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Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for

Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It feels heavy on negative externalities.

thetinguy 5y ago
Also creators don’t get revenue from blocked ads but they do from premium.
ohmanjjj 5y ago
If someone can’t afford $15 for Premium, they likely shouldn’t be wasting their time watching videos to begin with, and instead focus their time and effort on making a living.
- Bootvis 5y ago
  Yes, you can never learn something from a YouTube video /s
  - ohmanjjj 5y ago
    If one can’t afford $15 for unlimited access to uninterrupted education, they have their priorities elsewhere.
monkeybutton 5y ago
Personally, I rarely use YouTube so there's no way to justify paying for premium.
AniseAbyss 5y ago
Only use YT for about an hour a week for some background music while working out. I really do not give a shit about the service beyond that. Honestly if YT goes kaput I'll just use digital radio. No skin off my back.
ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
I feel content on the internet was free for so long, people just feel entitled to it. Now everyone is anti-ad, with most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day), but they still feel entitled to consume content for free.
- lelandbatey 5y ago
  > "They're still entitled to consume content for free." YouTube et al. are free. That's the whole point! The only reason anyone uses them is because they are free, as in free beer. If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything, I never said "oh, but I agree I'll watch the ads/let the ads play/download the ads" in order to be allowed to watch the YouTube video. (armchair lawyers will make murmurs about "Terms of Service" and "End User License Agreements", which may in some cases technically be true in a legalese sense, but are clear cases of trying to weasel out of what's right in front of our faces, which is that these platforms are free). YouTubes business model is to give things away for free and HOPE that they can advertise to you enough that it will be worth it. This is, in general, the business model of "the internet". The thing is, we've been at it for so long, that the businesses folks are starting to become entitled. It's been 25+ years and so many people have gotten in on this game (low level content creators are quite numerous) that now the opinion of the tastemakers is shifting to one of "yeah I am entitled to get paid for my work, and since I get paid when people look at the ads I facilitate, I am thusly entitled to have my audience look at my ads so I can get paid." It's a train of thought that seems to make sense, but all the creators are forgetting that that's not how their business model actually works, and that's not the deal any of us in any conscious way have agreed to. I have a story I wrote a while ago that I feel captures what we're seeing with business people becoming entitled to owning our eyeballs, devices, and attention: ---------- By 2027 we live in a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!" As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy." "But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't afford to give away the pizza?" moans the employee. Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." You do, and with that you walk to your car and drive home. The frustrated employee would, by 2030, move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer agrees, under penalty of death and enforced by on-site police, to sit with their eyes held open and stare into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would receive a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually and punitively enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments". Meanwhile in 2028, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.
sudosysgen 5y ago
Sponsorblock integration is a huge one.
CogitoCogito 5y ago
Does Youtube offer to not track you in any way when using Youtube Premium? (This is a serious question. I don't know what features Youtube Premium has.)
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  No, and that use-case for Vanced totally makes sense to me. But you could pay for Premium and then use Vanced in addition to it to take advantage of the reduced tracking, rather than as a replacement for Premium.
ComradePhil 5y ago
I believe it's a result of selfish and/or short-term thinking.
vopi 5y ago
I simply don't care. I don't tolerate viewing ads. I currently use sponsorblock as well. I have paid for YouTube premium at some point but I see no reason anymore. There's enough people who don't know how to block ads and frankly if it ever got to that point I expect the big G to crack down hard (technical and legal means). It's the same thing with ad blocking. I'm sorry but when you have 11 percent of my average network requests being ads I will simply block those requests. Is it selfish? Of course. I'm not claiming to "stick it too the man", I just don't wanna see your shilling. Simple as.
wand3r 5y ago
I dont use vanced but I am looking into it. Allegedly vanced has an iOS alternative. My reasoning is that Google is disgusting and has created a defacto monopoly. There is no way to outcompete a free product at scale so there basically can’t be an alternative. So I obviously use video and that means I use youtube. I dont want to support google, never want to see an ad and I honestly don’t care about the creator. If i did find someone who I regularly watched I would probably support them directly. I would never want to use youtube premium and infact constantly being bombarded by ads for youtube premium is a major reason i use an adblocker…
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > I honestly don’t care about the creator. At least you’re honest
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    Why would you?
  - Teever 5y ago
    A very important life rule is to never, ever care about someone more than they care about you.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      This rule creates a negative feedback loop to a world where every single person cares about no one else.
      - Teever 5y ago
        As opposed to some Woodstock hippy utopia where everyone cares so much for everyone else that love conquers all?
        bduerst 5y ago
        How is that the only alternative?
mtizim 5y ago
Personally, I would go out of my way to steal from the relevant company, and just I don't care much for YouTube's survival.
ryanlitalien 5y ago
The benefits of YouTube Premium far exceed the monthly cost. I only realize this value prop when I try to access YouTube in incognito. Eye opening.
- abcc8 5y ago
  Same. I was recently chastised (lightly) by a friend for sending a YouTube video link. They asked why I sat through so many ads. I've been using YouTube premium for years and had no idea how bad the ad situation is for non-premium users.
- dhc02 5y ago
  1. No ads 2. Free YouTube Music subscription (cancel your Spotify subscription) 3. Download videos and playlists to your device before a flight or other no-service scenario 4. Every time you watch a video, a proportional percentage of your subscription fee goes to that creator, no matter whether they are in a lucrative (i.e., ad-friendly) niche or not. 5. One less browser extension (or mobile app) I need to give permission to track my activity and worry it will be hacked or sold without me realizing it.
  - ohgodplsno 5y ago
    1. Vanced does it, and so does uBlock. 2. So I can have access to a worse player ? Which is already impressive given how bad Spotify is. 3. youtube-dl. 4. Giving 0.000005$ to a creator for me watching 20 minutes of video is still Google rent-seeking 5. Fair enough. But then I'm trading one browser extensions that might track me (but that doesn't) for the certainty that Google will absolutely track me to vomit out more shitty AI recommended playlists. Not sure it's worth the tradeoff.
    - dhc02 5y ago
      I'm a youtube-dl[p] user, but pretending that is equivalent to the few taps it take to sync in the background in the official app is silly.
Beaver117 5y ago
Wowie, it's free!
giordano-bruno 5y ago
The same reason we all use(d) The Pirate Bay. Information deserves to be free, remember? We can distribute videos for free, you remember that, right? We can also pay content creators, who get ripped off by YouTube anyway. Ask them about that. Are you suggesting that HackerNews readers should also remove their adblockers? That we are bound by a Kantian moral obligation to be subjected to enticement and manipulation for Google’s balance sheet? Will we get kicked out of Capitalism if we don’t acquiesce and watch the ads? I guess I’m an amoral Bad Boy. Antinomian. A rebel, with strange views on religion, morality, information, and economics - heretical, unspeakable views, that I shall not utter here. PS: I’m concerned about exposing my mind to advertisements. The risk to the computer, which is but a tool of the mind, is entirely secondary.
- rryan 5y ago
  Straw man argument. OP was suggesting you pay for YT premium, which does away with the ads completely. Removing your web adblocker is a non sequitur, and exposes your computer to malware / spyware in addition to ads.
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  > We can distribute videos for free, you remember that, right? Outside of a purely P2P system like Peertube, how would you distribute videos for free? Are there not server costs?
- ohyeshedid 5y ago
  > (Personally, I don’t watch videos, and prefer to simply read books from the library, which somehow exists without the “support” of advertisers...) Depending on what kind of library you're referencing: those books were purchased, and sometimes/often at more than consumer retail.
- mda 5y ago
  "I am an amoral antinomian rebel bad boy". People on HN never ceases to amaze.
JSavageOne 5y ago
The same reason people use adblockers, get around news article paywalls, and/or pirate. Because they can, and don't see ethical issues with it. > if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. How likely is this though? For example despite adblockers already being widely available, it seems that a significant portion of internet users if not most don't actually use them.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  Having worked on a largely ad-supported website in the early '10s, I can definitely say the rise of ad blockers had a meaningful impact on ad revenue. I didn't mind this at all, I much preferred the product investing more effort in making the subscription that removed ads have attractive features, but if users had a way to also get all of the subscription features without paying, I don't think the business would have been able to sustain itself.
bdlowery 5y ago
Some people can’t afford $12 a month, especially with that measly 150k tech salary. Really gotta start budgeting these days.
arrosenberg 5y ago
I mainly use iOS devices and avoid YouTube on my phone, so I don't use this app. I don't pay for Premium though, and I won't because Google is a monopolist and their entire business is built around the pernicious use of data and advertising. I use uBlock which takes care of the ads on desktop, and don't see it as immoral to freeride in this situation. I do pay for plenty of similarly situated services where the agreement is a much more clear "money for goods and services" type arrangement.
