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YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, peo

• beardedwizard 3y ago
  people are paying for the content with patreon, bypassing YouTube entirely. Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with? Why blame the users for YouTube failure?
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Patreon is also Pay-what-you-want, so whales can subsidize lower tiers, and folks can often pay less than $15 per month.
  • grogenaut 3y ago
    Because people get real mad if YouTube tries to collect the patron money themselves and obviously takes a cut. Aka memberships.
    • LukeShu 3y ago
      So? Patreon's taking a cut (but YouTube takes a bigger cut; a quick search indicates 30% vs 8%-12%). I'm fine with YouTube memberships in principle; if a creator that I support said "consider switching your support from Patreon to YouTube", I would. But there's no way I'm signing up for YouTube Premium.
      • grogenaut 3y ago
        The parent said youtube should be able to take money directly... and I pointed out they can. That's what's So. And I didn't say youtube premium, I said memberships. Tho if you have enough memberships premium makes more sense fiscally even tho it doesn't give the money to the creators as much.
        • LukeShu 3y ago
          I was responding to your assertion that people get mad because YouTube takes a cut. The alternative (Patreon) also takes a cut.
          • grogenaut 3y ago
            People are also mad at that but sometimes less so. It seems those indirections launder the grumpy since there's not one focused place to complain. YouTube takes more because they're doing more work. It's funny cause no one seems to think YouTube deserves any munny for their technological marve of long tail content sometimes.
  • mths 3y ago
    Isn't YouTube already doing that with channel memberships? I think people can also pay to comment on live streams or something.. They're definitely already letting you support creators directly, while taking their cut of course.
    • Jach 3y ago
      Yup. The livestream version is a "super chat" (or "super sticker" is an option), but even regular videos can turn on "super thanks" which let viewers donate and leave a comment. In any case, youtube takes 30%, so many streamers try to push to a third party option that takes a much lower fee. And the "and leave a comment" turns people off that option I'm sure, it'd be nice if they made it optional and just let you pseudo-anonymously support someone's video. Most people won't realize you can delete the comment right after making it and the channel still gets your money (not sure if the channel can still see the comment contents if any/account that did it). There's also "gifted memberships" which like memberships themselves is another feature lifted directly from Twitch. Given youtube's catch-up stance (Twitch also makes it difficult to use adblock) it's not hard to call them "failing" at monetizing; there are many interesting A/B experiments that could be done that they are not doing. (I think gifted memberships is no longer an A/B test feature but standard by now... so they do them sometimes, but not enough.) Part of it is also probably just Google culture; if something is "only" going to net them a few million in profit, it's not worth doing.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    The amount of people paying with patreon is just so so tiny compared to people watching YouTube in any country or city that I am not even sure what your point is. > Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with? What does this even mean? I hope you are not suggesting in good faith that YouTube should grab money from other companies somehow? Money that was given to that company by people with specific expectations in mind. What exactly is YouTube failure here? The patreon citation is just so irrelevant because of scale. Taking all of Patreon revenue would not cover YouTube hosting costs. People on HN love to talk about patreon as an alternative to youtube premium because it is an easy way out. But if it was representative of real world actions, Patreon would be processing a lot lot more money.
    • justinclift 3y ago
      > The amount of people paying with patreon is just so so ... Interesting. What are your sources for that info? :)
      • daveoc64 3y ago
        Many Patreon creators allow you to see how many patrons they have. The most popular Patreon creators have something like ~50,000 patrons. Anyone able to pull in that many patrons is likely to have millions of viewers on YouTube. The proportion of viewers that pay is tiny.
        • justinclift 3y ago
          > Many Patreon creators allow you to see how many patrons they have. Ahhh. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that being optional either. Many Patreon creators don't though, so it's kind of hard to tell. :/ That being said, I kind of wonder if the % of people paying creators is much different to the average % of people who pay for online services. From (probably dodgy?) rough memory, that's something like 4% of users. No idea how that works out when compared to $ from Youtube viewers though. :)
  • bigthymer 3y ago
    I think people are more willing to pay via Patreon because it directly funds the creators. The more YouTube takes, the less willing people are to pay.
• paulryanrogers 3y ago
  What if they charged based on use up to $15 per month? That would be a lot more tempting.
