etc., and as I understand in the broader pop-culture content sponsor ad reads are now quite common. So even with the Premium subscription, the L shortcut key to advanced in seconds is extremely useful... I assume it will be taken away next.
  - cookiecaper 8y ago
    > But it's worth $15 for my family to not be subject to stupid ads. Yes. Nursery rhymes and other entertainment for toddlers is by far our largest use case for YouTube, and ads would frequently comprise things like the latest horror movie trailer. If we didn't have the option of YouTube Premium to make it so the ads didn't interject, we would've been done with YouTube a long time ago. Kind of a non-issue for us now though -- since moving to an area serviced by Comcast and thus having a mandatory data cap, we just use youtube-dl to grab the video once and then stream them over the LAN through a Plex server.
    - andybak 8y ago
      Is wired connectivity still that much of a problem in parts of the US? We have data caps in the UK but they only kick in at absurd levels of usage - to the point it's never occured to me to check. I rather assumed that there would be a gradual improvement in the situation over there.
      - etcet 8y ago
        Most Comcast customers in the US have a 1T monthly cap. Their language: "After using these 2 courtesy months, if you exceed the plan you will be charged $10.00 for each 50GB of additional data provided, but charges will not exceed $200 each month, no matter how much you use." I hit 700G last month. If I had to do a full backup or restore I'd definitely go over 1T. Annoyingly, they count both ingress and egress traffic.
      - mjevans 8y ago
        It is. Source: I live in a 'dense' suburb near Seattle (renting, but finally in a house that's not as noisy or otherwise hell as apartments can be). I'm a Comcast customer (for lack of ANY OTHER actual high speed data competition; DSL is like 8M bit down and less than 1M bit up per second). Their 1G bit plan gives me something like 25-30 M bit/sec upload, and comes with a VERY small 1T bytes cap. Not even /trying/, I easily come near to 700-800 M bytes per month. I fully expect to exceed that during the holiday season when I have to liquidate my vacation time per my current employer's policy (or loose it) and have nothing better to do than binge on various legal video products.
- cheath 8y ago
  I love it for the ad-free videos. I honestly didn't even know that original content was a part of the offering. But I'd happily keep paying for this one feature.
- scandox 8y ago
  Me too. One of the dumbasses apparently...
- denormalfloat 8y ago
  The paradox is resolved if you consider yourself an advertiser. When you pay for "ad free", it's equivalent to bidding on yourself and then showing yourself nothing. A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self.
  - steve19 8y ago
    Good point. And they do with native advertising. As a YouTube premium subscriber I still have to sit through (or fast forward through) sponser messages or put up with obviously paid for videos.
  - nothrabannosir 8y ago
    I like this idea, although I do want to note: > A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self. At least I'd get my money back :( But it's a great mental model.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      The mental model gets better when you realise online ad auctions have bids multiplied by the predicted click-through-rate (pCTR). That means someone can outbid you easily if it is predicted the ad will be clicked, and they have to pay a load of money if it's predicted the ad is very unlikely to be clicked. Which in turn means, you'll effectively only be shown ads you're interested in, since the predictor thinks it's very likley you'll click (or watch the whole thing for a preroll ad). Turns out, that predictor is mostly right - it did a good job of showing me ads that were funny enough to watch to the end, and correctly realised I would never watch an ad twice, so never showed me the same ad twice.
  - gibolt 8y ago
    I can predict or skip those ads. The ones that I can't skip otherwise (especially on mobile) are why I'm a subscriber. Side thing no one ever mentions about ads, they always play at 1x. I watch between 2-4x and ads seem so slow when they happen
  - manigandham 8y ago
- zippie 8y ago
  Same here. I enjoy YouTube Music more lately, which allows you to play any “music video” such as live performances in audio only, and is also included in the subscription.
- hbosch 8y ago
  > I simply enjoy zero advertisements. I'm a Youtube Premium subscriber as well, and this is by far the #1 perk. However, it's technically wrong (you probably already know this) to call Youtube content ad-free just because we aren't seeing Youtube's ads. :) Almost all of the content creators I follow on YT simply advertise or product-place inside their videos.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    In my mind those are two different things. Youtube Premium pays for the video hosting platform. Content producers advertise to support their content production.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      A share of youtube premium revenue goes to video producers too though. The share is the money they would have earned from the ad that would have been shown had you not had premium. (it's actually even more complex than that, since if you had been shown that ad, the advertisers daily budget would have been debited, meaning that advertiser might have reduced their bids on other users to have the same overall spend. The payment has a correction to take that into account).
