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HN: I hate ads YT comes up with a premium offering. Also, HN: I won't pay for YouTube Premium. Here is how I use adblock to block ads. I really don't get thi

HN: I hate ads YT comes up with a premium offering. Also, HN: I won't pay for YouTube Premium. Here is how I use adblock to block ads. I really don't get this rationale. We pay for other services. YT is effectively a pipe which hosts and streams content for you, that does cost something. I consider YouTube to be a repository of knowledge rather than just a specialised video hosting service like Netflix. As it has everything from how do I bake cookies, to something as niche as how do I fix the specific model of bike I have. It makes sense to just pay for it. Content creators can earn money from Patreon or sponsorships but for it to be profitable to host these videos, YT will have to charge for them either via subscription or ads.

raspyberr 5y ago
But they're still going to keep doing all the tracking and whatnot.
madsbuch 5y ago
Both are reasonable. I would say that the problem is in the order: It is not OK for YT to be a healthy company, it needs to grow. It is like a car that is not allowed to max out at a speed.
nomorewords 5y ago
I think that the issue people are having is that (a large portion of) the content on YT also does sponsorships. Also, 'like and subscribe and bell'. So you might pay for YT, but I don't think that the quality of the service improves that much (say like Spotify). Until YT improve their algorithm and stop with the arbitrary 10m time marks for monetization, I think YT is going to have a problem with people seeing a premium variant as a good option opposed to just adblocking. I get that the counterpoint to my point is that YT isn't paying that much and that people are free to do whatever in their videos, but that doesn't make it less annoying. Spotify doesn't pay great, but I don't have to hear a band saying 'buy our tshirts!' after listening to a song/album. I think that the many community scandals, coupled with the, what I view as, changes in monetization strategies has put YT in this position.
- actuator 5y ago
  Agreed, but I think as a principle, I would want YouTube to dictate less on how I can monetize my video. If I am influential and brands want to do product placement with me, it should be upto me. The ideal scenario is, YT takes a fee like they do with Premium for hosting and discovery. The content creator can choose to take a cut if he wishes or can just do his own monetisation. It is upto him, whether he does no monetisation, puts merchandise links in description or outright shows the product in between a video. YouTube can make other integrations for content creators to monetise but they should have freedom of their own as well. The good thing about competition is, if some content creator is being obnoxious with promotions or product placement, users can find someone who is doing a better job. In the past some YouTubers have noted that they get more dollar return from a premium viewer watching their video than an ad one, so content creators can choose to forego on promotional placements and compete on a better experience.
  - nomorewords 5y ago
    I think it could be cool if YT started their own Patreon. Anyone who is a 'member' of the channel, for some basic tier fee even, should not even get the plug as part of the video, or at least have that part skipped by default. This would be a step closer to like someone else here mentioned YT being the intermediary between the companies and the creators and taking a cut from that as well.
    - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
      There are channel memberships, but their main offering is access to members-only content.
- naravara 5y ago
  > I think that the issue people are having is that (a large portion of) the content on YT also does sponsorships. Also, 'like and subscribe and bell'. So you might pay for YT, but I don't think that the quality of the service improves that much (say like Spotify). To expand on what you said, a large proportion of YouTube's content is just clickbaity garbage as well. The whole platform is designed, from the ground-up, as a mechanism to shove intrusive ads in your face. Simply removing the ads and putting in a subscription fee doesn't address a lot of the other noxious effects the ad-centric focus has had on the content environment, the UI, the recommendations, etc. I would much rather subscribe to the YouTuber offshoot services, like CuriosityStream or Dropout or Nebula. They have a clear offering and the services are designed around a clear subscription model.
hiccuphippo 5y ago
You can pay for high quality video knowledge without ads in Curiosity Stream (https://curiositystream.com/ https://curiositystream.com/).
- Y_Y 5y ago
