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The price hike on Youtube premium is insane. I guess it makes sense when every other product you try to bring to market ends in failure. If Google is the creme

The price hike on Youtube premium is insane. I guess it makes sense when every other product you try to bring to market ends in failure. If Google is the creme de la creme of software engineering companies, full of absolute geniuses, why can't they think of a product that people actually want besides charging more/putting out more ads for the products they have?

pvarangot 4y ago
Geniuses in their underwear at home resting and vesting no make you money.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  You'd think the largest tracking machine humanity has ever built would be able to tell whether their 'underwear'-clad engineers are implementing the assigned tasks as expected.
  - pvarangot 4y ago
    The assigned task is not working for the competition
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  This is different from pre-2020 when they were in their underwear in the office. (... I've heard stories. ;) )
wutbrodo 4y ago
> If Google is the creme de la creme of software engineering companies, full of absolute geniuses, why can't they think of a product This question seems to answer itself? Engineering skills are not product skills, and Google kinda sucks at product
peppertree 4y ago
Google engineering team is supreme but product team is subpar.
- melony 4y ago
  I thought they are famous for their "APM program"? Is it simply overrated?
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    “Signs point to yes” But for real… it’s prestigious because it’s hard to get into, not because Google is great at product development. In practice Google’s product muscle has proven to be pretty weak
  - s3r3nity 4y ago
    They've been riding off that "fame" for like 20 years, but it's a completely different situation today vs. when the program was at its peak.
- zoltar 4y ago
  The house that Marissa built.
- smaug7 4y ago
  While I don't necessarily disagree, my understanding is that engineering tends to drive more of the product decisions. I question how much power the product team actually has.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    That has ceased to be true in vast tracts of the company. Cloud, for example, is chasing feature parity with its competitors and engineers are told to implement things because AWS or Azure have them, not because they organically grew out of the architecture of the existing system. In fact, quite a few features annealed poorly onto the existing architecture (which users of Google Cloud may have memory of).
lumost 4y ago
I spotted this in my account. I was originally under the impression youtube premium would be 15 bucks a month... some how it's now up to 30 bucks a month. 6x AppleTV and 2x Netflix.
- ilovecaching 4y ago
  It's 30 bucks because you're paying via Apple. Google hates the Apple cut so they are now charging an extra 8 dollars a month for not giving them direct access to your credit card info.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Are they wrong to do so? It makes no sense for them to make less money on a competitor's platform. There's also no real alternative to YouTube Premium on iOS (see: sideloading limitations) so they could arguably charge $50 a month and retain most of their iOS customers. This is your reward for locking yourself in a room with two hungry corporations.
    - alimov 4y ago
      > so they could arguably charge $50 a month and retain most of their iOS customers. Source?
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        It's hyperbole, but people would still buy it. On iOS, Google is allowed to monopolize YouTube and it shows us a dark vision for the future of platforms that enable this kind of lockdown. Google can treat the platform like a second class citizen, buy up latent iOS advertising, force people to use an inferior app and still profit handsomely off it, all at the same time. This doesn't have to be the case. But Apple's lockdown enables Google's tyranny, so there's really no other choice. On other platforms, I can install apps like NewPipe on watch YouTube in the background without needing to download anything from Google besides the videos I want. Google is not the savior of this story by any means, but they're not afraid to play Apple's game of turning iOS users into hostages.
alphabetting 4y ago
I've always been surprised that YouTube has been that profitable to begin with. 40k hours of video uploaded every hour and all the watch time is pretty mind boggling.
- jorams 4y ago
  I don't think they've ever released how profitable YouTube is? Only revenues. I've always assumed it's unprofitable given what must be ridiculous operational costs.
crazygringo 4y ago
Huh? For individual plans there's no hike ($12/mo.). Family plan went from $18 to $23, hardly insane. But now if you purchase via iOS instead of the web it's $30 because of the Apple 30% tax. So... don't do that. They are literally pushing you to subscribe via the web, so do that. The only thing insane is that Apple still takes a big cut of streaming/media subscriptions.
- browningstreet 4y ago