ainiriand 5y ago
I was in South America for some months and I decided to buy Youtube premium because in my house in Germany would be heavily used as well. My account was blocked until I was able to produce proof that my address was effectively in South America, so I had to spend all the time there with a blocked account. When I came back to Germany I tried contacting customer support again to unlock the account and I had to deal with a couple phone calls and emails, costing me time. I never want to have such an ordeal to remove some ads.
DetroitThrow 5y ago
On hn I find people often talk about how as individuals we shouldn't ignore the negative externalities we might create for massively profitable monopolies, but never in the same breath do we talk about the negative externalities those monopolies thrust on us as individuals or on our governments. I'm sure most are aware just how well Google will be regardless of whether they bypass ads or not.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  My main consideration is for content creators, especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them. Any concern I have about YouTube not being able to sustain itself does not come from a place of caring about Google's livelihood. I also have a whole laundry list of complaints and gripes about YouTube and Google as a whole. But I'm probably not going to get much productive engagement from them airing those here, so I targeted my question to the HN audience.
  - nomel 5y ago
    > especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them Youtube could communicated the number of blocked ads, and lost revenue, to the content creators. Content creators could either push the Patreon route (this seems required for any remotely controversial topic), or encourage watchers to disable ad blocking for their videos.
  - toastercat 5y ago
    > My main consideration is for content creators, especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them. Any concern I have about YouTube not being able to sustain itself does not come from a place of caring about Google's livelihood. The best solution I've found to this is to support content creators directly. Subscribe to their Patreon, Liberapay, GoFundMes, etc. Most YouTubers who sincerely try to make a living from their content already do this. Or just disable adblock for a video or two.
  - DetroitThrow 5y ago
    When the discussion is based on "negative externalities" of individuals towards tenants who are already at the mercy of a non-negotiable relationship receiving an opaque and steadily decreasing cut of revenue, and when most tenants attempting to create have to rely on more than just ad revenue to keep creating, it seems to me that the more harmful actor in this scenario to tenants is the monopoly and not those who avoid ad revenue. It's not productive or in good faith discussion to flip the focus of an examination of negative externalities on those individuals avoiding ads once that is brought up, but again, the largest contributing problem actors are not what you care to talk about.
kazinator 5y ago
- Because Youtube is run by a company that has money pouring out of every orifice; they don't need any more of yours. - Because Youtube is built on copyright infringment; giving it money is exactly like paying for an account on any piracy site to help keep it running. - Because even where there isn't infringment, Youtube has a broken compensation model you should consider not paying into. - If Youtube died, it would probably only be a good thing anyway for the whole video ecosystem. - If you really want to donate money or help, pick some worthy cause, like kids with cancer or something; the Googles of this world don't need your charity.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  > Youtube[...] has money pouring out of every orifice; they don't need any more of yours. I'm mostly concerned with money going to the content creators. If you're not watching ads and not paying for Premium, they get nothing. > Youtube is built on copyright infringment I think this is a [citation needed] kind of thing, I'd assume that original content and fair use content is the vast majority of their revenue. But I don't know that for sure either. > If Youtube died, it would probably only be a good thing anyway for the whole video ecosystem. Long term, I could see this being the case. Short term, I think a lot of creators would be displaced as they tried to figure out how to make it work in a YouTube-less world. People with large audiences would probably survive fine, but I'm not sure if some of my favorite < 50k subscriber channels would stick around. But these are all guesses. > If you really want to donate money or help, pick some worthy cause, like kids with cancer or something I don't look at this as charity, I look at it as providing an economic incentive to continue getting content from creators I like. But this is a "but there are starving kids in Africa!" kind of argument anyway, which doesn't really hold up if you try to scrutinize everything that way.
  - DetroitThrow 5y ago
    >I'm mostly concerned with money going to the content creators. This doesn't really hold up when you gloss over his discussion of the broken YouTube compensation model. Even though it's not salient to your biases or original conjecture to bring up that YouTube's compensation system is harmful for most creators, it seems unproductive to put your head in the sand about the issue and keep claiming that you want to see money go to content creators you support.
hutrdvnj 5y ago
I find it okay when you can click the ads away like it used to be for a long time, but now YouTube often forces you to watch the whole clip, sometimes even two.
davyonhn 5y ago
For me, it's because I have multiple accounts and don't want to pay for Premium on all of them. For example: I pay for Premium on an account that I watch YouTube on every night. However, I don’t want that account linked to my phone.
- 15characterslon 5y ago
  Maybe you could use family sharing. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7507744?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7507744?hl=en
kevingadd 5y ago
Personally, I pay for Premium but I also think everyone should run an ad-blocker on Google properties. I certainly do. It's at least nice if my premium sub gives 3 cents to the creators of the videos I watch since they wouldn't be getting ad money...
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  That's personally where I fall as well, I pay for most sites I get a lot of value out of, but continue to run ad blockers. It's quite frustrating how many sites continue to show you ads even if you're a paid subscriber.
sullivanmatt 5y ago
Personally, I already pay for Google One, run my phone lines on Google Fi, and only use YouTube for an average of 15-20 minutes of content per day. Google Fi aside, surely somebody, somewhere, at Google can just bundle these things up and I can just pay a single monthly rate to be "in" the Google universe? I'm not paying $12/mo for something I barely use, to a company that I already give money to for a "premium" membership tier. I also don't have the time to check what crazy bundles Google is attempting to offer this month that will simply not exist next month. I am happy to pay for Google's services, but why do they feel the need to make that an actively hostile process?
Teever 5y ago
Google profits through monetizing my personal information whether I want them to or not. There's no need to add insult to injury and pay them.
ProAm 5y ago
For me its the gross level of targeted tracking. Google is essentially spyware at its roots. If paying for it stopped that it would be one thing, but its not.
leetcrew 5y ago
> if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. I personally find categorical imperative arguments to be ridiculous. almost anything could be bad if everyone did them all the time. the reality is that adblocking, torrenting, and similar workarounds are used by a small subset of technically savvy users. most people just don't care enough to configure any of these tools (or even switch to a browser where they are on by default!). Google is not going to run out of ad revenue any time soon. I don't feel any obligation to allow Google to use my own device and internet connection to serve me ad content that I don't wish to see. Google doesn't seem to care very much either; the most they do is reorganize APIs every so often to break these kinds of workarounds. I'm not sure that's even intentional tbh. content creators have reacted by embedding ads in the content itself. this is usually more tolerable than the preroll ads, so I don't really mind. I do agree there is a cost to adblocking and torrenting, but it's not the one you identified. when I pay for content or view associated ads, I am voting for more of that type of content to exist in the future. when I don't pay or block ads, I am throwing away my vote. for most throwaway content, I don't really care. but I find a way to pay for stuff I do care about, or at least disable adblock while I'm consuming it.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  If Youtube enabled an ad-free experience on a per creator/channel basis, would that be a good compromise for you?
  - bduerst 5y ago
    What would that user experience look like? $0.50/mo per channel? $5/mo for all minecraft channels? Given the overhwelming negative response to how cable priced and bundled channels, and the simplicity that competitors like Netflix have, I'm not sure users would prefer that.
  - realusername 5y ago
    I can answer since I'm also using Vanced. The core issue for me is that what YouTube provides isn't valuable enough by itself for a monthly payment. They don't produce their own content like Netflix, they are at best a video distribution platform, I can pay to creators I watch via Patreon but to YouTube itself, that's complicated, they would have to get a very low share of the creator revenue to start to feel convincing.
lordleft 5y ago
Totally agree with this. If you're going to block yt ads, at least acknowledge that you're expecting content for free. Maybe you can find a way to ethically justify that for yourself (you buy merch from the company, etc), but own your choice. Don't flee into elaborate rationalizations that deny the facts of the matter. Linus from LTT recently raised this point.
- lelandbatey 5y ago