  They also tend to do deals for subscriptions to Nebula, which is a site run by a bunch of YT "creators" which streams their YouTube stuff plus sooner extra content. It seems like a pretty good way to consume their content without touching Google.
proc0 5y ago
I would have paid for YT but they have demonstrated that they will shit all over independent creators, and smear them to justify it, while at the same time prioritizing the mainstream garbage I was trying to avoid by going there. It is suffering from the problem of social media at large: to be a platform or a curator of content? Moderation is tough and largely unsolved, I get that, but it started as a platform and then it flipped over to heavily curating, effectively abusing their influence they built with the help of little channels. Independent creators are the future of media (not just social) in my opinion, and I feel YT has betrayed them by constantly siding with mainstream legacy media, and doing so in a sneaky way... they pretended to be fair and after huge global success they flipped and have no problem manipulating the attention of the masses.
- redwall_hp 5y ago
  The ideal future is Peertube or simply chucking video files on Cloudfront and slapping the standard HTML5 video tags onto a web page. Creators of videos should one their own web presence, letting the internet be distributed as intended instead of siloing large swathes of content in the hands of a few large companies. If you’re producing videos as a business, depending on a third party to provide a free service, you’re going to have issues sooner or later.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    > Creators of videos should one their own web presence. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. They want to own their own web presence but on free servers.
    - Scoundreller 5y ago
      While you might not own peertube, you control your content on your channel. And I’m happy to share in the hosting that way. Bandwidth and spectrum aren’t like oil. If we don’t use it, it’s lost forever. Worked for how we consumed internet video before Netflix/youtube: Torrents.
    - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
asddubs 5y ago
the thing about youtube is that it fucking sucks and i hate it. the only good thing about it are the videos it hosts
falcolas 5y ago
I hate ads. But I do pay. And my views end up being worth about 20x that of a comparable ad view. Absolutely worth it, given how much entertainment it provides.
sebastien_b 5y ago
> Also, HN: I won't pay for YouTube Premium. Here is how I use adblock to block ads. I pay for YT premium, because I got sick of all the preroll and mid-video ads. What am I greeted with now? A bunch of "Sponsored Content" during videos - the kind of thing I specifically paid to get away from.
- asddubs 5y ago
  check out sponsorblock if you hadn't heard of it before. it's a crowdsourced browser add on to skip sponsored segments
  - virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
    How can that even work?
    - asddubs 5y ago
      amazingly well! you get a few extra buttons to mark the beginning / end of a segment when watching a video, you upload the segment to a database along with a category (sponsor, self promotion, asking for engagement, etc) - everyone else with the addon will now have that segment be auto-skipped. a little option to unskip pops up when this happens and you can downvote bad segments, but so far I've never had a false positive
      - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        Unfortunately if you’re using the YouTube app on iOS/Android... ...or could it work for those by using iOS/Android’s accessibility+automation services?
        mardifoufs 5y ago
        YouTube Vanced has integrated support for sponsorblock and in my experience it just works, you just have to turn it on! I've not watched a single sponsored segment in at least half a year now, it's really amazing. Even very very recent or niche videos usually have their ads properly tagged. (make sure you install Vanced from the right website, go on the subreddit for the always updated link)
nyjah 5y ago
I pay for youtube premium and I absolutely love it. Sure creators will do ads, but 10 second fast-forward works really well and its matter of a click or two and I am skipping the entire ad for the video. And there are more than a handful of great niche channels not big enough to have ad reads yet. Television and radio ads I find more obnoxious. Some random celebrity pushing some credit card or the same repeat radio read for the 1,000th time that only ensures I will under no circumstances use their product.
Bodell 5y ago