  $15 to $23. A bit insulting, TBH.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    No, all news sources reporting the hike say it's been $18 previously, not $15. $18 to $23 is not insulting. It's still less than the price of two individual subscriptions.
    - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
      You're both right. It was $15/mo, then the price went up to $18 but they didn't raise the price for existing subscribers, but this time they're raising the price for existing customers as well, so for the oldest customers, it's a 50%, $15->$23 hike, and for newer customers, it's a 27%, $18->$23 hike.
    - indecisive_user 4y ago
      I have a family plan. I can confirm I pay $14.99 per month right now and received an email stating it will increase to $22.99. Perhaps I'm grandfathered into a cheaper plan, but that's my data point.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Most problems Google is trying to solve now outside their core competency and existing offerings are not, fundamentally, software engineering problems. Consider the saga of Stadia. The tech is rock-solid. That fact did nothing to address developers not wanting to risk a platform that might not have customers, customers not wanting to subscribe to a platform that may not have long-term support, game development itself being the world's biggest game of craps, entire swathes of the world lacking enough internet bandwidth for realtime streaming, and nobody trusting Google to lean into something at an operational loss for more than a few years anymore (with the exception-proving-the-rule of Cloud).
- _trampeltier 4y ago
  In theorie, I was interested in Stadia, but a subscription but I still have to buy the game WTF. So of course I did not even try.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    I think this is really interesting. Stadia didn't require a subscription. You could just buy games and play them. But loads of people came to the conclusion that you needed a subscription. My going hypothesis is that this was caused by the free trial of the subscription service (higher resolution, cheaper games) that everybody got when they launched. So since people couldn't access the games without getting the free trial they assumed that this meant that they couldn't access the games without a subscription.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Yeah, that's high on the list of things that harmed the platform. Hypothetically, if they'd wanted to go a totally different direction, the could have courted game developers willing to create games for them that would have been offerable at a pure-subscription rate. But they chased AAA games and hit a major market issue: there was no way AAA publishers were going to under-cut their per-unit sales in other channels by offering with-subscription access to their product and trusting Google would pay them enough to make that worth their while.
  - 4y ago
Aleksdev 4y ago
I think GCP, YouTube and Google maps are pretty good products. To answer your question. I don’t think it’s that easy to create a product that people love.
explodingwaffle 4y ago
I don’t understand why anyone would pay that much for YouTube premium- isn’t it just no ads, and background play? In what universe is that worth £16/$12 a month?? You could get two “real” streaming services for that if you pushed it a little.
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  It is quite punchy for an online service, but you would have to prise YouTube Premium from my cold dead hands. I visit YouTube multiple times per day for work, entertainment, research etc. Without Premiun there are so many ad units it’s painful.
- sidibe 4y ago
  No ads and background play are great though. YouTube music also means you don't need a Spotify subscription which is $10 by itself. Altogether it is worth it to me
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  No ads is worth quite a bit to me. I wish more platforms had this option to opt out of them legitimately. I would gladly pay another 25% on top of my YouTube Premium subscription if they would also enforce no in-content/native ads from the creators (just ask them to tag the beginning and end of the sponsored section, and auto-skip for premium subscribers). I basically lose my shit every time I have to hear "this episode brought to you by square space" lol.
  - nitrixion 4y ago
    This is yet another instance where piracy provides the better product. Installing uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock makes Youtube a much better product than simply paying for premium. If you haven't used it, SponsorBlock is a crowd sourced browser extension that identifies and skips sections of videos like "This content is brought to you by..." I used to pay for premium and use YT Music, but after getting fed up with YTM I cancelled. I'm noticing a much MUCH better experience using UBO and SponsorBlock. Unfortunately, this setup means the creators don't get any revenue from me. If only YouTube offered such an experience at a reasonable cost.
kweingar 4y ago
> every other product you try to bring to market ends in failure Pretty difficult to square >$250B of annual revenue with “all of your products are failures” and “can’t think of a product that people actually want”

pvarangot 4y ago

Geniuses in their underwear at home resting and vesting no make you money.