  Yes, users are expecting content for free because they're being given content for free. They're also being given a pile of garbage data in the form of ads, and there's nothing wrong with dumping that garbage, in the same way you are free to throw away the ad pages of a free newspaper, or toss the ad flyer that comes with your pizza. Content creators are facilitating the business model of Google and most big business on the internet, which is that they give things away for free (yes free, I don't have to do anything or sign any contracts to watch a YouTube video) and they hope that advertisers will pay for the chance at their ad to be seen by people watching. Nowhere in there does the audience get a say, nor is the audience asked for their consent, nor is the audience forced into any kind of actual contract that the audience clearly understands. Content creators, having lived in this world created by Ad-tech for so long, have grown entitled to the eyeballs, the attention, and the time of their audience. The train of thought goes like this: "I'm entitled to be paid for my work. I get paid when my audience watches ads. Hence I am entitled to have my audience watch ads." But that isn't true at all! They're entitled to be paid by the advertiser according to whatever terms that creator has with that advertiser. The creator though has no agreement and no terms with the audience so NO, the audience has no obligation to do anything for the content creator. If content creators aren't comfy with this situation, they can try to actually build an agreement with their audience, where the costs and the payments are clearly laid out. That's hard to do so few do it, but that's the actual, ethical thing to do instead of complain that users aren't watching ads; if watching ads was actually ethically required then lowering the volume or looking away when an ad plays would be decried as piracy, and while I'm sure that'll happen once eye-tracking starts being built into the mobile app, it'll be as stupid to complain about then as it is now.
operator-name 5y ago
Vanced isn't equivalent to paying for premium. It includes features like ReturnYoutubeDislikes and SponsorBlock which would normally be available via extensions (as would the premium's lack of ads via adblock), as well as further customisability. It replaces some enhancements that are normally done via browser extentions and I personally find it extremely handy to be able to copy with a timestamp, set a video on infinite repeat, restrict video bandwidth on a finer scale (the native app removing this baffles me), set a default playback speed and reenabling tap to seek (another baffling change). I happily support creators and alternative platforms (Nebula, Floatplane) via direct channels, and personally I don't find the service or youtube as a platform worthy of support.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  That's a very good point, and I agree that Vanced brings a lot to the table over just ad removal. I may even consider using it even though I pay for Premium already. But I imagine that that's a demographic that a very small percentage of Vanced users fall into.
  - Qub3d 5y ago
    I use vanced, and I have YouTube premium. Sponsor segments and missing dislike counts are killer to my experience. I also like that I can turn off elements of the YouTube design that are clearly rushed and/or TikTok also-rans demanded by management.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
1/ I want free shit. 2/ I hate ads. 3/ Google not making money from ads makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. 4/ I also run and contribute to Sponsorblock because fuck your VPN ad. Nobody "values the service" of YouTube, that's bullshit HN founder talk seeping on every other subject. The reality is, there's no other source of videos (everyone is on youtube because everyone is on youtube), ads are a scourge, and there's very little _actually worth the time_ on YouTube.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  I'm with you on 2 & 3, but I don't align with 1 at all. Perhaps that's because I'm fortunate enough to have the expendable income to afford it, so it's easier for me to justify the cost. But it's fair to say that "value the service" is kinda bullshit, I'm mostly talking about valuing the content, and paying for the service that makes it possible. I'd follow the content though, if it moved to a service with more agreeable terms.
bcrescimanno 5y ago
My primary issue with paying for Google services is that, when it comes to Google, I am the product being sold. I honestly haven't looked into YouTube Premium despite consuming a fair amount of YouTube content because I don't strongly feel it will change the dynamic with Google: they will still take my viewing data on YouTube and package that to sell me to advertisers in other avenues. So now, yes, I get a better YouTube experience by removing ads on my mobile device; but, I'm now paying Google money so they can make money off my viewing habits.
no_time 5y ago
I'm doing everything in my power to not give any money to GOOG/MS/AAPL. I would not shed a tear for YT in it's current state if it were to shut down because of revenue problems.
- fma 5y ago
  A more effective way would be to just boycott YouTube. Rather than block ads, block their domain on all your devices. Increasing a video view count entices the video producer to create more. More content = more views from users who see ads.
  - no_time 5y ago
    I could go full Stallman on every aspect of my life. I do admire his strict adherence to his own moral code. But at some point you have to realize if you are a gifted person like Stallman, with a large capacity to bring change to this world through uncompromising attitude OR you are just average joe with no real chance of making any meaningful change. To be frank with you I sleep really well knowing I'm not directly contributing money towards tech giants getting even more powerful while at the same time not completely alienating myself from popular culture.
disiplus 5y ago
i pay for youtube premium (i use spotify for music) just to not have ads, but now there are baked ads in videos, so im thinking about canceling my premium and just installing vanced because it has sponsorblock installed. im not even watching that much youtube, but i cannot stand ads.
Taway_vncd 5y ago
The internet was better before monetization. The profit motive has killed what made it great and promising. I wish everyone used ad blockers and everyone who's in it for the money would either charge upfront or stop producing. The good niche content that's made for love would still be there.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  I have mixed feelings about the monetization. I also like creations just for creations sake, but it'd be hard for me to argue that I haven't benefited from a lot of great content that wouldn't exist if people couldn't dedicate themselves full time to making it. A lot of people may say (and feel!) they'd do it just for the love of it, but reality can get in the way of that when you've got to make a living. That's not to say that there aren't better ways to make that living than ad revenue. I much prefer direct monetization.
vdsk 5y ago
I am already paying google enough with my personal information. They will not extract more value from me without putting at least a fight. I completely understand why people would pay, especially if there is no other option to not get ads, but I don't want to pay Google any cents for a service they would be happy to provide for free for influence. It has negative externalities (Google "lose" money and free video is... un-impacted in the long run) but I value those infinitely less than my attention span.
- mminer237 5y ago
  If you don't view any ads, Google doesn't make any money off your personal information. Essentially all data collecting only exists to tailor specific ads to people they think will find them relevant so they can justify charging more for them.
  - vdsk 5y ago
    Sure, but they are still collecting anyway despite them having been unable to put an ad in front of my eyes for several years now. I understand they are probably just doing it "in case of", but the more paranoid part of myself is wondering if that's all there is.
EarlKing 5y ago
Because Google regards us as a resource to be exploited and we're just returning the favor? Class warfare really sucks when you're on the wrong end of it, huh?
kevincox 5y ago
I used to pay for Premium. Then they kept making the service worse and worse. Eventually I decided that they don't deserve my money. - YouTube Music is trash. I was an inside early adopter and all of my feedback was ignored. I originally subscribed for Google Play Music (which was pretty good) but I switched back to my own collecting. - They removed email subscription notices. - YouTube Originals were awful. They took some of my favourite creators to make slightly better content that I can no longer share with my friends. Not to mention that you were never notified of these videos because they were completely different from normal videos in all of the YouTube UIs. (Thankfully went back on this, but I had left by that point). - Videos always play at 360p on my 4k monitor. I need to manually up the quality at least 90% of the time. My internet is fantastic and I never see a stutter after raising the quality. - The recommendations are always awful. I don't use them often but when I do it is all things that I have already watched. - They keep trying to turn auto-play back on. (Although to be fair this isn't new). - It still has ads! They just promote the Premium content (that I don't want) instead of other ads. Sure, less obtrusive but still annoying. Just let me use the damn service I have been paying for for years. I understand the argument that I shouldn't be using the service if I'm not paying for it. In fact I don't use an adblocker on most sites because of this belief (I just back out of obnoxious sites). However 1. I've paid enough that I consider it fair for years of future viewing and 2. costing YouTube money is actually beneficial to me, because if it were to fold the content would move somewhere better. To me YouTube is a great example of the cost of forever quadratic growth. They had a good product, it was profitable with ads or profitable if people payed for Premium. But they need to keep sucking more value from users otherwise their shareholders get angry. But I've been sucked dry and I'm quitting.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  Yeah, the constant ad creep is my justification for ad blockers as well: since the service provider doesn't respect me or my privacy, they'll never be content to serve a few simple ads on the side of a video based on the content of that video to pay the server bills. Instead, they'll build a giant Rube Goldberg machine to target ads, hoover up user data, and shove more and more ads in my face. Even when I pay, I still get "original content" shown in my face because it's cheaper for them to serve than content sourced from other providers. At the end of the day, you just have to put in the legwork to make things optimal for your use case, because they'll never care about you anyway.
autoexec 5y ago
> and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. I doubt this. Youtube provides google with a lot more than a means a push ads. It gives them massive amounts of data about the viewers and the content creators to mine for their own use. They collect that data if you view ads on the platform or not.
beprogrammed 5y ago
For me personally, and I know others as well, I can't stand ads, if it comes down to the end of the world or accepting ads, goodbye world. So naturally I go quite a bit out of my way to remove ads and build tools that remove ads, everywhere I can. With YouTube's current trend of doing the worst job possible (see removing dislikes) there is no way in hell I'm going to be paying them anything. I'm still waiting for good ways to pay content producers directly, how does one tip a tenth of a cent?