Disclosure: I do pay for premium because I do not like ads. However, I find myself more sympathetic to the issue you’ve described. Perhaps if people felt that the “content creators” would revive a fair shake of those premium monthly charges I pay they would be more likely to enter into such an agreement. As it stands this is simply not the case and the same holds true for most all content streaming services. The provider and about 1% of contributors get the real lions share, the rest are fighting for scraps (often at the mercy of YouTube’s moderation algos, e.g. getting banned, having videos removed or demonetized because a computer doesn’t really know what it’s looking at.) On top of that YouTube uses my demographic and video watching data to serve me ads everywhere else, my email, my browser, etc. not exactly a fair trade off in simply removing ads from the videos themselves. It truly is not an egalitarian system, therefore the erosion of trust, and as a consequence the unwillingness of its consumers to “play ball”, is simply a product of their own making.
- bscphil 5y ago
  > The provider and about 1% of contributors get the real lions share, the rest are fighting for scraps This is a good point and a much bigger issue than I was initially thinking. Even if 100% of my YouTube ad money and premium subscription went directly to the creators I watch, proportioned by how much time I spent on each channel, I wouldn't do it. That's because there's a weird inequality created by virality. If you're really successful, you can make millions of dollars a year solo. If you don't get past the algorithm or your content is niche, you might have a team of 5 people and make less than 100k a year in total (and obviously there's a very long tail of people trying to make a career of YouTube who are currently failing to do even that). At the end of the day, I think this is ... bad. It may seem "fair" for people to be paid linearly with how much their creations are consumed, but the nature of digital media is such that if something is mainstream enough, boring enough, safe enough, it can scale basically forever with no added costs. (It's why Disney movies can make a billion dollars.) If someone whose work I follow is already making six figures a year, I'd much rather continue watching their content for free (which comes at no cost to them because digital media can be copied), while supporting niche creators who are trying to make rent at the end of the month instead. It may not be "fair" (ad blocking is only a step removed from piracy, they're both effectively copyright subversion), but copyright and endless remuneration based on popularity is creating a bad media landscape. I want to see a better one.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I'm ready to pay, I pay for a lot of stuff: netflix, audible, dynalist, pycharm, etc. But with youtube you pay twice, once with your money, and the second time with your private life. And Google's track record clearly shows it's not a good idea to trust them with it. Google is the only one responsible for my total defiance toward them. They catered to it year after year. Now they are just harvesting the result. They can't have their cake and eat it.
- GloriousKoji 5y ago
  I would argue you also pay with your time, what percentage of total view time is wasted on long intros, sponsored plugs and telling people to do all the typical social media stuff which has nothing to do with real content.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Thankfully, there is a wonderful extension for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ Try it, and you will for a brief moment feel like when you installed a regular adblocker the first time 15 years ago: "WOW". With this + ublock origin + youtube enhancer, the site is a completely different experience. It's the experience I would happily pay for, if it wouldn't mean giving away my whole life to Google's monster AI.
nyhc99 5y ago
I agree, but I think most of us will always remain averse to subscription models. Especially now that everyone seems to be asking for them. While I MIGHT in the future consider paying for premium youtube, I certainly won't be doing it for the various newspapers, like the NYT, who paywall their articles after X reads. I'm just not interested in being tied down like that and incentivized to consume more of their content than I already do. It's a shame that the micro-payment systems that have been theorized about on here for the last decade still haven't come to fruition. I'd pay 5 cents to read an interesting article, or a couple cents to watch a video. Maybe a layer 2 protocol with no transaction fees sitting on top of a cryptocurrency can finally solve this before another decade goes by.
pgrote 5y ago
Of all the services we pay for, our family derives the most value and enjoyment from the YT Premium program. This includes Netflix, Disney, Curiositystream, Hulu, etc.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
the42thdoctor 5y ago