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  I pay YouTube purely for the lack of ads too, and have never watched any of the Originals content or used any other feature of YouTube other than simply watching videos from channels I sub to (I don't comment, or take part in communities, or any of that stuff). I sub to 200+ channels and YT is my primary replacement for TV, so I'm more than happy to pay for it to be ad-free. Channels that insert their own ads into video are a step too far though, and I've started unsubscribing from them. Patreon is fine, affiliate links in the description are fine (if they're relevant, eg tools you used, items you showed in the video), and I actively participate in both to support channels I like. But sitting there talking about "random product dot com forward-slash channelnamehere" as though they're the most exciting thing since sliced bread, just cheapens the identity immensely, and is the modern day equivalent of seeing your favourite sports/hollywood star hawking off some random crap on the shopping channel.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    I don't mind the product mentions in videos, as long as they're relevant and relatively short. For instance, Glenn Fricker (Spectre Sound) talks about music production on his channel, and he has a short "sponsored by" segment in most of his videos, about a music distribution service that gets your music onto just about every streaming service in one go. That's genuinely useful for his target audience, and there's a small signup fee rebate to be had. I usually skip over the 10 seconds or so now, but it's an example of appropriate sponsorship.
- on_and_off 8y ago
  I watched some of it. So in France they took the most famous youtubers out there, and tasked them with creating 2 series. Both were pretty uninspired derivative work. You could see that there was way more budget than on these people regular videos, but that the whole thing was mostly a paycheck, not a passion project. I don't think Youtube even has to produce any content to be honest. No ads and Play Music ? That's already a great value proposal. If on top of that you add a video streaming service which actually has a library that only grows (instead of a rolling one like netflix) and that actually contains different cuts of each films, bonuses, cut scenes, etc, I might be willing to just let go of Netflix and go with them.
- wavefunction 8y ago
  I just use an ad-blocker and don't see any ads on youtube
  - viraptor 8y ago
    Doesn't work for the YouTube app.
    - drewg123 8y ago
      There are other non-official, youtube apps that it does work for. I wonder when/how Google will crack down on them.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - totfz 8y ago
      I avoid using my mobile as much as I can. If I'm at home I use my computer, if I'm out I'd do anything other than watch videos on a 4" screen. I wonder if I'm alone in this.
    - JDiculous 8y ago
      You don't have to use the Youtube app, you can use a mobile browser than supports plugins (eg. Firefox)
- bobbyi_settv 8y ago
  Yeah. I've considered moving from Google Play Music to Spotify, but I don't know if I'm ready to deal with Youtube having ads on my phone and TV (I know that ad blocking is an option on my laptop). The actual "Youtube premium" is basically a non-factor in whether they would keep me, although I'll admit I did really enjoy season 1 of Cobra Kai.
  - rangibaby 8y ago
    Unless you have a very old phone you should be able to block ads on it
- joegahona 8y ago
  I didn't know they had original content either. The main selling points for me were the zero ads and the offline playback, and playback with your device's screen off.
- randallsquared 8y ago
  Conversely, I only signed up for Premium to see Cobra Kai.
  - YokoZar 8y ago
    So did I, but I stuck around because I enjoyed the ad-free part.
- dominotw 8y ago
  I use youtube premium for 1. No ads. 2. Backgrounding, for listening to audiobooks while I sleep. 3. Download tech lectures and audiobooks for the car. As other have said, I would pay double too.
  - kenneth 8y ago
    Listening to audiobooks while you sleep? Please do elaborate? Do you feel like you get subconsciously smarter by hearing content during sleep? Is there a reason for listening to books while sleeping? For me, lack of attention is a key reason why I don't listen to audiobooks. I can read and focus on the content, but when it's just played back to me I'll lose track of it.
    - Konnstann 8y ago
      I like listening to people talk while I fall asleep, so I'll have youtube playing in the background. I can't fall asleep very easily if left to my own thoughts so background noise I can focus on helps.
      - Spivak 8y ago
        Internet radio might be up your alley since it's hard for me to follow long narratives when I fall asleep at some unknown point during them and then have to search to find the last thing I remember. I usually listen to the news for a country I have no connection to to avoid the problem of hearing names / events I know IRL. Easy to jump in and out, the content is always fresh, and the speakers are calm and collected.
    - dominotw 8y ago
      sorry i meant 'while i try to fall asleep' :D
- kiwidrew 8y ago
  I don't see the ads, because I use an adblocker. Every once in a while I happen to visit YouTube without the adblocker enabled, and... how can anyone put up with that experience?!?! I quickly re-enable the adblocking and return to my blissful ignorance. It's much the same experience on the rest of the web, actually. I simply can't figure out how normal people manage to cope with the deluge of advertising that's plastered everywhere. And even with an adblocker, the various sponsored content and thinly-veiled promotional blogposts is still constantly spewing forth...
  - mrep 8y ago
    What websites do you visit which are that bad? I was an early adopter of adblock but about a year ago I turned it off to see what it was like and it has been totally fine so I haven't turned it back on.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      Youtube - he said it in the first line.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    I never turn off my adblocker, it just isn't worth the annoyance. Instead, I support various people through Patreon, if I enjoy the content they make. That way, they get a much bigger cut, and aren't being screwed over by YouTube's over-eager demonetization policies.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Which just means that people arent willing to pay enough to actually be ad free. Many people don't seem to realize just how lucrative advertising can be, and how little they would be able to compensate considering how much media they consume every day. A single youtube video could be 5 or 6 figures in production and you can flip through a dozen without issue. That's a serious amount of value in return for ads.