foepys 5y ago
The official YouTube app is unable to play 2160p 60Hz video on my Android TV because it stutters and falls back to 1440p 60Hz. Doesn't matter whether I use the native app or the built-in Chromecast. NewPipe doesn't have any problems. The official YouTube app also sometimes just decides that 480p is enough for everybody and refuses to play any higher resolution until I force-close the app from the Android settings multiple times. Since using NewPipe I have never experienced a video playing in another resolution than the highest available. Plus, since Google/Alphabet is doing everything they can to funnel as much money away from the EU via various tax avoidance systems, I don't feel any shame. I try to donate to the creators via various channels, if one is available.
newbie789 5y ago
vbezhenar 5y ago
“YouTube premium is not available in your country.”
jorvi 5y ago
At some point, YouTube realized they are more-or-less the only game in town and started to go from 1 ad every 0.5 video to 2 pre-roll ads, a mid roll ad and sometimes at near the end another ad. They also made some 30s-1m ads unskippable.
Karsteski 5y ago
Tbh I would just pay for YouTube if it were just a video platform that was consumer-friendly, for example LTT's Floatplane service, which I have paid for in the past. Unfortunately, that's not what we're dealing with. Google/Youtube are massive data collection platforms, and I refuse to participate in that any more than I have to.
idonotknowwhy 5y ago
Sponsor Block
toastercat 5y ago
Everytime* we have a thread about third-party YouTube clients, there are comments like yours by folks who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of these third-party tools. The same happened year(s) ago with a thread about NewPipe. The purpose of these apps (including Vanced) is not solely to get past ad-block; Vanced (and NewPipe, and Piped, and Invidious) do far more than just give an ad-free viewing experience -- they provide a breadth of quality of life features on top of usually being more privacy-friendly. The frustrating thing about this is that we can avoid these questions if commenters would just click the link and read.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  You're totally right and I wish I had clarified that more in my original comment. I will probably try out Vanced even though I pay for Premium. I was really looking to hear from the people who primarily use it to circumvent ads, which I assume is the primary draw. But there are a lot of other good features worth discussing.
  - toastercat 5y ago
    I think it is definitely a primary draw; I no longer use Vanced (used it years ago) but I remember the killer feature back then was being able to listen to audio from videos while having your phone screen off (a feature that YouTube eventually added to the official app). I primarily use NewPipe. I enjoy the benefit of not having ads, but more than that, I enjoy the simplicity and the drastically lower system resource usage.
- jsnell 5y ago
  The HN title is "Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android". The app being an adblocker is the one thing the submitter thought was worth highlighting. It is also the first feature the app's webpage mentions. The webpage even has paid ads for other adblockers before going into any of the advanced features. Given the above, it seems pretty darn obvious why the GP thinks that the real selling point of the app is to block ads. If this had been submitted as "Vanced: YouTube app with an AMOLED black theme", do you think it would be at the top of the frontpage?
willcipriano 5y ago
A significant percentage of what I watch on YouTube was uploaded by people who don't have rights to that content. For me, turnabout is fair play. YouTube can profit off of pirated content, and I can pirate YouTube. I use newpipe though.
smukherjee19 5y ago
Here's another angle: a LOT of common people out there don't even bother blocking ads, let alone even thinking about the possibility that it's possible to block ads without using Youtube Premium. They either: a) Live with ads, thinking that's the norm or not giving it much thought, or, b) Subscribe to Youtube Premium without considering the possibility of ways around it. So, realistically speaking, the probability of everyone starting to use Vance overnight is almost zero. I also used to feel the same: why can't people just use adblockers!? Then I realized that me and the type of people I normally interact with != the general public, atleast in terms of tech-savviness and/or curiousity.
- wbobeirne 5y ago
  I agree it's unlikely, but it's a negative externality all the same. In general I try to minimize those. It's also highly dependent on the creator's viewer demographic, since the creator only gets paid for ads watched. A tech focused creator probably sees significantly less ad revenue than one with a more general audience.
polski-g 5y ago
I dislike Google's censorship. So I don't want them to make more money to engage in more censorship.
- mda 5y ago
  Why don't you completely avoid its services then?
evilthrow 5y ago
If I can not pay, I will not pay.
manholio 5y ago
Youtube and Google make money by being monopolists. They had (or in the case of Youtube, bought) a first mover advantage, grown their platforms aggressively and now they are milking the network effects. There is almost no way someone could break the monopoly by making a better video sharing platform, not even Google could do it, that's why they bought a rapidly growing market leader instead of making their own failed copycat (Google Plus, anyone?). So there is absolutely no connection between this reality and the "fair world" fantasy you describe, that could maybe apply to copyright, torrenting etc., but not adblocking on monopolistic platforms. The amount of money and ads views you generate for Google is a monopoly rent, it bears no relation to the value of the platform or its operating costs in a competitive market, or any other justifiable and "fair" income.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TheNewAndy 5y ago
I used to have no adblockers on anything, and I was fine with it. Then I had kids, and I wasn't really comfortable with bringing them up in an environment where when you tell a computer to do one thing ("Play this video") it does a different thing ("I will do that, but not before I do what I want to do"). There are a few websites that have ad supported videos that I am ok with my kids watching, and putting uBlock Origin on the computers means that when I tell my computer to play videos from those sites, I know that it is going to do just that, and I won't have my kids being manipulated by stuff they don't understand. Ads in software are just a case of a computer not doing what you have asked it to do. It has always been ok to ignore ads - putting them on computers does not make them special in any way. This is just my parenting, and I can imagine that other people want their children to value other things - and I might change things as they get older so they can understand how the ads work. Right now, they are not ready for that.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Same, sometime I get naughty ads, I wonder what impression it would leave on children mind. I think someone has uploaded the few examples of such egregious vice. https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/ https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Yeah, Alexa in South Park: Post COVID is quite a dystopian demonstration of that.
- d0gbread 5y ago
  Having a kid is what put it over the top for me too. That, compounded by Google's ads being all over the map in terms of content, location in videos, and most importantly, length. I've put on a kids video and mid video there's a ten minute ad playing and a two year old absorbing some content I did not approve.
doliveira 5y ago
I paid for Youtube Premium just once. Then I opened Incognito mode in the app and it started showing me ads anyway.
nathias 5y ago
I don't want to support the platforms in any way and hope they stop existing. Sadly, its very hard for competitors to take back market share from these global monopolies.
Levitz 5y ago
>if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. Good. I find the idea of Google having an effective monopoly on video streaming disgraceful.
Bayart 5y ago
I'll consider giving money of my own free will to Google when they stop farming my data and dodging taxes. I sponsor a number a creators through Patreon.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
YT Premium is actually nice and lets me share with others who I consider "family". It strikes a nice balance at it's current price and policies. If those don't seem like a good deal anymore vanced (et. al.) here I come.
traspler 5y ago
I don‘t use Vanced but something similar for iOS. I actually do pay for YT Premium but what the app also gives me is SponsorBlock, so thanks the other viewers flagging sections in videos, it will also skip baked-in ad slots. As I have YT Premium and assumed that the creators get paid for their baked-in spot according to their reach (channel size, engagement, etc) and not how many people don‘t skip that section of the video, I don‘t feel bad but frustrated that I have to go so far to simply watch videos without getting constantly bombarded with ads. If my assumption is wrong I would be grateful to get more info on how these baked-in ad spots are arranged.
masterof0 5y ago
Because if someone gives a free magazine, I don't have to stare at the ads either. If they (Youtube) don't want people to block ads, they can stop serving ads and charge for the service. People will move to another free services and continue blocking ads. No company have the right to serve me content I don't want to consume. If not my responsibility as a consumer to justify/support a company's business model
charcircuit 5y ago
The main value adds to me other than blocking ads is sponsorblock and a black theme (as opposed to dark grey). I have given YouTube money via memberships as they take a 30% cut.
gaius_baltar 5y ago
> Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? YT Premium only makes the problem worse by still allowing native ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.
coryfklein 5y ago
> YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It feels heavy on negative externalities. "YouTube files bankruptcy and closes it's doors because people aren't willing to watch advertisements and executives could think of no other source of revenue to keep the doors open." That's never going to happen, because the executives would be fired for incompetency. If advertising suddenly becomes a non-viable revenue stream, YouTube (and internet video hosting in general) is not going to disappear. In fact, I ACTIVELY WISH we would drop the advertising model, and I will not support it if I have any alternative. It is a poison on the world and a giant economic waste. The world would be much the better place if YouTube (and the internet in general) gave up on advertising entirely.
scim-knox-twox 5y ago
I don't support Google / ads / tracking.