Its thanks to youtube that I can read HN, it is also probably thanks to youtube that I can afford premium. I just wish we could choose which series to fund for youtube originals, like a big contest or something.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
It's unfortunate that the Youtube subscription is bundled with a music subscription. It inflates the price a lot if you're not interested in the latter.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I love Newpipe. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe And libgen. And private trackers. YouTube is largely shit tier mental junk food anyway.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
  Newpipe's "skip silence" feature is absolutely incredible with lectures and public meetings too. It's just an all around better experience.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  YouTube is largely shit tier mental junk food anyway Maybe the stuff you watch. There's heaps and heaps of longform content about every subject under the sun.
dilap 5y ago
I tried paying for the premium offering, but YouTube fucked it up: it wasn't simply YouTube w/o ads, it was a different set of content/recommendations.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
I refuse to pay money to a company that deletes the videos I like to watch over copyright issues nobody cares about. Also, paying money just makes you even more valuable to advertisers and it's not like it will make Google turn off all the spyware.
Bancakes 5y ago
At this point does it matter if youtube goes out of business? Influential content creators can post very optimised and compressed videos on their sites, and a search engine can aggregate top creators.
- cowl 5y ago
  Yes it matters. those creators are "influential" because of youtube. almost noone will follow N creators on N different platforms. The agregation is the main reason why people keep using Youtube or Netflix or Spotify etc. I don't have time to log on 20 different sites to see content When I can log in one and have 20 subcription lists right there.
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    The aggregation is just a search engine with thumbnails. It will do the same job as youtube - a search engine for videos, without hosting any.
zzyzxd 5y ago
I am willing to pay to get rid of ads, but that also makes it easier for Google to track me, since now I have to login a Google account. What's worse for me is, because I use private/incognito browser sessions by default, it will take even more time if I have to login to the account every time I visit youtube.com than just playing the ads. And the worst experience is when I am on my phone, where logging in my Google account in one Google app means I am logged in on all other Google apps. I am sure they put a lot of effort to make it difficult to logout. I remember last time I accidentally logged in to Google Maps app a few month ago, I had to revoke the app's auth token from web management dashboard because I couldn't figure out how to logout within the app.
- Fezzik 5y ago
  I had a similar issue with the NYT - every time I subscribed (and during my subscription period) I found it impossible to avoid getting on their spammy email lists if I ever logged in to read articles. The only workable solution I found is to pay my 1-year subscription fee, immediately cancel the subscription, and then use the NYT in incognito mode thereby stopping them from caching my read article count and avoiding having to login (I would always accidentally login if I maintained the subscription). It’s annoying, but I want to give them money while also avoiding being harassed by dozens of emails every month. Sadly there is no similar work around for youtube.
  - zzyzxd 5y ago
    youtube.com. was heaven for me before they fixed it[1]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581118
aseerdbnarng 5y ago
Ok but netflix charges £8/month for my wife and I to watch its content ad-free, while youtube premium is £11/month per person or £18/month for a family subscription despite all of youtube's content being given to it for free. Youtube premium is horrible value for money for most people.
mushishi 5y ago
I subscribed to Youtube premium as it has a couple of great channels for me, but the upgrade was easy to justify also because I fully replaced Spotify with it. With Youtube premium you could run the Android Youtube app in the background without stopping the music.
8note 5y ago
I have no reason to believe that premium YouTube won't get ads once it's been around for a while. Paying customers are the best people to show ads to. Besides, my current experience is to watch an ad in order to watch an ad in order to watch a video. Getting rid of one layer of ad doesnt mean I'm not watching ads anymore, and I'm not going to pay money to watch ads.