• mertd 3y ago
  I have YT premium and it is easily the best money I spend most months. I'll just play devil's advocate. Maybe people are imagining a pay per view type of experience?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • senectus1 3y ago
    completely agree. ESPECIALLY if you have children. they can piggyback of your subscription and they wont get fed those horrendous adverts while they're searching for tutorial videos. Its how the kids learn faster these days.. tutorial videos in small bites about specific subjects.
    • sundvor 3y ago
      Agreed - YouTube Family, and all child accounts are covered. Some of those ads were truly atrocious for a child to watch, especially - if you're in Australia - those for WorkSafe.
  • post_break 3y ago
    I don't like paying for premium, but at the same time I have been able to do things I never could have on my own, save tens of thousands of dollars in DIY projects, etc. My fear is they will raise the pricing and boil the frog.
  • sundvor 3y ago
    Yep, of all my subscriptions, YTP will be the last to go. The experience truly is a premium one, only marred by the inability to disable YouTube shorts. (I recently made near exactly the same comment in a recent, related story thread - but it's worth repeating).
    • crop_rotation 3y ago
      Yes I too would love an option to disable shorts. Like hide it behind 50 buttons for all I care but please let me disable shorts.
• esprehn 3y ago
  YouTube has caching like that too, see: https://peering.google.com/#/ https://peering.google.com/#/ And https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/faq https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/faq And specifically the section on: "What content can Google serve from an edge node?"
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    This is not comparable to Netflix et al. YouTube catalog is effectively infinite, and people watch all kinds of random content. Storing 10k movies and 20k TV episodes is a cakewalk compared to this.
    • hamandcheese 3y ago
      I don't disagree that YouTube has a much longer (and fatter) tail, but that doesn't mean they can't benefit from edge caching.
      • crop_rotation 3y ago
        They can benefit for sure, my point is that serving a YouTube type catalog is just far more expensive.
        • acdha 3y ago
          There's undoubtably more data being served but I'd be very curious how the edge caching efficiencies differ given how many people watch the same things (recommended by the algorithm) and since YouTube's content is so much shorter on average that larger catalog is somewhat balanced by any given cache node being able to hold more videos.
    • lokar 3y ago
      The cache hit rate is actually pretty high. Also, google already has setups at pops for other reasons and can cache fill at lower qos for free much of the time.
• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium ads. Yes, I know it exist. No, I don't want it - the more you try to trick me into activating the trial, the less I want it. > So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops). Proper ad blocker on the desktop. yt-dlp for archiving/off-line playing. NewPipe or some other alternative YouTube players for mobile. Yes, I know you meant a non-free-riding alternative, but hey - I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available. But I'm not getting bullied into subscribing.
  • pb7 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • LukeShu 3y ago
      I spend more supporting YT creators than what YouTube Premium costs. I'm fine paying for things when I say "I like this, I want more of it." YouTube itself is the worst part of the experience, it's the part I want less of. YT would have to have way fewer dark patterns and bad behaviors for me to even consider paying for YouTube Premium.
      • pb7 3y ago
        Then stop using it. The content creators you watch use it and that means you are obliged to follow the platform's terms. If they didn't need the platform, they would self host their videos and monetize via other means like Patreon but they don't. That means your contributions compared to the revenue via YouTube pales in comparison.
    • daedalus_j 3y ago
• thirteenfingers 3y ago
  What I don't understand (speaking of Vimeo) is why doesn't YouTube offer a plan where individual content creators can choose to pay a monthly fee to keep ads off of their own videos for all viewers. Speaking for myself I would happily pay for that.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    You can read the Vimeo thread for why it can not work. If people pay a monthly fee, and their views skyrocket, you either have to force them to pay much more, or to restrict their views somehow, both of which are just so so bad compared to the current scenario (this is exactly what Vimeo did).
    • asdfman123 3y ago
      Same cost model as any hosting service.
• rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  Surely there must be limits, though. I have recently witnessed a couple of 1 hour+ long “adverts”. I can bear adverts when watching youtube videos. But not 1h+ long…
• Nullabillity 3y ago
  I subscribe to YTP, but still use incognito tabs plenty for stuff that I don't want recommendations from. Fucking with adblockers there wouldn't exactly encourage me to keep the main subscription…
• dmbche 3y ago
  Isn't it Youtube's problem to make their business profitable? It's not a binary - they could offer a different deal with Premium, market it differently. Customers aren't rational - just like humans. They are a massive multinational - if anyone can figure it out, it's them. Maybe the ad model doesn't work, and people are not clear on what they are actually paying for, since it's effortless to get the same service for free. Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible. Having a way to remaing somewhat anonymous would make me consider premium, but it's a not go for me at this time
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    It is YouTube's problem to make their business profitable. And hence they will make efforts like what the article says. If things don't work they might require login and enforce ads somehow (YouTube will survive that I think, even if there is some viewership drop). There is no magic wand here that they can figure out (look at competing video services like Vimeo for an example). In the long run in 20 years if YouTube is deemed unprofitable as a whole for the company, it might even be shut down, and nobody might be willing to host another YouTube like service as is without significant changes to monetisation.