thetinguy 5y ago

Also creators don’t get revenue from blocked ads but they do from premium.

ohmanjjj 5y ago

If someone can’t afford $15 for Premium, they likely shouldn’t be wasting their time watching videos to begin with, and instead focus their time and effort on making a living.

Bootvis 5y ago
Yes, you can never learn something from a YouTube video /s
- ohmanjjj 5y ago
  If one can’t afford $15 for unlimited access to uninterrupted education, they have their priorities elsewhere.

monkeybutton 5y ago

Personally, I rarely use YouTube so there's no way to justify paying for premium.

AniseAbyss 5y ago

Only use YT for about an hour a week for some background music while working out. I really do not give a shit about the service beyond that. Honestly if YT goes kaput I'll just use digital radio. No skin off my back.

ApolloFortyNine 5y ago

I feel content on the internet was free for so long, people just feel entitled to it. Now everyone is anti-ad, with most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day), but they still feel entitled to consume content for free.

lelandbatey 5y ago
> "They're still entitled to consume content for free." YouTube et al. are free. That's the whole point! The only reason anyone uses them is because they are free, as in free beer. If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything, I never said "oh, but I agree I'll watch the ads/let the ads play/download the ads" in order to be allowed to watch the YouTube video. (armchair lawyers will make murmurs about "Terms of Service" and "End User License Agreements", which may in some cases technically be true in a legalese sense, but are clear cases of trying to weasel out of what's right in front of our faces, which is that these platforms are free). YouTubes business model is to give things away for free and HOPE that they can advertise to you enough that it will be worth it. This is, in general, the business model of "the internet". The thing is, we've been at it for so long, that the businesses folks are starting to become entitled. It's been 25+ years and so many people have gotten in on this game (low level content creators are quite numerous) that now the opinion of the tastemakers is shifting to one of "yeah I am entitled to get paid for my work, and since I get paid when people look at the ads I facilitate, I am thusly entitled to have my audience look at my ads so I can get paid." It's a train of thought that seems to make sense, but all the creators are forgetting that that's not how their business model actually works, and that's not the deal any of us in any conscious way have agreed to. I have a story I wrote a while ago that I feel captures what we're seeing with business people becoming entitled to owning our eyeballs, devices, and attention: ---------- By 2027 we live in a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!" As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy." "But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't afford to give away the pizza?" moans the employee. Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." You do, and with that you walk to your car and drive home. The frustrated employee would, by 2030, move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer agrees, under penalty of death and enforced by on-site police, to sit with their eyes held open and stare into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would receive a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually and punitively enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments". Meanwhile in 2028, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.

sudosysgen 5y ago

Sponsorblock integration is a huge one.

CogitoCogito 5y ago

Does Youtube offer to not track you in any way when using Youtube Premium? (This is a serious question. I don't know what features Youtube Premium has.)

wbobeirne 5y ago
No, and that use-case for Vanced totally makes sense to me. But you could pay for Premium and then use Vanced in addition to it to take advantage of the reduced tracking, rather than as a replacement for Premium.

ComradePhil 5y ago

I believe it's a result of selfish and/or short-term thinking.

vopi 5y ago

I simply don't care. I don't tolerate viewing ads. I currently use sponsorblock as well. I have paid for YouTube premium at some point but I see no reason anymore. There's enough people who don't know how to block ads and frankly if it ever got to that point I expect the big G to crack down hard (technical and legal means). It's the same thing with ad blocking. I'm sorry but when you have 11 percent of my average network requests being ads I will simply block those requests. Is it selfish? Of course. I'm not claiming to "stick it too the man", I just don't wanna see your shilling. Simple as.

wand3r 5y ago

I dont use vanced but I am looking into it. Allegedly vanced has an iOS alternative. My reasoning is that Google is disgusting and has created a defacto monopoly. There is no way to outcompete a free product at scale so there basically can’t be an alternative. So I obviously use video and that means I use youtube. I dont want to support google, never want to see an ad and I honestly don’t care about the creator. If i did find someone who I regularly watched I would probably support them directly. I would never want to use youtube premium and infact constantly being bombarded by ads for youtube premium is a major reason i use an adblocker…

endisneigh 5y ago
> I honestly don’t care about the creator. At least you’re honest
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  Why would you?
- Teever 5y ago
  A very important life rule is to never, ever care about someone more than they care about you.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    This rule creates a negative feedback loop to a world where every single person cares about no one else.
    - Teever 5y ago
      As opposed to some Woodstock hippy utopia where everyone cares so much for everyone else that love conquers all?
      - bduerst 5y ago
        How is that the only alternative?

mtizim 5y ago

Personally, I would go out of my way to steal from the relevant company, and just I don't care much for YouTube's survival.

ryanlitalien 5y ago

The benefits of YouTube Premium far exceed the monthly cost. I only realize this value prop when I try to access YouTube in incognito. Eye opening.

abcc8 5y ago
Same. I was recently chastised (lightly) by a friend for sending a YouTube video link. They asked why I sat through so many ads. I've been using YouTube premium for years and had no idea how bad the ad situation is for non-premium users.
dhc02 5y ago
1. No ads 2. Free YouTube Music subscription (cancel your Spotify subscription) 3. Download videos and playlists to your device before a flight or other no-service scenario 4. Every time you watch a video, a proportional percentage of your subscription fee goes to that creator, no matter whether they are in a lucrative (i.e., ad-friendly) niche or not. 5. One less browser extension (or mobile app) I need to give permission to track my activity and worry it will be hacked or sold without me realizing it.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  1. Vanced does it, and so does uBlock. 2. So I can have access to a worse player ? Which is already impressive given how bad Spotify is. 3. youtube-dl. 4. Giving 0.000005$ to a creator for me watching 20 minutes of video is still Google rent-seeking 5. Fair enough. But then I'm trading one browser extensions that might track me (but that doesn't) for the certainty that Google will absolutely track me to vomit out more shitty AI recommended playlists. Not sure it's worth the tradeoff.
  - dhc02 5y ago
    I'm a youtube-dl[p] user, but pretending that is equivalent to the few taps it take to sync in the background in the official app is silly.

Beaver117 5y ago

Wowie, it's free!

giordano-bruno 5y ago

The same reason we all use(d) The Pirate Bay. Information deserves to be free, remember? We can distribute videos for free, you remember that, right? We can also pay content creators, who get ripped off by YouTube anyway. Ask them about that. Are you suggesting that HackerNews readers should also remove their adblockers? That we are bound by a Kantian moral obligation to be subjected to enticement and manipulation for Google’s balance sheet? Will we get kicked out of Capitalism if we don’t acquiesce and watch the ads? I guess I’m an amoral Bad Boy. Antinomian. A rebel, with strange views on religion, morality, information, and economics - heretical, unspeakable views, that I shall not utter here. PS: I’m concerned about exposing my mind to advertisements. The risk to the computer, which is but a tool of the mind, is entirely secondary.

rryan 5y ago
Straw man argument. OP was suggesting you pay for YT premium, which does away with the ads completely. Removing your web adblocker is a non sequitur, and exposes your computer to malware / spyware in addition to ads.
KoftaBob 5y ago
> We can distribute videos for free, you remember that, right? Outside of a purely P2P system like Peertube, how would you distribute videos for free? Are there not server costs?
ohyeshedid 5y ago
> (Personally, I don’t watch videos, and prefer to simply read books from the library, which somehow exists without the “support” of advertisers...) Depending on what kind of library you're referencing: those books were purchased, and sometimes/often at more than consumer retail.
mda 5y ago
"I am an amoral antinomian rebel bad boy". People on HN never ceases to amaze.

JSavageOne 5y ago

The same reason people use adblockers, get around news article paywalls, and/or pirate. Because they can, and don't see ethical issues with it. > if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. How likely is this though? For example despite adblockers already being widely available, it seems that a significant portion of internet users if not most don't actually use them.

wbobeirne 5y ago
Having worked on a largely ad-supported website in the early '10s, I can definitely say the rise of ad blockers had a meaningful impact on ad revenue. I didn't mind this at all, I much preferred the product investing more effort in making the subscription that removed ads have attractive features, but if users had a way to also get all of the subscription features without paying, I don't think the business would have been able to sustain itself.

bdlowery 5y ago

Some people can’t afford $12 a month, especially with that measly 150k tech salary. Really gotta start budgeting these days.

arrosenberg 5y ago

I mainly use iOS devices and avoid YouTube on my phone, so I don't use this app. I don't pay for Premium though, and I won't because Google is a monopolist and their entire business is built around the pernicious use of data and advertising. I use uBlock which takes care of the ads on desktop, and don't see it as immoral to freeride in this situation. I do pay for plenty of similarly situated services where the agreement is a much more clear "money for goods and services" type arrangement.

ainiriand 5y ago

I was in South America for some months and I decided to buy Youtube premium because in my house in Germany would be heavily used as well. My account was blocked until I was able to produce proof that my address was effectively in South America, so I had to spend all the time there with a blocked account. When I came back to Germany I tried contacting customer support again to unlock the account and I had to deal with a couple phone calls and emails, costing me time. I never want to have such an ordeal to remove some ads.