- JDiculous 8y ago
  Why not just use an ad-blocker?
  - yurishimo 8y ago
    Mobile. It’s hard to block ads for mobile devices without resorting to DNS blocking hacks. Most people don’t want to deal with that.
    - JDiculous 8y ago
      No it's not, just use Firefox and use any adblock plugin just like you would on desktop.
      - visarga 8y ago
        Can FF also play audio in locked screen mode?
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        YouTube app itself can't do that, so I assume you're already using something different? BTW. that's literally the single dumbest thing about YouTube app, and I can't fathom why it's the case.
        Phrodo_00 8y ago
        Pretty sure it can if you have premium... let me check: Yep.
        JDiculous 8y ago
        yes
        dorchadas 8y ago
        If not Firefox, try Brave. It can play with a locked screen, though you have to restart it because it automatically pauses (might be a way to turn that off). Also automatically blocks the YT ads without a plugin. Brave in incognito mode has become my default YT listening method on mobile.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  There's a difference between small production cost videos and high production values videos: the former is more 'real' (in a way that reality TV definitely isn't, since reality TV is phony). People seem to like that 'real' quality. It's not that higher production values wouldn't be accepted, but that those come with hired writers, actors, directors, high costs, and mass marketing to recoup those costs. The market can only support so much high-cost content, which means less variety than people want. Conversely, the market can support enormous variety in low-cost content.
- danans 8y ago
  The article isn't saying that YT Premium for ad removal is going away. It just says that the YT Original content is going to also be available via an ad supported model for non YT Premium subscribers. Its central claim is that YT couldn't make compelling case for original scripted long form content to be a selling point for the premium subscription, mostly due to it being dominated by short form content.
- speedplane 8y ago
  In the past two years, I've probably recieved dozens of YouTube Red/Premium/etc marketing e-mails, pop-ups, etc. Every one of them highlighted some high quality, exclusive content, which I can't remember. I don't remember a single marketing message mention that they'll remove ads, and in fact, your post is the first time I heard about it. I doubt I'd pay google for premium YouTube content, but I probably would do so to remove ads. Maybe YourTube's problem is more about messaging than content/price.
discreditable 8y ago
I had YouTube Premium to avoid ads. Since the adpocalypse, more creators are adding sponsored content to their videos. So now I've got ads even though I'm paying.
- fludlight 8y ago
  Does a content creator get paid if someone with youtube premium watches their video?
  - philfrasty 8y ago
    peanuts compared to revenue from product placements
    - Retric 8y ago
      YouTube premium viewers can watch more videos per hour due to lack of commercials. This boosts the value of product placements, on top of that product placements rarely include residuals for unusually popular vidoes making this a large net win over normal YouTube adds.
  - akovaski 8y ago
    Yes. "Creators can earn money from advertisements served on their videos, from YouTube Premium subscribers watching their content, and in some cases, through viewer-purchased goods like Super Chat, Merch, and channel memberships." https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72857 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72857
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  The vast majority of youtube content I encounter is thinly veiled commercials of one form or another. It's so bad that occasionally I'll ask myself if the overt and relatively easily defeated ads exist in part to obfuscate the more subtle advertising most content has become rife with.
  - 8y ago
PhantomGremlin 8y ago
The biggest winners here are Google shareholders. There was no way Google was going to spend enough cash to successfully compete with the likes of Netflix and Disney. It's better that they pulled the plug early.
nerdponx 8y ago
I would have paid for YT Premium if I had some guarantee that I wouldn't be surveilled aggressively even as a paid user.
analyst74 8y ago
The content creation space is extremely competitive and audiences are fickle. On top of that, Hollywood is a very self-reinforcing system, where industry connection is super valuable at getting funding, securing talents, rights and other things needed to deliver a successful project. Outside funding will have a hard time competing against existing investors, and will end up either overpaying or settle with less promising projects with trouble securing funding otherwise.
ohazi 8y ago
I love YouTube and watch a ton of creative and technical content. I'm arguably the ideal customer for a product like YouTube premium. But I use an ad-blocker and pay creators directly via Patreon (whenever possible) instead. So why didn't I bother signing up for YouTube premium, even though I was excited to the level of shouting, "This! This is what I wanted!" when it was first announced? I have zero confidence that Google is willing to keep their experiments like this one alive for more than a year or two. This result seemed obvious and inevitable. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety, but I'm now far more likely to try out a random probably-not-going-to-be-around-next-year startup with a neat idea than an interesting looking Google experiment. Google used to have a reputation for being clever and innovative. It was fun to try out their new products. They had features that were original and helpful rather than gimmicky and "me too." Product updates added features without throwing away old functionality that was obviously still important. Products lasted longer than one or two promotion cycles. These days it's just frustrating.