    • dmbche 3y ago
      I guess I'm fine with that! Or maybe some billionaire will make it it's gift to humanity. Crazy that we have public libraries but no public youtube/wiki government supported
      • crop_rotation 3y ago
        YouTube costs a lot, and even that because it can rely on Google's amazing infrastructure which is optimised to the core. There is no billionaire who can even cover 10 years of YouTube costs.
        • dmbche 3y ago
• throw101010 3y ago
  If I didn't have to tie my identity to my browsing/watching history (through credit card) then I would pay... but I guess that would imply them supporting alternative payment methods and also them not being able to sell this data (i.e. the subscription would be more expensive). Unlikely to happen, so I will keep ad-blocking or eventually stop watching if they make ad-blocking too difficult (happened with Twitch for me)
  • VancouverMan 3y ago
    I feel the same way. It's not just about the privacy aspects, too. It's also about the convenience. I don't want to have to create and use an account just to pay for video content. I want something more along the lines of dropping coins/bills into the instrument case of a street musician.
• kawogi 3y ago
  I'd be ok woth paying for their service, as we use youtube a lot. But youtube forces you to create a google account and stay logged in. This way they can easily track almost everything you do on the web, and I'm definitely not ok with paying for being tracked. If this was a youtube-only account (as it was in the past) then I'll immediately start paying for their service.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    This is a fair point. I too would appreciate some way to have an isolated YouTube account.
    • lamontcg 3y ago
      Firefox containers, set one up for youtube.
      • justin_oaks 3y ago
        For Chrome you can setup up different profiles. It's not as nice as containers since separate profiles force you to have different Chrome windows, but it gets the job done. I have a Facebook-only Chrome profile that keeps Facebook from tracking me all over the web.
  • dogleash 3y ago
    That's my beef too. I already pay for twitch turbo which I find to be less valuable, so it's not the cost. I just don't want to be logged into youtube all the time. And I'll never log into my google account from a work computer.
• vbezhenar 3y ago
  Peer to peer and microtransactions might work. So some people with computers can keep one tab open and earn some crypto cents. I'm not sure if it's possible to build P2P network with zero trust that could work like that. One issue could be that participating person might technically be involved with distribution of forbidden content like child porn or disney cartoon. So even if they didn't know that and everything was encrypted, they might still be accountable for it, especially because they made money doing it.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    People don't like micro transactions. Please try to think of one micro transaction product that ever got any traction. The number of desktops is tiny compared to phone and laptop users, so I don't see how this can be scaled. (And it's not even clear the cents people would earn would even cover their electricity/data costs)
  • asdfman123 3y ago
    What many people specifically don’t like about subscriptions are the transactions, IMO. Transaction costs aren’t zero, and microtransactions just introduce more of them.
• dxuh 3y ago
  It's not that I wouldn't want to pay. I can just (so far) watch the stuff with an adblocker and have effectively no additional value by giving YouTube money for premium.
• nextaccountic 3y ago
  > And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs Why can't Google do this? They already have presence at ISPs
  • miah_ 3y ago
    Youtube has ~500 hours of video uploaded every minute. Netflix only has content from the past few months/years, and probably only a few thousand hours _total_.
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      Most of that content will hardly get any views though. Caching the top 10.000 on a daily basis will avoid most traffic.
  • est31 3y ago
    I guess the reasoning is that Youtube has a way larger catalog while Netflix's catalog is comparatively small. I don't really think this really a legitimate reason though, given that most social media has huge power laws, that is it's likely that 99% of each day's views are for a very tiny number of videos comparable to the size of Netflix's catalog. Yes, for the remaining 1% youtube has to provide some central service, but that's just a small fraction of their traffic, and if they run into cost problems there they just increase the size of the caches at the ISPs, or introduce layered caching (one for each continent, then one for each ISP, etc). They probably do all of that already. Storing those huge amount of videos that get maybe 1 view per decade each, that's a different challenge, but I wouldn't say the traffic is. But I don't know youtube's data maybe there is no power law in effect for them, idk.