ThalesX 4y ago
You'd think the largest tracking machine humanity has ever built would be able to tell whether their 'underwear'-clad engineers are implementing the assigned tasks as expected.
- pvarangot 4y ago
  The assigned task is not working for the competition
shadowgovt 4y ago
This is different from pre-2020 when they were in their underwear in the office. (... I've heard stories. ;) )

wutbrodo 4y ago

> If Google is the creme de la creme of software engineering companies, full of absolute geniuses, why can't they think of a product This question seems to answer itself? Engineering skills are not product skills, and Google kinda sucks at product

peppertree 4y ago

Google engineering team is supreme but product team is subpar.

melony 4y ago
I thought they are famous for their "APM program"? Is it simply overrated?
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  “Signs point to yes” But for real… it’s prestigious because it’s hard to get into, not because Google is great at product development. In practice Google’s product muscle has proven to be pretty weak
- s3r3nity 4y ago
  They've been riding off that "fame" for like 20 years, but it's a completely different situation today vs. when the program was at its peak.
zoltar 4y ago
The house that Marissa built.
smaug7 4y ago
While I don't necessarily disagree, my understanding is that engineering tends to drive more of the product decisions. I question how much power the product team actually has.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  That has ceased to be true in vast tracts of the company. Cloud, for example, is chasing feature parity with its competitors and engineers are told to implement things because AWS or Azure have them, not because they organically grew out of the architecture of the existing system. In fact, quite a few features annealed poorly onto the existing architecture (which users of Google Cloud may have memory of).

lumost 4y ago

I spotted this in my account. I was originally under the impression youtube premium would be 15 bucks a month... some how it's now up to 30 bucks a month. 6x AppleTV and 2x Netflix.

ilovecaching 4y ago
It's 30 bucks because you're paying via Apple. Google hates the Apple cut so they are now charging an extra 8 dollars a month for not giving them direct access to your credit card info.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Are they wrong to do so? It makes no sense for them to make less money on a competitor's platform. There's also no real alternative to YouTube Premium on iOS (see: sideloading limitations) so they could arguably charge $50 a month and retain most of their iOS customers. This is your reward for locking yourself in a room with two hungry corporations.
  - alimov 4y ago
    > so they could arguably charge $50 a month and retain most of their iOS customers. Source?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      It's hyperbole, but people would still buy it. On iOS, Google is allowed to monopolize YouTube and it shows us a dark vision for the future of platforms that enable this kind of lockdown. Google can treat the platform like a second class citizen, buy up latent iOS advertising, force people to use an inferior app and still profit handsomely off it, all at the same time. This doesn't have to be the case. But Apple's lockdown enables Google's tyranny, so there's really no other choice. On other platforms, I can install apps like NewPipe on watch YouTube in the background without needing to download anything from Google besides the videos I want. Google is not the savior of this story by any means, but they're not afraid to play Apple's game of turning iOS users into hostages.

alphabetting 4y ago

I've always been surprised that YouTube has been that profitable to begin with. 40k hours of video uploaded every hour and all the watch time is pretty mind boggling.

jorams 4y ago
I don't think they've ever released how profitable YouTube is? Only revenues. I've always assumed it's unprofitable given what must be ridiculous operational costs.

crazygringo 4y ago

Huh? For individual plans there's no hike ($12/mo.). Family plan went from $18 to $23, hardly insane. But now if you purchase via iOS instead of the web it's $30 because of the Apple 30% tax. So... don't do that. They are literally pushing you to subscribe via the web, so do that. The only thing insane is that Apple still takes a big cut of streaming/media subscriptions.