DetroitThrow 5y ago

On hn I find people often talk about how as individuals we shouldn't ignore the negative externalities we might create for massively profitable monopolies, but never in the same breath do we talk about the negative externalities those monopolies thrust on us as individuals or on our governments. I'm sure most are aware just how well Google will be regardless of whether they bypass ads or not.

wbobeirne 5y ago
My main consideration is for content creators, especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them. Any concern I have about YouTube not being able to sustain itself does not come from a place of caring about Google's livelihood. I also have a whole laundry list of complaints and gripes about YouTube and Google as a whole. But I'm probably not going to get much productive engagement from them airing those here, so I targeted my question to the HN audience.
- nomel 5y ago
  > especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them Youtube could communicated the number of blocked ads, and lost revenue, to the content creators. Content creators could either push the Patreon route (this seems required for any remotely controversial topic), or encourage watchers to disable ad blocking for their videos.
- toastercat 5y ago
  > My main consideration is for content creators, especially since the ad revenue is passed through to them. Any concern I have about YouTube not being able to sustain itself does not come from a place of caring about Google's livelihood. The best solution I've found to this is to support content creators directly. Subscribe to their Patreon, Liberapay, GoFundMes, etc. Most YouTubers who sincerely try to make a living from their content already do this. Or just disable adblock for a video or two.
- DetroitThrow 5y ago
  When the discussion is based on "negative externalities" of individuals towards tenants who are already at the mercy of a non-negotiable relationship receiving an opaque and steadily decreasing cut of revenue, and when most tenants attempting to create have to rely on more than just ad revenue to keep creating, it seems to me that the more harmful actor in this scenario to tenants is the monopoly and not those who avoid ad revenue. It's not productive or in good faith discussion to flip the focus of an examination of negative externalities on those individuals avoiding ads once that is brought up, but again, the largest contributing problem actors are not what you care to talk about.

kazinator 5y ago

- Because Youtube is run by a company that has money pouring out of every orifice; they don't need any more of yours. - Because Youtube is built on copyright infringment; giving it money is exactly like paying for an account on any piracy site to help keep it running. - Because even where there isn't infringment, Youtube has a broken compensation model you should consider not paying into. - If Youtube died, it would probably only be a good thing anyway for the whole video ecosystem. - If you really want to donate money or help, pick some worthy cause, like kids with cancer or something; the Googles of this world don't need your charity.

wbobeirne 5y ago
> Youtube[...] has money pouring out of every orifice; they don't need any more of yours. I'm mostly concerned with money going to the content creators. If you're not watching ads and not paying for Premium, they get nothing. > Youtube is built on copyright infringment I think this is a [citation needed] kind of thing, I'd assume that original content and fair use content is the vast majority of their revenue. But I don't know that for sure either. > If Youtube died, it would probably only be a good thing anyway for the whole video ecosystem. Long term, I could see this being the case. Short term, I think a lot of creators would be displaced as they tried to figure out how to make it work in a YouTube-less world. People with large audiences would probably survive fine, but I'm not sure if some of my favorite < 50k subscriber channels would stick around. But these are all guesses. > If you really want to donate money or help, pick some worthy cause, like kids with cancer or something I don't look at this as charity, I look at it as providing an economic incentive to continue getting content from creators I like. But this is a "but there are starving kids in Africa!" kind of argument anyway, which doesn't really hold up if you try to scrutinize everything that way.
- DetroitThrow 5y ago
  >I'm mostly concerned with money going to the content creators. This doesn't really hold up when you gloss over his discussion of the broken YouTube compensation model. Even though it's not salient to your biases or original conjecture to bring up that YouTube's compensation system is harmful for most creators, it seems unproductive to put your head in the sand about the issue and keep claiming that you want to see money go to content creators you support.

hutrdvnj 5y ago

I find it okay when you can click the ads away like it used to be for a long time, but now YouTube often forces you to watch the whole clip, sometimes even two.

davyonhn 5y ago

For me, it's because I have multiple accounts and don't want to pay for Premium on all of them. For example: I pay for Premium on an account that I watch YouTube on every night. However, I don’t want that account linked to my phone.

15characterslon 5y ago
Maybe you could use family sharing. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7507744?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7507744?hl=en

kevingadd 5y ago

Personally, I pay for Premium but I also think everyone should run an ad-blocker on Google properties. I certainly do. It's at least nice if my premium sub gives 3 cents to the creators of the videos I watch since they wouldn't be getting ad money...

wbobeirne 5y ago
That's personally where I fall as well, I pay for most sites I get a lot of value out of, but continue to run ad blockers. It's quite frustrating how many sites continue to show you ads even if you're a paid subscriber.

sullivanmatt 5y ago

Personally, I already pay for Google One, run my phone lines on Google Fi, and only use YouTube for an average of 15-20 minutes of content per day. Google Fi aside, surely somebody, somewhere, at Google can just bundle these things up and I can just pay a single monthly rate to be "in" the Google universe? I'm not paying $12/mo for something I barely use, to a company that I already give money to for a "premium" membership tier. I also don't have the time to check what crazy bundles Google is attempting to offer this month that will simply not exist next month. I am happy to pay for Google's services, but why do they feel the need to make that an actively hostile process?

Teever 5y ago

Google profits through monetizing my personal information whether I want them to or not. There's no need to add insult to injury and pay them.

ProAm 5y ago

For me its the gross level of targeted tracking. Google is essentially spyware at its roots. If paying for it stopped that it would be one thing, but its not.

leetcrew 5y ago

> if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. I personally find categorical imperative arguments to be ridiculous. almost anything could be bad if everyone did them all the time. the reality is that adblocking, torrenting, and similar workarounds are used by a small subset of technically savvy users. most people just don't care enough to configure any of these tools (or even switch to a browser where they are on by default!). Google is not going to run out of ad revenue any time soon. I don't feel any obligation to allow Google to use my own device and internet connection to serve me ad content that I don't wish to see. Google doesn't seem to care very much either; the most they do is reorganize APIs every so often to break these kinds of workarounds. I'm not sure that's even intentional tbh. content creators have reacted by embedding ads in the content itself. this is usually more tolerable than the preroll ads, so I don't really mind. I do agree there is a cost to adblocking and torrenting, but it's not the one you identified. when I pay for content or view associated ads, I am voting for more of that type of content to exist in the future. when I don't pay or block ads, I am throwing away my vote. for most throwaway content, I don't really care. but I find a way to pay for stuff I do care about, or at least disable adblock while I'm consuming it.

gtirloni 5y ago
If Youtube enabled an ad-free experience on a per creator/channel basis, would that be a good compromise for you?
- bduerst 5y ago
  What would that user experience look like? $0.50/mo per channel? $5/mo for all minecraft channels? Given the overhwelming negative response to how cable priced and bundled channels, and the simplicity that competitors like Netflix have, I'm not sure users would prefer that.
- realusername 5y ago
  I can answer since I'm also using Vanced. The core issue for me is that what YouTube provides isn't valuable enough by itself for a monthly payment. They don't produce their own content like Netflix, they are at best a video distribution platform, I can pay to creators I watch via Patreon but to YouTube itself, that's complicated, they would have to get a very low share of the creator revenue to start to feel convincing.

lordleft 5y ago

Totally agree with this. If you're going to block yt ads, at least acknowledge that you're expecting content for free. Maybe you can find a way to ethically justify that for yourself (you buy merch from the company, etc), but own your choice. Don't flee into elaborate rationalizations that deny the facts of the matter. Linus from LTT recently raised this point.