- ariwilson 8y ago
  It's been around for 3 years now though??? How long does something have to last before it's worth trying out?
  - ohazi 8y ago
    It's not about any one particular product. I used to be excited about Google products in general, and was eager to try them out. Now I'm not. This was genuine good will that the Google brand used to have, and they threw it away -- the blame here lies squarely with Google. The core principals of the company seem pretty firmly rooted now. There's everything related to the advertising and tracking side of the business, which nobody really likes and which they try to keep hidden, but that pays the bills a hundred times over. Then there's the "cool new technologies" side of Google, which used to be run by sensible intelligent people. This was the glamorous side of Google, so a lot of the attention seeking sociopaths ended up here. Most wannabe-Googlers are interested in this side of the company, not ads. So now this side of the company is full of bozo politicking PMs with no original ideas other than to make shitty clones of everything Apple does, and the smart people are either frustrated or gone. Google corporate dangles the most ridiculous, foot-shooting promotion structure anyone has ever seen, and so their non-ad product roadmap is a complete circus. So it doesn't matter that this particular product happened to be around for three years before getting axed. Google's non-ad product strategy is essentially that every product will get killed or replaced by a "new and improved" product, designed by a completely different team, that's demonstrably worse. Fuck that.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling I pay for YouTube content. YouTube just doesn’t get a cut of it. I pay for it on Patreon. There is so much great short-form educational content waiting to happen, but instead we get more long-firm scripted crap.
wjoe 8y ago
>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling. Well, YouTube found out definitively that the answer was a resounding no. It's not so much that the audience isn't interested in paying for long form storytelling (or at least myself), but maybe just not interested in paying YouTube for it. YouTube is a place for short videos, I go there when I want to watch tech reviews, recipes, or something silly. When I want longform storytelling, I go to Netflix or something else that I pay for. I'm not sure what the solution is, but YouTube hasn't done a good job of advertising or raising awareness of Premium content at all. The most I see is a few thumbnails of things that I need to pay to watch on the homescreen. I would be happy to be proved wrong, but I have low expectations of drama or any longform content on YouTube - I expect it to be low budget and badly acted, so I may as well just go elsewhere. Perhaps ad blockers are a double whammy against YouTube Premium. I don't see ads on YouTube anyway, so I don't need to pay to get rid of them. And maybe they're advertising Premium content on there, but I've not seen them anyway. I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable. Still, it wouldn't take much for them to draw more attention to Premium videos, whether it's from ads, creating more social media buzz around them, or just putting a larger section on the home page that at least gives me a description of the content that I'm missing. As always, YouTube relies too much on their algorithm of placing more of the same content in front of you. When the experience is designed to just keep you clicking on though the recommendations of videos like the ones you just watched, it's no wonder that they're not getting eyes on original content. And yet it should be so easy for them.
- leppr 8y ago
  > I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable. Not only would that force them to enter a game of cat-and-mouse with developers, it would also give an opportunity for ad-free/ad-light competition. My intuition would be that they want to wait until "paying for not having ads" becomes sort of a norm, before prematurely forcing ads on desktop users and potentially encouraging an exodus.
aetherson 8y ago
Impulse was considerably better than it has any right to be, though.
- yegle 8y ago
  Yes Impulse is surprisonly good compare to those low quality originals and is the only original series I watched so far since I start using YouTube Red/Premium 3 years ago.
payne92 8y ago
I don’t understand why YouTube hasn’t implemented Patreon as a feature. That’s one model that’s clearly working at some scale, and it could be easy expanded to “subscriber only videos“
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  They have. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294
bad_user 8y ago
I would pay for YouTube Premium, but it's not available in my country.
akvadrako 8y ago
Some of their originals were pretty good, for example Dallas & Robo.
vinceguidry 8y ago
YouTube isn't taking any chances but still expecting to get big like Netflix just cuz. I have a friend who makes original, scripted, television-length episodic content and he can't get noticed, despite having a whole season already up on YouTube, link below. This sort of serious production isn't really viable for the sponsorship model of most YouTube channels, which stick to 10-20 minute videos that can use what a TV crew would consider a barebones production staff. YouTube should be reaching out to people like my friend like they reached out to my mom shortly after all the crafting TV shows started disappearing in the early 2000s. I think they just lost their nerve, but still don't have the resources to truly do what Netflix is doing. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/vid...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