raspyberr 5y ago

But they're still going to keep doing all the tracking and whatnot.

madsbuch 5y ago

Both are reasonable. I would say that the problem is in the order: It is not OK for YT to be a healthy company, it needs to grow. It is like a car that is not allowed to max out at a speed.

nomorewords 5y ago

I think that the issue people are having is that (a large portion of) the content on YT also does sponsorships. Also, 'like and subscribe and bell'. So you might pay for YT, but I don't think that the quality of the service improves that much (say like Spotify). Until YT improve their algorithm and stop with the arbitrary 10m time marks for monetization, I think YT is going to have a problem with people seeing a premium variant as a good option opposed to just adblocking. I get that the counterpoint to my point is that YT isn't paying that much and that people are free to do whatever in their videos, but that doesn't make it less annoying. Spotify doesn't pay great, but I don't have to hear a band saying 'buy our tshirts!' after listening to a song/album. I think that the many community scandals, coupled with the, what I view as, changes in monetization strategies has put YT in this position.

actuator 5y ago
Agreed, but I think as a principle, I would want YouTube to dictate less on how I can monetize my video. If I am influential and brands want to do product placement with me, it should be upto me. The ideal scenario is, YT takes a fee like they do with Premium for hosting and discovery. The content creator can choose to take a cut if he wishes or can just do his own monetisation. It is upto him, whether he does no monetisation, puts merchandise links in description or outright shows the product in between a video. YouTube can make other integrations for content creators to monetise but they should have freedom of their own as well. The good thing about competition is, if some content creator is being obnoxious with promotions or product placement, users can find someone who is doing a better job. In the past some YouTubers have noted that they get more dollar return from a premium viewer watching their video than an ad one, so content creators can choose to forego on promotional placements and compete on a better experience.
- nomorewords 5y ago
  I think it could be cool if YT started their own Patreon. Anyone who is a 'member' of the channel, for some basic tier fee even, should not even get the plug as part of the video, or at least have that part skipped by default. This would be a step closer to like someone else here mentioned YT being the intermediary between the companies and the creators and taking a cut from that as well.
  - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
    There are channel memberships, but their main offering is access to members-only content.
naravara 5y ago
> I think that the issue people are having is that (a large portion of) the content on YT also does sponsorships. Also, 'like and subscribe and bell'. So you might pay for YT, but I don't think that the quality of the service improves that much (say like Spotify). To expand on what you said, a large proportion of YouTube's content is just clickbaity garbage as well. The whole platform is designed, from the ground-up, as a mechanism to shove intrusive ads in your face. Simply removing the ads and putting in a subscription fee doesn't address a lot of the other noxious effects the ad-centric focus has had on the content environment, the UI, the recommendations, etc. I would much rather subscribe to the YouTuber offshoot services, like CuriosityStream or Dropout or Nebula. They have a clear offering and the services are designed around a clear subscription model.

hiccuphippo 5y ago

You can pay for high quality video knowledge without ads in Curiosity Stream (https://curiositystream.com/ https://curiositystream.com/).

Y_Y 5y ago
They also tend to do deals for subscriptions to Nebula, which is a site run by a bunch of YT "creators" which streams their YouTube stuff plus sooner extra content. It seems like a pretty good way to consume their content without touching Google.

proc0 5y ago

I would have paid for YT but they have demonstrated that they will shit all over independent creators, and smear them to justify it, while at the same time prioritizing the mainstream garbage I was trying to avoid by going there. It is suffering from the problem of social media at large: to be a platform or a curator of content? Moderation is tough and largely unsolved, I get that, but it started as a platform and then it flipped over to heavily curating, effectively abusing their influence they built with the help of little channels. Independent creators are the future of media (not just social) in my opinion, and I feel YT has betrayed them by constantly siding with mainstream legacy media, and doing so in a sneaky way... they pretended to be fair and after huge global success they flipped and have no problem manipulating the attention of the masses.

redwall_hp 5y ago
The ideal future is Peertube or simply chucking video files on Cloudfront and slapping the standard HTML5 video tags onto a web page. Creators of videos should one their own web presence, letting the internet be distributed as intended instead of siloing large swathes of content in the hands of a few large companies. If you’re producing videos as a business, depending on a third party to provide a free service, you’re going to have issues sooner or later.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > Creators of videos should one their own web presence. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. They want to own their own web presence but on free servers.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    While you might not own peertube, you control your content on your channel. And I’m happy to share in the hosting that way. Bandwidth and spectrum aren’t like oil. If we don’t use it, it’s lost forever. Worked for how we consumed internet video before Netflix/youtube: Torrents.
  - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago

asddubs 5y ago

the thing about youtube is that it fucking sucks and i hate it. the only good thing about it are the videos it hosts

falcolas 5y ago

I hate ads. But I do pay. And my views end up being worth about 20x that of a comparable ad view. Absolutely worth it, given how much entertainment it provides.

sebastien_b 5y ago

> Also, HN: I won't pay for YouTube Premium. Here is how I use adblock to block ads. I pay for YT premium, because I got sick of all the preroll and mid-video ads. What am I greeted with now? A bunch of "Sponsored Content" during videos - the kind of thing I specifically paid to get away from.