lelandbatey 5y ago
Yes, users are expecting content for free because they're being given content for free. They're also being given a pile of garbage data in the form of ads, and there's nothing wrong with dumping that garbage, in the same way you are free to throw away the ad pages of a free newspaper, or toss the ad flyer that comes with your pizza. Content creators are facilitating the business model of Google and most big business on the internet, which is that they give things away for free (yes free, I don't have to do anything or sign any contracts to watch a YouTube video) and they hope that advertisers will pay for the chance at their ad to be seen by people watching. Nowhere in there does the audience get a say, nor is the audience asked for their consent, nor is the audience forced into any kind of actual contract that the audience clearly understands. Content creators, having lived in this world created by Ad-tech for so long, have grown entitled to the eyeballs, the attention, and the time of their audience. The train of thought goes like this: "I'm entitled to be paid for my work. I get paid when my audience watches ads. Hence I am entitled to have my audience watch ads." But that isn't true at all! They're entitled to be paid by the advertiser according to whatever terms that creator has with that advertiser. The creator though has no agreement and no terms with the audience so NO, the audience has no obligation to do anything for the content creator. If content creators aren't comfy with this situation, they can try to actually build an agreement with their audience, where the costs and the payments are clearly laid out. That's hard to do so few do it, but that's the actual, ethical thing to do instead of complain that users aren't watching ads; if watching ads was actually ethically required then lowering the volume or looking away when an ad plays would be decried as piracy, and while I'm sure that'll happen once eye-tracking starts being built into the mobile app, it'll be as stupid to complain about then as it is now.

operator-name 5y ago

Vanced isn't equivalent to paying for premium. It includes features like ReturnYoutubeDislikes and SponsorBlock which would normally be available via extensions (as would the premium's lack of ads via adblock), as well as further customisability. It replaces some enhancements that are normally done via browser extentions and I personally find it extremely handy to be able to copy with a timestamp, set a video on infinite repeat, restrict video bandwidth on a finer scale (the native app removing this baffles me), set a default playback speed and reenabling tap to seek (another baffling change). I happily support creators and alternative platforms (Nebula, Floatplane) via direct channels, and personally I don't find the service or youtube as a platform worthy of support.

wbobeirne 5y ago
That's a very good point, and I agree that Vanced brings a lot to the table over just ad removal. I may even consider using it even though I pay for Premium already. But I imagine that that's a demographic that a very small percentage of Vanced users fall into.
- Qub3d 5y ago
  I use vanced, and I have YouTube premium. Sponsor segments and missing dislike counts are killer to my experience. I also like that I can turn off elements of the YouTube design that are clearly rushed and/or TikTok also-rans demanded by management.

ohgodplsno 5y ago

1/ I want free shit. 2/ I hate ads. 3/ Google not making money from ads makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. 4/ I also run and contribute to Sponsorblock because fuck your VPN ad. Nobody "values the service" of YouTube, that's bullshit HN founder talk seeping on every other subject. The reality is, there's no other source of videos (everyone is on youtube because everyone is on youtube), ads are a scourge, and there's very little _actually worth the time_ on YouTube.

wbobeirne 5y ago
I'm with you on 2 & 3, but I don't align with 1 at all. Perhaps that's because I'm fortunate enough to have the expendable income to afford it, so it's easier for me to justify the cost. But it's fair to say that "value the service" is kinda bullshit, I'm mostly talking about valuing the content, and paying for the service that makes it possible. I'd follow the content though, if it moved to a service with more agreeable terms.

bcrescimanno 5y ago

My primary issue with paying for Google services is that, when it comes to Google, I am the product being sold. I honestly haven't looked into YouTube Premium despite consuming a fair amount of YouTube content because I don't strongly feel it will change the dynamic with Google: they will still take my viewing data on YouTube and package that to sell me to advertisers in other avenues. So now, yes, I get a better YouTube experience by removing ads on my mobile device; but, I'm now paying Google money so they can make money off my viewing habits.

no_time 5y ago

I'm doing everything in my power to not give any money to GOOG/MS/AAPL. I would not shed a tear for YT in it's current state if it were to shut down because of revenue problems.

fma 5y ago
A more effective way would be to just boycott YouTube. Rather than block ads, block their domain on all your devices. Increasing a video view count entices the video producer to create more. More content = more views from users who see ads.
- no_time 5y ago
  I could go full Stallman on every aspect of my life. I do admire his strict adherence to his own moral code. But at some point you have to realize if you are a gifted person like Stallman, with a large capacity to bring change to this world through uncompromising attitude OR you are just average joe with no real chance of making any meaningful change. To be frank with you I sleep really well knowing I'm not directly contributing money towards tech giants getting even more powerful while at the same time not completely alienating myself from popular culture.

disiplus 5y ago

i pay for youtube premium (i use spotify for music) just to not have ads, but now there are baked ads in videos, so im thinking about canceling my premium and just installing vanced because it has sponsorblock installed. im not even watching that much youtube, but i cannot stand ads.

Taway_vncd 5y ago

The internet was better before monetization. The profit motive has killed what made it great and promising. I wish everyone used ad blockers and everyone who's in it for the money would either charge upfront or stop producing. The good niche content that's made for love would still be there.

wbobeirne 5y ago
I have mixed feelings about the monetization. I also like creations just for creations sake, but it'd be hard for me to argue that I haven't benefited from a lot of great content that wouldn't exist if people couldn't dedicate themselves full time to making it. A lot of people may say (and feel!) they'd do it just for the love of it, but reality can get in the way of that when you've got to make a living. That's not to say that there aren't better ways to make that living than ad revenue. I much prefer direct monetization.

vdsk 5y ago

I am already paying google enough with my personal information. They will not extract more value from me without putting at least a fight. I completely understand why people would pay, especially if there is no other option to not get ads, but I don't want to pay Google any cents for a service they would be happy to provide for free for influence. It has negative externalities (Google "lose" money and free video is... un-impacted in the long run) but I value those infinitely less than my attention span.

mminer237 5y ago
If you don't view any ads, Google doesn't make any money off your personal information. Essentially all data collecting only exists to tailor specific ads to people they think will find them relevant so they can justify charging more for them.
- vdsk 5y ago
  Sure, but they are still collecting anyway despite them having been unable to put an ad in front of my eyes for several years now. I understand they are probably just doing it "in case of", but the more paranoid part of myself is wondering if that's all there is.

EarlKing 5y ago

Because Google regards us as a resource to be exploited and we're just returning the favor? Class warfare really sucks when you're on the wrong end of it, huh?

kevincox 5y ago

I used to pay for Premium. Then they kept making the service worse and worse. Eventually I decided that they don't deserve my money. - YouTube Music is trash. I was an inside early adopter and all of my feedback was ignored. I originally subscribed for Google Play Music (which was pretty good) but I switched back to my own collecting. - They removed email subscription notices. - YouTube Originals were awful. They took some of my favourite creators to make slightly better content that I can no longer share with my friends. Not to mention that you were never notified of these videos because they were completely different from normal videos in all of the YouTube UIs. (Thankfully went back on this, but I had left by that point). - Videos always play at 360p on my 4k monitor. I need to manually up the quality at least 90% of the time. My internet is fantastic and I never see a stutter after raising the quality. - The recommendations are always awful. I don't use them often but when I do it is all things that I have already watched. - They keep trying to turn auto-play back on. (Although to be fair this isn't new). - It still has ads! They just promote the Premium content (that I don't want) instead of other ads. Sure, less obtrusive but still annoying. Just let me use the damn service I have been paying for for years. I understand the argument that I shouldn't be using the service if I'm not paying for it. In fact I don't use an adblocker on most sites because of this belief (I just back out of obnoxious sites). However 1. I've paid enough that I consider it fair for years of future viewing and 2. costing YouTube money is actually beneficial to me, because if it were to fold the content would move somewhere better. To me YouTube is a great example of the cost of forever quadratic growth. They had a good product, it was profitable with ads or profitable if people payed for Premium. But they need to keep sucking more value from users otherwise their shareholders get angry. But I've been sucked dry and I'm quitting.

dont__panic 5y ago
Yeah, the constant ad creep is my justification for ad blockers as well: since the service provider doesn't respect me or my privacy, they'll never be content to serve a few simple ads on the side of a video based on the content of that video to pay the server bills. Instead, they'll build a giant Rube Goldberg machine to target ads, hoover up user data, and shove more and more ads in my face. Even when I pay, I still get "original content" shown in my face because it's cheaper for them to serve than content sourced from other providers. At the end of the day, you just have to put in the legwork to make things optimal for your use case, because they'll never care about you anyway.

autoexec 5y ago

> and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. I doubt this. Youtube provides google with a lot more than a means a push ads. It gives them massive amounts of data about the viewers and the content creators to mine for their own use. They collect that data if you view ads on the platform or not.

beprogrammed 5y ago

For me personally, and I know others as well, I can't stand ads, if it comes down to the end of the world or accepting ads, goodbye world. So naturally I go quite a bit out of my way to remove ads and build tools that remove ads, everywhere I can. With YouTube's current trend of doing the worst job possible (see removing dislikes) there is no way in hell I'm going to be paying them anything. I'm still waiting for good ways to pay content producers directly, how does one tip a tenth of a cent?

foepys 5y ago

The official YouTube app is unable to play 2160p 60Hz video on my Android TV because it stutters and falls back to 1440p 60Hz. Doesn't matter whether I use the native app or the built-in Chromecast. NewPipe doesn't have any problems. The official YouTube app also sometimes just decides that 480p is enough for everybody and refuses to play any higher resolution until I force-close the app from the Android settings multiple times. Since using NewPipe I have never experienced a video playing in another resolution than the highest available. Plus, since Google/Alphabet is doing everything they can to funnel as much money away from the EU via various tax avoidance systems, I don't feel any shame. I try to donate to the creators via various channels, if one is available.

newbie789 5y ago

vbezhenar 5y ago

“YouTube premium is not available in your country.”

jorvi 5y ago

At some point, YouTube realized they are more-or-less the only game in town and started to go from 1 ad every 0.5 video to 2 pre-roll ads, a mid roll ad and sometimes at near the end another ad. They also made some 30s-1m ads unskippable.