75 points by elemeno 8y ago

I’m a YouTube premium subscriber and I never watch any “original content”. I simply enjoy zero advertisements. Paradoxically the target demographic willing to pay to be ad free is probably worth far more to advertisers than those who don’t— making it difficult to justify the product offering. Though I’d certainly use YouTube significantly less if I had to sit through the ads.

minitoar 8y ago
Came here to say the same thing. You also get google play as part of the subscription, which I find to be just as good as spotify.
- viraptor 8y ago
  If you keep music downloaded it's better - play doesn't force you to refresh/re-download every few weeks.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ryanworl 8y ago
Not dealing with ads and being able to play videos in the background on iOS are the two reasons I pay for YouTube. If I were no longer able to do that my YouTube consumption would drop dramatically.
kylecordes 8y ago
As with many other posters, I don't care one bit about the original content, have not even looked at one minute of it. But it's worth $15 for my family to not be subject to stupid ads. I'd pay twice as much. The business model here is not subtle, it doesn't require a big long-term investment or deep understanding. Just charge people money for the thing they want. I consume a fair amount of technical content, on YouTube. If I had to watch ads, I would probably stop rather than watch. I've seen some technical content with sponsored products etc., and as I understand in the broader pop-culture content sponsor ad reads are now quite common. So even with the Premium subscription, the L shortcut key to advanced in seconds is extremely useful... I assume it will be taken away next.
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  > But it's worth $15 for my family to not be subject to stupid ads. Yes. Nursery rhymes and other entertainment for toddlers is by far our largest use case for YouTube, and ads would frequently comprise things like the latest horror movie trailer. If we didn't have the option of YouTube Premium to make it so the ads didn't interject, we would've been done with YouTube a long time ago. Kind of a non-issue for us now though -- since moving to an area serviced by Comcast and thus having a mandatory data cap, we just use youtube-dl to grab the video once and then stream them over the LAN through a Plex server.
  - andybak 8y ago
    Is wired connectivity still that much of a problem in parts of the US? We have data caps in the UK but they only kick in at absurd levels of usage - to the point it's never occured to me to check. I rather assumed that there would be a gradual improvement in the situation over there.
    - etcet 8y ago
      Most Comcast customers in the US have a 1T monthly cap. Their language: "After using these 2 courtesy months, if you exceed the plan you will be charged $10.00 for each 50GB of additional data provided, but charges will not exceed $200 each month, no matter how much you use." I hit 700G last month. If I had to do a full backup or restore I'd definitely go over 1T. Annoyingly, they count both ingress and egress traffic.
    - mjevans 8y ago
      It is. Source: I live in a 'dense' suburb near Seattle (renting, but finally in a house that's not as noisy or otherwise hell as apartments can be). I'm a Comcast customer (for lack of ANY OTHER actual high speed data competition; DSL is like 8M bit down and less than 1M bit up per second). Their 1G bit plan gives me something like 25-30 M bit/sec upload, and comes with a VERY small 1T bytes cap. Not even /trying/, I easily come near to 700-800 M bytes per month. I fully expect to exceed that during the holiday season when I have to liquidate my vacation time per my current employer's policy (or loose it) and have nothing better to do than binge on various legal video products.
cheath 8y ago
I love it for the ad-free videos. I honestly didn't even know that original content was a part of the offering. But I'd happily keep paying for this one feature.
scandox 8y ago
Me too. One of the dumbasses apparently...
denormalfloat 8y ago
The paradox is resolved if you consider yourself an advertiser. When you pay for "ad free", it's equivalent to bidding on yourself and then showing yourself nothing. A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self.
- steve19 8y ago
  Good point. And they do with native advertising. As a YouTube premium subscriber I still have to sit through (or fast forward through) sponser messages or put up with obviously paid for videos.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  I like this idea, although I do want to note: > A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self. At least I'd get my money back :( But it's a great mental model.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    The mental model gets better when you realise online ad auctions have bids multiplied by the predicted click-through-rate (pCTR). That means someone can outbid you easily if it is predicted the ad will be clicked, and they have to pay a load of money if it's predicted the ad is very unlikely to be clicked. Which in turn means, you'll effectively only be shown ads you're interested in, since the predictor thinks it's very likley you'll click (or watch the whole thing for a preroll ad). Turns out, that predictor is mostly right - it did a good job of showing me ads that were funny enough to watch to the end, and correctly realised I would never watch an ad twice, so never showed me the same ad twice.
- gibolt 8y ago
  I can predict or skip those ads. The ones that I can't skip otherwise (especially on mobile) are why I'm a subscriber. Side thing no one ever mentions about ads, they always play at 1x. I watch between 2-4x and ads seem so slow when they happen
- manigandham 8y ago
zippie 8y ago
Same here. I enjoy YouTube Music more lately, which allows you to play any “music video” such as live performances in audio only, and is also included in the subscription.
hbosch 8y ago
> I simply enjoy zero advertisements. I'm a Youtube Premium subscriber as well, and this is by far the #1 perk. However, it's technically wrong (you probably already know this) to call Youtube content ad-free just because we aren't seeing Youtube's ads. :) Almost all of the content creators I follow on YT simply advertise or product-place inside their videos.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  In my mind those are two different things. Youtube Premium pays for the video hosting platform. Content producers advertise to support their content production.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    A share of youtube premium revenue goes to video producers too though. The share is the money they would have earned from the ad that would have been shown had you not had premium. (it's actually even more complex than that, since if you had been shown that ad, the advertisers daily budget would have been debited, meaning that advertiser might have reduced their bids on other users to have the same overall spend. The payment has a correction to take that into account).
ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
I pay YouTube purely for the lack of ads too, and have never watched any of the Originals content or used any other feature of YouTube other than simply watching videos from channels I sub to (I don't comment, or take part in communities, or any of that stuff). I sub to 200+ channels and YT is my primary replacement for TV, so I'm more than happy to pay for it to be ad-free. Channels that insert their own ads into video are a step too far though, and I've started unsubscribing from them. Patreon is fine, affiliate links in the description are fine (if they're relevant, eg tools you used, items you showed in the video), and I actively participate in both to support channels I like. But sitting there talking about "random product dot com forward-slash channelnamehere" as though they're the most exciting thing since sliced bread, just cheapens the identity immensely, and is the modern day equivalent of seeing your favourite sports/hollywood star hawking off some random crap on the shopping channel.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  I don't mind the product mentions in videos, as long as they're relevant and relatively short. For instance, Glenn Fricker (Spectre Sound) talks about music production on his channel, and he has a short "sponsored by" segment in most of his videos, about a music distribution service that gets your music onto just about every streaming service in one go. That's genuinely useful for his target audience, and there's a small signup fee rebate to be had. I usually skip over the 10 seconds or so now, but it's an example of appropriate sponsorship.