  • asdfman123 3y ago
    They do. The key phrase is “highly leverage.”
• bigthymer 3y ago
  I think you make a good point but I think part of the problem is that it is difficult to get people to pay for something that they have gotten used to getting for free.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    That is correct, and sometimes such free services go away if they don't make money in the long term. I don't want the same to happen to YouTube.
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    It makes no sense to pay for YouTube premium when you can use ad blockers. Which is why google is removing that option.
    • musictubes 3y ago
      Unless you want to compensate the creators of the videos. Both Youtube itself and video creators need to be paid for them to keep going.
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      One thing I haven't seen discussed here is: how exactly are they going to remove that option? Are they going to embed the ads into the video stream on-the-fly somehow?
      • crop_rotation 3y ago
        One way would be to require logins and then timeout accounts that behave abnormally wrt ads. Given that WASM will be mainstream soon, it will be hard to monkey patch the code to prevent all this.
      • HDThoreaun 3y ago
        Youtube can tell if an ad is blocked. They can then refuse to serve the video. Instead replacing it with an image that says "please turn off your adblocker" or the like.
• 8note 3y ago
  YouTube premium is the definition of paying to watch ads. If you want to skip ads your option is to block ads, not to buy premium
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Some site off X free articles per month. Can't YT do the same? Along the same lines, if there are heavy TY users, can't they be ad'ed more than average? The point being, it's hard to want to pay for the no-ads experience when you rarely if ever get to experience it and/or your YT usage is not that often.
• empyrrhicist 3y ago
  I would pay, but I refuse to pay for YouTube music. I used the much superior Google Play Music until they killed it, and I refused to eat the new dogfood.
• vba616 3y ago
  >people do not want to pay People don't want to pay for subscriptions because everything has become a bait and switch with infinite tiers! Whether it's the local newspaper, or a mega-tech company's corporate offerings. I tried subscribing (online) to my hometown newspaper within the last year. And a major national news publication. You know how people say (or used to) that the garbage on the internet is the fault of the public for not being willing to pay for good journalism. Well, guess what? You pay, you're just a sucker, probably senile and out of touch, so every third thing you click on is still behind a pay wall in the hopes you'll upgrade. And, you know, it's being done to big dumb corporations with all the software-as-a-service offerings, and they're sucking up your tax dollars from government the same way. I don't want to name names, but the entire game seems to be slicing up features randomly and making up excuses to charge more for almost every one.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    YouTube premium has just one tier. And before you raise the hypothetical question of additional tiers in future, by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.
    • vba616 3y ago
      If there's just one tier, but it doesn't include what I'd expect, then I'd be even less happy than if there are more tiers - but they probably will get around to adding them.
      • crop_rotation 3y ago
        What you are describing is just wishful thinking. There is no business model which has just one tier with the perfect specs and the perfect price for millions of people, let alone hundreds of millions.
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      For now. It's just like cable TV. They promised that a subscription to cable TV would mean no ads. They lied, and went back on their promise within a very short time. They'll do the same here.
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  On the hand, people have been abused by Google (by way of stealing our attention) and Google has trained us not to pay for services. So I can’t see how you expect me to trust the company that has tried to game me, and never disclosed that I was the product. Why should I pay now ?
• matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Paying to skip ads just raises the value of your attention even further because now they know you've got enough disposable income to pay for such frivolous things. The truth is that not advertising to everyone at all times is leaving money on the table and it's only a matter of time before some bonus-seeking executive turns that into his payday opportunity. Besides, even if you pay for premium you'll still get ads hardcoded into videos as sponsored segments and you'll still be tracked and profiled by Google. Ads are immoral and should not be a valid business model to begin with. What YouTube is doing is exactly what should be done: pay us, or we won't actually send you the video. The network is the boundary: I'm not gonna try to hack into their servers to get a video they don't want to send me. If they send me the video for free though, that's their decision. They can send me ads too hoping I'll look at then but I make no such promise. They don't get to complain at all if I block them just like magazines don't get to complain if I rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash. Many channels are successfully backed by patrons via patreon. That seems to be the most ethical way in my understanding.
  • MrZander 3y ago
    > Ads are immoral How do you justify this claim? How can advertising your product to attract customers be morally wrong?