Karsteski 5y ago

Tbh I would just pay for YouTube if it were just a video platform that was consumer-friendly, for example LTT's Floatplane service, which I have paid for in the past. Unfortunately, that's not what we're dealing with. Google/Youtube are massive data collection platforms, and I refuse to participate in that any more than I have to.

idonotknowwhy 5y ago

Sponsor Block

toastercat 5y ago

Everytime* we have a thread about third-party YouTube clients, there are comments like yours by folks who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of these third-party tools. The same happened year(s) ago with a thread about NewPipe. The purpose of these apps (including Vanced) is not solely to get past ad-block; Vanced (and NewPipe, and Piped, and Invidious) do far more than just give an ad-free viewing experience -- they provide a breadth of quality of life features on top of usually being more privacy-friendly. The frustrating thing about this is that we can avoid these questions if commenters would just click the link and read.

wbobeirne 5y ago
You're totally right and I wish I had clarified that more in my original comment. I will probably try out Vanced even though I pay for Premium. I was really looking to hear from the people who primarily use it to circumvent ads, which I assume is the primary draw. But there are a lot of other good features worth discussing.
- toastercat 5y ago
  I think it is definitely a primary draw; I no longer use Vanced (used it years ago) but I remember the killer feature back then was being able to listen to audio from videos while having your phone screen off (a feature that YouTube eventually added to the official app). I primarily use NewPipe. I enjoy the benefit of not having ads, but more than that, I enjoy the simplicity and the drastically lower system resource usage.
jsnell 5y ago
The HN title is "Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android". The app being an adblocker is the one thing the submitter thought was worth highlighting. It is also the first feature the app's webpage mentions. The webpage even has paid ads for other adblockers before going into any of the advanced features. Given the above, it seems pretty darn obvious why the GP thinks that the real selling point of the app is to block ads. If this had been submitted as "Vanced: YouTube app with an AMOLED black theme", do you think it would be at the top of the frontpage?

willcipriano 5y ago

A significant percentage of what I watch on YouTube was uploaded by people who don't have rights to that content. For me, turnabout is fair play. YouTube can profit off of pirated content, and I can pirate YouTube. I use newpipe though.

smukherjee19 5y ago

Here's another angle: a LOT of common people out there don't even bother blocking ads, let alone even thinking about the possibility that it's possible to block ads without using Youtube Premium. They either: a) Live with ads, thinking that's the norm or not giving it much thought, or, b) Subscribe to Youtube Premium without considering the possibility of ways around it. So, realistically speaking, the probability of everyone starting to use Vance overnight is almost zero. I also used to feel the same: why can't people just use adblockers!? Then I realized that me and the type of people I normally interact with != the general public, atleast in terms of tech-savviness and/or curiousity.

wbobeirne 5y ago
I agree it's unlikely, but it's a negative externality all the same. In general I try to minimize those. It's also highly dependent on the creator's viewer demographic, since the creator only gets paid for ads watched. A tech focused creator probably sees significantly less ad revenue than one with a more general audience.

polski-g 5y ago

I dislike Google's censorship. So I don't want them to make more money to engage in more censorship.

mda 5y ago
Why don't you completely avoid its services then?

evilthrow 5y ago

If I can not pay, I will not pay.

manholio 5y ago

Youtube and Google make money by being monopolists. They had (or in the case of Youtube, bought) a first mover advantage, grown their platforms aggressively and now they are milking the network effects. There is almost no way someone could break the monopoly by making a better video sharing platform, not even Google could do it, that's why they bought a rapidly growing market leader instead of making their own failed copycat (Google Plus, anyone?). So there is absolutely no connection between this reality and the "fair world" fantasy you describe, that could maybe apply to copyright, torrenting etc., but not adblocking on monopolistic platforms. The amount of money and ads views you generate for Google is a monopoly rent, it bears no relation to the value of the platform or its operating costs in a competitive market, or any other justifiable and "fair" income.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

TheNewAndy 5y ago

I used to have no adblockers on anything, and I was fine with it. Then I had kids, and I wasn't really comfortable with bringing them up in an environment where when you tell a computer to do one thing ("Play this video") it does a different thing ("I will do that, but not before I do what I want to do"). There are a few websites that have ad supported videos that I am ok with my kids watching, and putting uBlock Origin on the computers means that when I tell my computer to play videos from those sites, I know that it is going to do just that, and I won't have my kids being manipulated by stuff they don't understand. Ads in software are just a case of a computer not doing what you have asked it to do. It has always been ok to ignore ads - putting them on computers does not make them special in any way. This is just my parenting, and I can imagine that other people want their children to value other things - and I might change things as they get older so they can understand how the ads work. Right now, they are not ready for that.

cute_boi 5y ago
Same, sometime I get naughty ads, I wonder what impression it would leave on children mind. I think someone has uploaded the few examples of such egregious vice. https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/ https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/
lostmsu 5y ago
Yeah, Alexa in South Park: Post COVID is quite a dystopian demonstration of that.
d0gbread 5y ago
Having a kid is what put it over the top for me too. That, compounded by Google's ads being all over the map in terms of content, location in videos, and most importantly, length. I've put on a kids video and mid video there's a ten minute ad playing and a two year old absorbing some content I did not approve.

doliveira 5y ago

I paid for Youtube Premium just once. Then I opened Incognito mode in the app and it started showing me ads anyway.

nathias 5y ago

I don't want to support the platforms in any way and hope they stop existing. Sadly, its very hard for competitors to take back market share from these global monopolies.

Levitz 5y ago

>if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. Good. I find the idea of Google having an effective monopoly on video streaming disgraceful.

Bayart 5y ago

I'll consider giving money of my own free will to Google when they stop farming my data and dodging taxes. I sponsor a number a creators through Patreon.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

YT Premium is actually nice and lets me share with others who I consider "family". It strikes a nice balance at it's current price and policies. If those don't seem like a good deal anymore vanced (et. al.) here I come.

traspler 5y ago

I don‘t use Vanced but something similar for iOS. I actually do pay for YT Premium but what the app also gives me is SponsorBlock, so thanks the other viewers flagging sections in videos, it will also skip baked-in ad slots. As I have YT Premium and assumed that the creators get paid for their baked-in spot according to their reach (channel size, engagement, etc) and not how many people don‘t skip that section of the video, I don‘t feel bad but frustrated that I have to go so far to simply watch videos without getting constantly bombarded with ads. If my assumption is wrong I would be grateful to get more info on how these baked-in ad spots are arranged.

masterof0 5y ago

Because if someone gives a free magazine, I don't have to stare at the ads either. If they (Youtube) don't want people to block ads, they can stop serving ads and charge for the service. People will move to another free services and continue blocking ads. No company have the right to serve me content I don't want to consume. If not my responsibility as a consumer to justify/support a company's business model

charcircuit 5y ago

The main value adds to me other than blocking ads is sponsorblock and a black theme (as opposed to dark grey). I have given YouTube money via memberships as they take a 30% cut.

gaius_baltar 5y ago

> Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? YT Premium only makes the problem worse by still allowing native ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.

coryfklein 5y ago

> YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It feels heavy on negative externalities. "YouTube files bankruptcy and closes it's doors because people aren't willing to watch advertisements and executives could think of no other source of revenue to keep the doors open." That's never going to happen, because the executives would be fired for incompetency. If advertising suddenly becomes a non-viable revenue stream, YouTube (and internet video hosting in general) is not going to disappear. In fact, I ACTIVELY WISH we would drop the advertising model, and I will not support it if I have any alternative. It is a poison on the world and a giant economic waste. The world would be much the better place if YouTube (and the internet in general) gave up on advertising entirely.

scim-knox-twox 5y ago

I don't support Google / ads / tracking.