on_and_off 8y ago
I watched some of it. So in France they took the most famous youtubers out there, and tasked them with creating 2 series. Both were pretty uninspired derivative work. You could see that there was way more budget than on these people regular videos, but that the whole thing was mostly a paycheck, not a passion project. I don't think Youtube even has to produce any content to be honest. No ads and Play Music ? That's already a great value proposal. If on top of that you add a video streaming service which actually has a library that only grows (instead of a rolling one like netflix) and that actually contains different cuts of each films, bonuses, cut scenes, etc, I might be willing to just let go of Netflix and go with them.
wavefunction 8y ago
I just use an ad-blocker and don't see any ads on youtube
- viraptor 8y ago
  Doesn't work for the YouTube app.
  - drewg123 8y ago
    There are other non-official, youtube apps that it does work for. I wonder when/how Google will crack down on them.
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  - totfz 8y ago
    I avoid using my mobile as much as I can. If I'm at home I use my computer, if I'm out I'd do anything other than watch videos on a 4" screen. I wonder if I'm alone in this.
  - JDiculous 8y ago
    You don't have to use the Youtube app, you can use a mobile browser than supports plugins (eg. Firefox)
bobbyi_settv 8y ago
Yeah. I've considered moving from Google Play Music to Spotify, but I don't know if I'm ready to deal with Youtube having ads on my phone and TV (I know that ad blocking is an option on my laptop). The actual "Youtube premium" is basically a non-factor in whether they would keep me, although I'll admit I did really enjoy season 1 of Cobra Kai.
- rangibaby 8y ago
  Unless you have a very old phone you should be able to block ads on it
joegahona 8y ago
I didn't know they had original content either. The main selling points for me were the zero ads and the offline playback, and playback with your device's screen off.
randallsquared 8y ago
Conversely, I only signed up for Premium to see Cobra Kai.
- YokoZar 8y ago
  So did I, but I stuck around because I enjoyed the ad-free part.
dominotw 8y ago
I use youtube premium for 1. No ads. 2. Backgrounding, for listening to audiobooks while I sleep. 3. Download tech lectures and audiobooks for the car. As other have said, I would pay double too.
- kenneth 8y ago
  Listening to audiobooks while you sleep? Please do elaborate? Do you feel like you get subconsciously smarter by hearing content during sleep? Is there a reason for listening to books while sleeping? For me, lack of attention is a key reason why I don't listen to audiobooks. I can read and focus on the content, but when it's just played back to me I'll lose track of it.
  - Konnstann 8y ago
    I like listening to people talk while I fall asleep, so I'll have youtube playing in the background. I can't fall asleep very easily if left to my own thoughts so background noise I can focus on helps.
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Internet radio might be up your alley since it's hard for me to follow long narratives when I fall asleep at some unknown point during them and then have to search to find the last thing I remember. I usually listen to the news for a country I have no connection to to avoid the problem of hearing names / events I know IRL. Easy to jump in and out, the content is always fresh, and the speakers are calm and collected.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    sorry i meant 'while i try to fall asleep' :D
kiwidrew 8y ago
I don't see the ads, because I use an adblocker. Every once in a while I happen to visit YouTube without the adblocker enabled, and... how can anyone put up with that experience?!?! I quickly re-enable the adblocking and return to my blissful ignorance. It's much the same experience on the rest of the web, actually. I simply can't figure out how normal people manage to cope with the deluge of advertising that's plastered everywhere. And even with an adblocker, the various sponsored content and thinly-veiled promotional blogposts is still constantly spewing forth...
- mrep 8y ago
  What websites do you visit which are that bad? I was an early adopter of adblock but about a year ago I turned it off to see what it was like and it has been totally fine so I haven't turned it back on.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    Youtube - he said it in the first line.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  I never turn off my adblocker, it just isn't worth the annoyance. Instead, I support various people through Patreon, if I enjoy the content they make. That way, they get a much bigger cut, and aren't being screwed over by YouTube's over-eager demonetization policies.
manigandham 8y ago
Which just means that people arent willing to pay enough to actually be ad free. Many people don't seem to realize just how lucrative advertising can be, and how little they would be able to compensate considering how much media they consume every day. A single youtube video could be 5 or 6 figures in production and you can flip through a dozen without issue. That's a serious amount of value in return for ads.
JDiculous 8y ago
Why not just use an ad-blocker?
- yurishimo 8y ago
  Mobile. It’s hard to block ads for mobile devices without resorting to DNS blocking hacks. Most people don’t want to deal with that.
  - JDiculous 8y ago
    No it's not, just use Firefox and use any adblock plugin just like you would on desktop.
    - visarga 8y ago
      Can FF also play audio in locked screen mode?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        YouTube app itself can't do that, so I assume you're already using something different? BTW. that's literally the single dumbest thing about YouTube app, and I can't fathom why it's the case.
        Phrodo_00 8y ago
        Pretty sure it can if you have premium... let me check: Yep.
      - JDiculous 8y ago
        yes
      - dorchadas 8y ago
        If not Firefox, try Brave. It can play with a locked screen, though you have to restart it because it automatically pauses (might be a way to turn that off). Also automatically blocks the YT ads without a plugin. Brave in incognito mode has become my default YT listening method on mobile.
cryptonector 8y ago
There's a difference between small production cost videos and high production values videos: the former is more 'real' (in a way that reality TV definitely isn't, since reality TV is phony). People seem to like that 'real' quality. It's not that higher production values wouldn't be accepted, but that those come with hired writers, actors, directors, high costs, and mass marketing to recoup those costs. The market can only support so much high-cost content, which means less variety than people want. Conversely, the market can support enormous variety in low-cost content.
danans 8y ago
The article isn't saying that YT Premium for ad removal is going away. It just says that the YT Original content is going to also be available via an ad supported model for non YT Premium subscribers. Its central claim is that YT couldn't make compelling case for original scripted long form content to be a selling point for the premium subscription, mostly due to it being dominated by short form content.
speedplane 8y ago
In the past two years, I've probably recieved dozens of YouTube Red/Premium/etc marketing e-mails, pop-ups, etc. Every one of them highlighted some high quality, exclusive content, which I can't remember. I don't remember a single marketing message mention that they'll remove ads, and in fact, your post is the first time I heard about it. I doubt I'd pay google for premium YouTube content, but I probably would do so to remove ads. Maybe YourTube's problem is more about messaging than content/price.