    • crop_rotation 3y ago
      I think the commenter meant "targeted advertising" which is the norm on the Internet.
      • matheusmoreira 3y ago
        I meant all forms of advertising but surveillance capitalism backed targeted advertising is certainly one of its worst forms.
    • nullc 3y ago
      I'll argue the case here though I go back and forth how strongly I hold this view. Ads are immoral because modern advertising is carefully engineered brainwashing, often filled with factually incorrect claims (which are legally permitted as "hyperbole"). Beyond creating demand for products that the viewer would be better off without the brainwashing component in many often damages the viewers level of personal satisfaction or feelings of self worth by playing to their insecurities or creating unrealistic comparisons (which by implication or claim the purchase will cure). Because of this advertising can be negative sum -- anytime the benefit of introducing someone to the product is outweighed by the harm created by the effort to convince the user they need it. For example, ads for things you can't afford can create longing that can't be answered, yet don't provide you the benefit of the good (or the seller the benefit of the sale!). One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum. Even where the ad can't be describe as brainwashing unless its in a catalogue of goods or similar, the user wasn't looking for it right now and so by forcing them to watch it you're taking their time. Because copyright creates a monopoly for goods, the user often doesn't have the opportunity to choose instead "similar to X but with less time wasting ads". Since the user is denied a practical alternative (other than a costly 'go without entirely') you cannot say that their consent to view the advertisement was freely given -- and consent not freely given isn't valid. As such, even a brainwashing free advertisement is ethically dubious because its stealing the user's time.
• fendy3002 3y ago
  I don't like that paid subscription services usually changes to be worse the day they get high enough market share. And content providers are severely fragmented that it become expensive to enjoy them all. Sure we can switch subscriptions for some months to enjoy different content provider for same expense, but it's such a hassle to do it imo.
• colordrops 3y ago
  I want a paid for video streaming service with the following: * No attachment to Google * Enough network effect / traction to be interesting * No predatory data collection and recommendation algorithms YouTube premium isn't that. So for now I use Newpipe and ad blockers. If they lock it down, hopefully there will be enough traction somewhere else to pick up where they left off.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    What you want kinda exists in other hosting providers like Vimeo, but the economics is not pretty and most people don't want such a service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578). What you missed in your requirement list is how much will you be willing to pay for the service you desire.
    • asdfman123 3y ago
      What’s really required is a much greater proportion of people like them.
    • js8 3y ago
      It could be a public service, but people don't like these either.
• WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  The issue with YouTube is that it’s not a cheaper alternative. I think a lot of people are like me and find it mostly of little value which is why they don’t pay and will probably just stop using it if they have to go through a ton of ads.
• COGlory 3y ago
  I used to have Youtube Red or whatever it was, along with Google Music. Then they got rid of Google Music, replacing it with Youtube Music that I didn't want. And then they ruined Youtube by intentionally nerfing it on Firefox, ruining my subscription feed, changing the algorithm to reinforce short form clickbait, and adding things like Shorts and autoplay that, no matter how many times I turn them off, they always come back. So I switched to Floatplane (3 subscriptions) and Spotify. I have no problem paying for content. I have a HUGE problem paying Google.
• markus_zhang 3y ago
  Probably the alternative is to simply not watch any video on YouTube at all. I'd love YouTube to do that for me because that's probably going to beneficial to me in general. I wish I could do that by myself.
• karmasimida 3y ago
  People would buy two cups of boba tea, other than paying 12 per month. Ain't nothing wrong with this, once it went free, it is hard to go back.
  • leduyquang753 3y ago
    Except in other-than-first-world countries it's equivalent to tens of cups of tea.
• cpeterso 3y ago
  Google does cache YouTube content in ISP data centers using GGC (Google Global Cache) servers. Their docs says the majority of GGC traffic is cacheable YouTube content. https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/7658599?hl=en https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/7658599?hl=en
• oefrha 3y ago
  It’s a recurring pattern on the Internet: people unashamedly claiming they’re getting X for free, and will gladly pay if Y condition is met. Then Y condition is met, and people (possibly the same, possibly different) unashamedly come up with new excuses of why they’re still getting it for free and won’t pay. Never believe “I’ll pay if …” if you’re running a business.
  • YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    Or this could be evidence that YouTube is coming up with new ways to be bad faster than they're fixing their problems. Shorts, removal of the Dislike button, repeatedly and retroactively changing the rules on 'advertiser friendliness' without warning, degrading their own search feature in favour of algorithmic content, spurious bans, a guilty-until-proven-innocent copyright strike system that's easily and openly exploited by bad actors and the inability of even million-subscriber channels to reach a human in support should any of those problems suddenly destroy their livelihood. Fixing any one of those things won't make YouTube good, nor does it inspire confidence that by the time any of them are fixed they won't have some up with some new form of awfulness.
• makeitdouble 3y ago
  > because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay People don't want to pay for half-baked products: - Workspace accounts don't work - Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid - As Google regularly kills people's account, it also means most of us have multiple Youtube accounts that we check in different contexts, and paying for premium on all of them is way more of a commitment that you make it sound like.
  • gg-plz 3y ago
    nonsense. these are not anywhere in the top hundred issues with the service. workspace accounts are irrelevant to 99.99% of normal users. google hasn't encouraged using workspace accounts for consumer use for like ten years. the only place people care is on hacker news. it works across almost all devices.
  • Supermancho 3y ago
    > People don't want to pay for half-baked products: This is disingenuous, to be blunt. People do not block youtube ads because workspace accounts don't work or because Google kills off niche products or that people lose youtube accounts when switching devices. Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience, due to the way the algorithms tailor so well, regardless of how often you may engage in it.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      The ad blocker problem is less people explicitely blocking ads on Youtube, than people blanket blocking ads everywhere. They'd need to white list Youtube to disable it for that specific case. So the question is whether they really _want_ to pay for Premium or not, the ad-blocker will probably stay on either way. > Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience I'm not following. For instance I have a work profile, my main profile on my phone (mostly due to paying for Google One + apps + a bunch of services on that specific account), and other profiles on my other devices (home laptop + ipad) I absolutely do not want my work account to share my personal algorithmic recommendations, or my main account getting killed because of anything happening on other devices, including facturation issues. Funnily enough, even as those accounts are separate, there's still cross-contamination of the algorithmic recomendations, probably because they share the same IP or geoloc.
• Animats 3y ago
  > Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops. Peer to peer streaming of the PeerTube type seems to work reasonably well. Unlike Mastodon, etc., you don't have to sign up to receive content. You just click on a URL and it works. What it doesn't offer is discovery. Nobody will find your stuff on PeerTube. They might follow links there. I put metaverse tech demos on PeerTube.[1] Works fine, few views. No ads. [1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/tp9mLAQoHaFR32YAVKVDrz https://video.hardlimit.com/w/tp9mLAQoHaFR32YAVKVDrz
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    > doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at *any scale* Sure it works fine at trivial scale. But can it work at 1% of YouTube scale? How many nodes are needed for that to happen? Is that number viable?
    • Nifty3929 3y ago
      No. 1% of YouTube is absolutely massive.
    • Animats 3y ago
      The way PeerTube works, if you're watching it, you're also sharing it. So it should scale for popular videos.
  • somethingreen 3y ago
    From user side Youtube discovery is almost completely broken anyway. I ended up removing both home feed and recommended videos block via extension because they didn't contribute anything besides frustration and page load time for a couple years now. I learn about creators elsewhere and then look up and subscribe to their channel on YT. This flow will work just fine with p2p as long as creators have a video list and an rss feed anywhere on the internet and a single functioning search engine continues to exist.
• Nifty3929 3y ago
  This exactly, but even one step further - it’s time consuming and expensive to produce the videos themselves! Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?! This is the major value YouTube provides. They bridge the gap between consumers who don’t want to pay with producers that NEED to get paid. Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    Yes correct, for most streamers that I watch, YouTube seems to be an important part of their income. PeerTube will not magically create incentives for people to create content.
    • brewdad 3y ago
      20 years ago there was no such job as “YouTube Creator”. If 20 years or less from now there once again isn’t, oh well.
  • jltsiren 3y ago
    The problem is that YouTube consists of two fundamentally different services. One is a content hosting service like Imgur. The people hosting the content are the users. If there are any expenses involved, it's a matter between them and the service provider. The audience doesn't use the service deliberately. They just go there because someone wants to show them something. The other is a platform where people try to make money with the content they produce. The audience are the users, and it's fair to expect them to pay one way or another. I'm not personally interested in using that YouTube, because I seem to be incompatible with videos as a content format. Pretty much every YouTube video like that I've seen would have been better as a written article.