asddubs 5y ago
check out sponsorblock if you hadn't heard of it before. it's a crowdsourced browser add on to skip sponsored segments
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
  How can that even work?
  - asddubs 5y ago
    amazingly well! you get a few extra buttons to mark the beginning / end of a segment when watching a video, you upload the segment to a database along with a category (sponsor, self promotion, asking for engagement, etc) - everyone else with the addon will now have that segment be auto-skipped. a little option to unskip pops up when this happens and you can downvote bad segments, but so far I've never had a false positive
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      Unfortunately if you’re using the YouTube app on iOS/Android... ...or could it work for those by using iOS/Android’s accessibility+automation services?
      - mardifoufs 5y ago
        YouTube Vanced has integrated support for sponsorblock and in my experience it just works, you just have to turn it on! I've not watched a single sponsored segment in at least half a year now, it's really amazing. Even very very recent or niche videos usually have their ads properly tagged. (make sure you install Vanced from the right website, go on the subreddit for the always updated link)

nyjah 5y ago

I pay for youtube premium and I absolutely love it. Sure creators will do ads, but 10 second fast-forward works really well and its matter of a click or two and I am skipping the entire ad for the video. And there are more than a handful of great niche channels not big enough to have ad reads yet. Television and radio ads I find more obnoxious. Some random celebrity pushing some credit card or the same repeat radio read for the 1,000th time that only ensures I will under no circumstances use their product.

Bodell 5y ago

Disclosure: I do pay for premium because I do not like ads. However, I find myself more sympathetic to the issue you’ve described. Perhaps if people felt that the “content creators” would revive a fair shake of those premium monthly charges I pay they would be more likely to enter into such an agreement. As it stands this is simply not the case and the same holds true for most all content streaming services. The provider and about 1% of contributors get the real lions share, the rest are fighting for scraps (often at the mercy of YouTube’s moderation algos, e.g. getting banned, having videos removed or demonetized because a computer doesn’t really know what it’s looking at.) On top of that YouTube uses my demographic and video watching data to serve me ads everywhere else, my email, my browser, etc. not exactly a fair trade off in simply removing ads from the videos themselves. It truly is not an egalitarian system, therefore the erosion of trust, and as a consequence the unwillingness of its consumers to “play ball”, is simply a product of their own making.

bscphil 5y ago
> The provider and about 1% of contributors get the real lions share, the rest are fighting for scraps This is a good point and a much bigger issue than I was initially thinking. Even if 100% of my YouTube ad money and premium subscription went directly to the creators I watch, proportioned by how much time I spent on each channel, I wouldn't do it. That's because there's a weird inequality created by virality. If you're really successful, you can make millions of dollars a year solo. If you don't get past the algorithm or your content is niche, you might have a team of 5 people and make less than 100k a year in total (and obviously there's a very long tail of people trying to make a career of YouTube who are currently failing to do even that). At the end of the day, I think this is ... bad. It may seem "fair" for people to be paid linearly with how much their creations are consumed, but the nature of digital media is such that if something is mainstream enough, boring enough, safe enough, it can scale basically forever with no added costs. (It's why Disney movies can make a billion dollars.) If someone whose work I follow is already making six figures a year, I'd much rather continue watching their content for free (which comes at no cost to them because digital media can be copied), while supporting niche creators who are trying to make rent at the end of the month instead. It may not be "fair" (ad blocking is only a step removed from piracy, they're both effectively copyright subversion), but copyright and endless remuneration based on popularity is creating a bad media landscape. I want to see a better one.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I'm ready to pay, I pay for a lot of stuff: netflix, audible, dynalist, pycharm, etc. But with youtube you pay twice, once with your money, and the second time with your private life. And Google's track record clearly shows it's not a good idea to trust them with it. Google is the only one responsible for my total defiance toward them. They catered to it year after year. Now they are just harvesting the result. They can't have their cake and eat it.

GloriousKoji 5y ago
I would argue you also pay with your time, what percentage of total view time is wasted on long intros, sponsored plugs and telling people to do all the typical social media stuff which has nothing to do with real content.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Thankfully, there is a wonderful extension for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ Try it, and you will for a brief moment feel like when you installed a regular adblocker the first time 15 years ago: "WOW". With this + ublock origin + youtube enhancer, the site is a completely different experience. It's the experience I would happily pay for, if it wouldn't mean giving away my whole life to Google's monster AI.

nyhc99 5y ago

I agree, but I think most of us will always remain averse to subscription models. Especially now that everyone seems to be asking for them. While I MIGHT in the future consider paying for premium youtube, I certainly won't be doing it for the various newspapers, like the NYT, who paywall their articles after X reads. I'm just not interested in being tied down like that and incentivized to consume more of their content than I already do. It's a shame that the micro-payment systems that have been theorized about on here for the last decade still haven't come to fruition. I'd pay 5 cents to read an interesting article, or a couple cents to watch a video. Maybe a layer 2 protocol with no transaction fees sitting on top of a cryptocurrency can finally solve this before another decade goes by.