discreditable 8y ago

I had YouTube Premium to avoid ads. Since the adpocalypse, more creators are adding sponsored content to their videos. So now I've got ads even though I'm paying.

fludlight 8y ago
Does a content creator get paid if someone with youtube premium watches their video?
- philfrasty 8y ago
  peanuts compared to revenue from product placements
  - Retric 8y ago
    YouTube premium viewers can watch more videos per hour due to lack of commercials. This boosts the value of product placements, on top of that product placements rarely include residuals for unusually popular vidoes making this a large net win over normal YouTube adds.
- akovaski 8y ago
  Yes. "Creators can earn money from advertisements served on their videos, from YouTube Premium subscribers watching their content, and in some cases, through viewer-purchased goods like Super Chat, Merch, and channel memberships." https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72857 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72857
newnewpdro 8y ago
The vast majority of youtube content I encounter is thinly veiled commercials of one form or another. It's so bad that occasionally I'll ask myself if the overt and relatively easily defeated ads exist in part to obfuscate the more subtle advertising most content has become rife with.
- 8y ago

PhantomGremlin 8y ago

The biggest winners here are Google shareholders. There was no way Google was going to spend enough cash to successfully compete with the likes of Netflix and Disney. It's better that they pulled the plug early.

nerdponx 8y ago

I would have paid for YT Premium if I had some guarantee that I wouldn't be surveilled aggressively even as a paid user.

analyst74 8y ago

The content creation space is extremely competitive and audiences are fickle. On top of that, Hollywood is a very self-reinforcing system, where industry connection is super valuable at getting funding, securing talents, rights and other things needed to deliver a successful project. Outside funding will have a hard time competing against existing investors, and will end up either overpaying or settle with less promising projects with trouble securing funding otherwise.