    • crop_rotation 3y ago
      The comparison to imgur is interesting, as imgur is itself trying hard to make money now by removing lots of content. The history of image hosting websites is a history filled with image hosts failing for the exact same reason. This post should be an interesting read: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... The thing is, there is no way to provide a free content hosting service in the long run (whether image or video)
• naikrovek 3y ago
  YouTube has cache boxes at ISPs like Netflix. YouTube Premium Family is worth every penny.
• jrm4 3y ago
  Not necessarily pure peer-to-peer, but I'm pretty sure some federated thing could absolutely work. We just need this country/world to collectively remember what a library is.
• webmobdev 3y ago
  No, it's because we users no longer trust BigTech like Google to not be greedy and know that it is all about bait and switch. They made "free" the norm on the internet as it increased the barriers for their competitors. Then started to show ads as nothing can be free for ever. And we users accepted that as a reasonable compromise with the belief that the ads will be limited. What happened? Bait and switch - from one to two to three banners in a page, from text ads to display ads to video ads, there was suddenly more ads than content on a web page. And the ads used more bandwidth than the content. Next came the assurance that our privacy wouldn't be compromised. Google pledged to "Do No Evil". What happened? Bait and switch - suddenly Google (or other BigTech) claimed that they just can't survive without personalised ads that need to be very privacy invasive. Now we are the products. The bait and switch in Youtube (or any other streaming platform) is quite obvious - get us to pay for "ads free" video, and then suddenly introduce ads in the paid tier. Then offer another "ad free" tier for a higher price. No thanks, Google. We are not going to be fooled. Go ahead and introduce the anti-ad blockers - there is no way you are going to get me to pay to watch videos full of ads. Google's greed also needs limit. Especially when the user experience of most Google products have become worse.
  • ravenstine 3y ago
    This is exactly why I won't pay The Google a single nickel ever again. It would not surprise me in the least that, after all of this, they begin showing ads for Premium users and justifying it as being fewer ads than for free users. And I can't wait for their sycophants to come to their defense, shaming me for wanting "everything for free." It's not about paid or free. It's about not trusting The Google, who I believe to be a bastard of a corporation. I pay for plenty of content creators on other platforms. But ads from The Google are the only way for anyone to make money? I don't buy it.
• pier25 3y ago
  If Google removed the useless YouTube Music + exclusives and lowered the price it would be a lot more popular. I pay for YouTube premium and for me it's worth it to remove the ads with the family plan. But paying for extra stuff you don't want sucks.
  • k4ch0w 3y ago
    +1, I will pay for the removal of the adds but I couldn't care about YouTube TV or music. The price already feels too high but it's the one I don't rotate through compared to Netflix/Disney/Hulu/HBO which I watch a show then cancel.
• kerkeslager 3y ago
  I've said it before and I've said it again: ad-based content and pay content are incompatible business models. YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for. The content is not worth paying for because it's been designed from the ground up to sell ads. When a website designed to sell ads fails to sell content, that's not evidence that selling content doesn't work, it's evidence that selling content designed to sell ads doesn't work.
  • lostmsu 3y ago
    This is spot on. People assume Vimeo is the only competitor to YouTube, but that's wrong. Reddit is a perfectly fine competitor to YouTube in a sense that people don't really need the content to come in form of video.
    • xkbarkar 3y ago
      No, just no. Reddits poor quality commentaries that are mostly bots and teen trollers, do not compare to millions of hours of content from verified experts amd amateurs alike showcasing or explaining something of interest to the viewer. Thats like compairing backroom gossip to news. Sure both have their biases and inaccuracies, but at least one of them holds a resemblance of accountability as opposed to the other that can spew anonymous bogus crap at will. With zero consequence. Reddit has very poor quality content. And it keeos on getting worse. Its just too riddled with bots. Imagine youtubes comment section without the videos. Reddit in a nutshell.
      • dale_glass 3y ago
        Reddit is enormously variable. Yeah, stay far away from the most popular subs. The traffic is insane and there's no time to form any kind of community. But you can find very good quality subreddits. Small subs are often better, because the mods haven't burned out yet and people know each other. And there's gems like /r/AskHistorians. Moderated with an iron fist, quality content is the only thing to be found there.