pgrote 5y ago

Of all the services we pay for, our family derives the most value and enjoyment from the YT Premium program. This includes Netflix, Disney, Curiositystream, Hulu, etc.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

the42thdoctor 5y ago

Its thanks to youtube that I can read HN, it is also probably thanks to youtube that I can afford premium. I just wish we could choose which series to fund for youtube originals, like a big contest or something.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

It's unfortunate that the Youtube subscription is bundled with a music subscription. It inflates the price a lot if you're not interested in the latter.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I love Newpipe. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe And libgen. And private trackers. YouTube is largely shit tier mental junk food anyway.

TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
Newpipe's "skip silence" feature is absolutely incredible with lectures and public meetings too. It's just an all around better experience.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
YouTube is largely shit tier mental junk food anyway Maybe the stuff you watch. There's heaps and heaps of longform content about every subject under the sun.

dilap 5y ago

I tried paying for the premium offering, but YouTube fucked it up: it wasn't simply YouTube w/o ads, it was a different set of content/recommendations.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

I refuse to pay money to a company that deletes the videos I like to watch over copyright issues nobody cares about. Also, paying money just makes you even more valuable to advertisers and it's not like it will make Google turn off all the spyware.

Bancakes 5y ago

At this point does it matter if youtube goes out of business? Influential content creators can post very optimised and compressed videos on their sites, and a search engine can aggregate top creators.

cowl 5y ago
Yes it matters. those creators are "influential" because of youtube. almost noone will follow N creators on N different platforms. The agregation is the main reason why people keep using Youtube or Netflix or Spotify etc. I don't have time to log on 20 different sites to see content When I can log in one and have 20 subcription lists right there.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  The aggregation is just a search engine with thumbnails. It will do the same job as youtube - a search engine for videos, without hosting any.

zzyzxd 5y ago

I am willing to pay to get rid of ads, but that also makes it easier for Google to track me, since now I have to login a Google account. What's worse for me is, because I use private/incognito browser sessions by default, it will take even more time if I have to login to the account every time I visit youtube.com than just playing the ads. And the worst experience is when I am on my phone, where logging in my Google account in one Google app means I am logged in on all other Google apps. I am sure they put a lot of effort to make it difficult to logout. I remember last time I accidentally logged in to Google Maps app a few month ago, I had to revoke the app's auth token from web management dashboard because I couldn't figure out how to logout within the app.

Fezzik 5y ago
I had a similar issue with the NYT - every time I subscribed (and during my subscription period) I found it impossible to avoid getting on their spammy email lists if I ever logged in to read articles. The only workable solution I found is to pay my 1-year subscription fee, immediately cancel the subscription, and then use the NYT in incognito mode thereby stopping them from caching my read article count and avoiding having to login (I would always accidentally login if I maintained the subscription). It’s annoying, but I want to give them money while also avoiding being harassed by dozens of emails every month. Sadly there is no similar work around for youtube.
- zzyzxd 5y ago
  youtube.com. was heaven for me before they fixed it[1]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581118

aseerdbnarng 5y ago

Ok but netflix charges £8/month for my wife and I to watch its content ad-free, while youtube premium is £11/month per person or £18/month for a family subscription despite all of youtube's content being given to it for free. Youtube premium is horrible value for money for most people.

mushishi 5y ago

I subscribed to Youtube premium as it has a couple of great channels for me, but the upgrade was easy to justify also because I fully replaced Spotify with it. With Youtube premium you could run the Android Youtube app in the background without stopping the music.

8note 5y ago

I have no reason to believe that premium YouTube won't get ads once it's been around for a while. Paying customers are the best people to show ads to. Besides, my current experience is to watch an ad in order to watch an ad in order to watch a video. Getting rid of one layer of ad doesnt mean I'm not watching ads anymore, and I'm not going to pay money to watch ads.