ohazi 8y ago

I love YouTube and watch a ton of creative and technical content. I'm arguably the ideal customer for a product like YouTube premium. But I use an ad-blocker and pay creators directly via Patreon (whenever possible) instead. So why didn't I bother signing up for YouTube premium, even though I was excited to the level of shouting, "This! This is what I wanted!" when it was first announced? I have zero confidence that Google is willing to keep their experiments like this one alive for more than a year or two. This result seemed obvious and inevitable. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety, but I'm now far more likely to try out a random probably-not-going-to-be-around-next-year startup with a neat idea than an interesting looking Google experiment. Google used to have a reputation for being clever and innovative. It was fun to try out their new products. They had features that were original and helpful rather than gimmicky and "me too." Product updates added features without throwing away old functionality that was obviously still important. Products lasted longer than one or two promotion cycles. These days it's just frustrating.

ariwilson 8y ago
It's been around for 3 years now though??? How long does something have to last before it's worth trying out?
- ohazi 8y ago
  It's not about any one particular product. I used to be excited about Google products in general, and was eager to try them out. Now I'm not. This was genuine good will that the Google brand used to have, and they threw it away -- the blame here lies squarely with Google. The core principals of the company seem pretty firmly rooted now. There's everything related to the advertising and tracking side of the business, which nobody really likes and which they try to keep hidden, but that pays the bills a hundred times over. Then there's the "cool new technologies" side of Google, which used to be run by sensible intelligent people. This was the glamorous side of Google, so a lot of the attention seeking sociopaths ended up here. Most wannabe-Googlers are interested in this side of the company, not ads. So now this side of the company is full of bozo politicking PMs with no original ideas other than to make shitty clones of everything Apple does, and the smart people are either frustrated or gone. Google corporate dangles the most ridiculous, foot-shooting promotion structure anyone has ever seen, and so their non-ad product roadmap is a complete circus. So it doesn't matter that this particular product happened to be around for three years before getting axed. Google's non-ad product strategy is essentially that every product will get killed or replaced by a "new and improved" product, designed by a completely different team, that's demonstrably worse. Fuck that.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling I pay for YouTube content. YouTube just doesn’t get a cut of it. I pay for it on Patreon. There is so much great short-form educational content waiting to happen, but instead we get more long-firm scripted crap.

wjoe 8y ago

>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling. Well, YouTube found out definitively that the answer was a resounding no. It's not so much that the audience isn't interested in paying for long form storytelling (or at least myself), but maybe just not interested in paying YouTube for it. YouTube is a place for short videos, I go there when I want to watch tech reviews, recipes, or something silly. When I want longform storytelling, I go to Netflix or something else that I pay for. I'm not sure what the solution is, but YouTube hasn't done a good job of advertising or raising awareness of Premium content at all. The most I see is a few thumbnails of things that I need to pay to watch on the homescreen. I would be happy to be proved wrong, but I have low expectations of drama or any longform content on YouTube - I expect it to be low budget and badly acted, so I may as well just go elsewhere. Perhaps ad blockers are a double whammy against YouTube Premium. I don't see ads on YouTube anyway, so I don't need to pay to get rid of them. And maybe they're advertising Premium content on there, but I've not seen them anyway. I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable. Still, it wouldn't take much for them to draw more attention to Premium videos, whether it's from ads, creating more social media buzz around them, or just putting a larger section on the home page that at least gives me a description of the content that I'm missing. As always, YouTube relies too much on their algorithm of placing more of the same content in front of you. When the experience is designed to just keep you clicking on though the recommendations of videos like the ones you just watched, it's no wonder that they're not getting eyes on original content. And yet it should be so easy for them.

leppr 8y ago
> I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable. Not only would that force them to enter a game of cat-and-mouse with developers, it would also give an opportunity for ad-free/ad-light competition. My intuition would be that they want to wait until "paying for not having ads" becomes sort of a norm, before prematurely forcing ads on desktop users and potentially encouraging an exodus.

aetherson 8y ago

Impulse was considerably better than it has any right to be, though.

yegle 8y ago
Yes Impulse is surprisonly good compare to those low quality originals and is the only original series I watched so far since I start using YouTube Red/Premium 3 years ago.

payne92 8y ago

I don’t understand why YouTube hasn’t implemented Patreon as a feature. That’s one model that’s clearly working at some scale, and it could be easy expanded to “subscriber only videos“

Ajedi32 8y ago
They have. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294

bad_user 8y ago

I would pay for YouTube Premium, but it's not available in my country.

akvadrako 8y ago

Some of their originals were pretty good, for example Dallas & Robo.

vinceguidry 8y ago

YouTube isn't taking any chances but still expecting to get big like Netflix just cuz. I have a friend who makes original, scripted, television-length episodic content and he can't get noticed, despite having a whole season already up on YouTube, link below. This sort of serious production isn't really viable for the sponsorship model of most YouTube channels, which stick to 10-20 minute videos that can use what a TV crew would consider a barebones production staff. YouTube should be reaching out to people like my friend like they reached out to my mom shortly after all the crafting TV shows started disappearing in the early 2000s. I think they just lost their nerve, but still don't have the resources to truly do what Netflix is doing. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/vid...

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