browningstreet 4y ago
$15 to $23. A bit insulting, TBH.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  No, all news sources reporting the hike say it's been $18 previously, not $15. $18 to $23 is not insulting. It's still less than the price of two individual subscriptions.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    You're both right. It was $15/mo, then the price went up to $18 but they didn't raise the price for existing subscribers, but this time they're raising the price for existing customers as well, so for the oldest customers, it's a 50%, $15->$23 hike, and for newer customers, it's a 27%, $18->$23 hike.
  - indecisive_user 4y ago
    I have a family plan. I can confirm I pay $14.99 per month right now and received an email stating it will increase to $22.99. Perhaps I'm grandfathered into a cheaper plan, but that's my data point.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Most problems Google is trying to solve now outside their core competency and existing offerings are not, fundamentally, software engineering problems. Consider the saga of Stadia. The tech is rock-solid. That fact did nothing to address developers not wanting to risk a platform that might not have customers, customers not wanting to subscribe to a platform that may not have long-term support, game development itself being the world's biggest game of craps, entire swathes of the world lacking enough internet bandwidth for realtime streaming, and nobody trusting Google to lean into something at an operational loss for more than a few years anymore (with the exception-proving-the-rule of Cloud).

_trampeltier 4y ago
In theorie, I was interested in Stadia, but a subscription but I still have to buy the game WTF. So of course I did not even try.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I think this is really interesting. Stadia didn't require a subscription. You could just buy games and play them. But loads of people came to the conclusion that you needed a subscription. My going hypothesis is that this was caused by the free trial of the subscription service (higher resolution, cheaper games) that everybody got when they launched. So since people couldn't access the games without getting the free trial they assumed that this meant that they couldn't access the games without a subscription.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Yeah, that's high on the list of things that harmed the platform. Hypothetically, if they'd wanted to go a totally different direction, the could have courted game developers willing to create games for them that would have been offerable at a pure-subscription rate. But they chased AAA games and hit a major market issue: there was no way AAA publishers were going to under-cut their per-unit sales in other channels by offering with-subscription access to their product and trusting Google would pay them enough to make that worth their while.
- 4y ago

Aleksdev 4y ago

I think GCP, YouTube and Google maps are pretty good products. To answer your question. I don’t think it’s that easy to create a product that people love.

explodingwaffle 4y ago

I don’t understand why anyone would pay that much for YouTube premium- isn’t it just no ads, and background play? In what universe is that worth £16/$12 a month?? You could get two “real” streaming services for that if you pushed it a little.

benjaminwootton 4y ago
It is quite punchy for an online service, but you would have to prise YouTube Premium from my cold dead hands. I visit YouTube multiple times per day for work, entertainment, research etc. Without Premiun there are so many ad units it’s painful.
sidibe 4y ago
No ads and background play are great though. YouTube music also means you don't need a Spotify subscription which is $10 by itself. Altogether it is worth it to me
krisroadruck 4y ago
No ads is worth quite a bit to me. I wish more platforms had this option to opt out of them legitimately. I would gladly pay another 25% on top of my YouTube Premium subscription if they would also enforce no in-content/native ads from the creators (just ask them to tag the beginning and end of the sponsored section, and auto-skip for premium subscribers). I basically lose my shit every time I have to hear "this episode brought to you by square space" lol.
- nitrixion 4y ago
  This is yet another instance where piracy provides the better product. Installing uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock makes Youtube a much better product than simply paying for premium. If you haven't used it, SponsorBlock is a crowd sourced browser extension that identifies and skips sections of videos like "This content is brought to you by..." I used to pay for premium and use YT Music, but after getting fed up with YTM I cancelled. I'm noticing a much MUCH better experience using UBO and SponsorBlock. Unfortunately, this setup means the creators don't get any revenue from me. If only YouTube offered such an experience at a reasonable cost.

kweingar 4y ago

> every other product you try to bring to market ends in failure Pretty difficult to square >$250B of annual revenue with “all of your products are failures” and “can’t think of a product that people actually want”