  • judge2020 3y ago
• superkuh 3y ago
  Peer to peer using automated torrenting for video distribution of copyrighted media libraries has been reinvented and worked 3 separate times over the last decade (popcorntime, etc). It just doesn't work in the sense that as soon as it works and becomes popular it's attacked legally until it stops existing. The problem is legal not technical.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    Popcorn time is again like Netflix, not YouTube. Serving 10k movies is a vastly easier problem than YouTube (The few gaming channels I watch have more video content length than the movies on Netflix)
• eviks 3y ago
  It can't be the perfect showcase because the service isn't even great, let alone if you compare it to "any" alternative, for example, it doesn't even have proper offline downloads, which is available for free with an alternative
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    Even great compared to what? You need to cite services similar to YouTube (like Vimeo, whose pricing model will just not be acceptable to anyone at HN), not frontends to YouTube, who don't do any of the expensive backend work.
    • eviks 3y ago
      Compared to the your own bar - perfection (also, how is HN audience relevant in the conversation about the whole internet?)
• Fogest 3y ago
  Part of the problem for me is that sponsor spots in videos are so common now that I feel forced to run SponsorBlock. If I'm already having to run one extension just to enjoy the experience, then I may as well also use Adblock and not even bother with Premium. But since premium doesn't give that full ad-free experience (referring to sponsors), I just don't see as much benefit. The amount of my life I save by using adblock + sponsorblock when watching YouTube is such a huge amount of time. Maybe I am just cheap, but I also feel it's a bit on the expensive side of things for what you get. I do however still like to support creators that I watch a lot, so I'll use things like Patron, or in the case of Linus Tech Tips, Floatplane. I feel like directly supporting the creators I spend a lot more time watching makes more of an impact on supporting the content I enjoy. Creators don't seem to get much out of YouTube Premium viewers.
  • judge2020 3y ago
    YT kind of started a soft assault on sponsor spots, with mobile users getting two-tap fast-forward, and encouraging creators to use chapters, making them choose to either fake their audience out with inaccurate chapters, or to include a sponsor chapter and assume x% of viewers are not going to see the sponsor spot.
  • guitarbill 3y ago
    I hate ads, but I'm largely ok with sponsor reads. They are by far the least evil and least annoying. They are not targeted (everybody watching the video sees the same ad... for now). They don't invade my privacy. They are usually fairly short. They're usually somewhat relevant to the creator, and therefore my interests. Of course, it depends on the creator. Some have more integrity, others less. If between Youtube Premium, Patreon, and sponsored segments or episodes creators can make a living, that sounds great to me. Better than TV, radio, or the increasingly expensive and ad-ified streaming services. I'll take it.
    • rolenthedeep 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm pretty okay with sponsored segments. By and large, the people I watch only accept sponsors that appear to be legitimate, and the read is generally "here's this service and what it does, give it a try and thank them for feeding me this week!" Or "I've been using this service since they started and I think it's pretty cool" They're generally not low quality scammy products or designed to extract money or spy (with the exception of VPN ads, but that's a different issue). I'm alright with them. I tend to skip them more these days because I can only hear about Brilliant and Squarespace so many times in a day
• mekoka 3y ago
  Can you see dislikes with YouTube Premium?
• rolenthedeep 3y ago
  I don't want to pay YouTube I'm happy subscribing to creators' patreons or Kofi or whatever because almost all of my money goes to them. Whereas on YouTube, most of my money or ad-generated money goes to Google. YouTube pays creators very little and treats them very poorly. There's a new adpocalypse every few months where YouTube will randomly change the rules, retroactively demonetize and delist videos, while offering no chance to appeal or even have videos reviewed by a person. Without even considering Google's generally evil and monopolistic behavior, why would I ever willingly give them money? YouTube's shitty treatment of creators is why every video now has a sponsored segment in the middle. They aren't paying enough and creators need additional income sources. YouTube can decide at any moment without notice to nuke your entire business and give you no option to recover. They keep shittifying the website with shorts and aggressive ads and dark patterns to drive up ad exposure, but this doesn't translate to higher pay for creators. In no circumstance is giving google more money going to fix any of the problems. All a YouTube plus subscription gets you is YouTube will turn off the ads and dark patterns designed to force you to pay for the subscription. As well, I have exactly zero faith that YouTube won't also start showing subscribed users ads in a year or two.
  • dialogbox 3y ago
    You and your creators use yt as a service. Their servers and network. Payment and others. That services don't come for free. If you don't give them any money, why Google need to provide the services? If you don't like that, you can build your own server and steam from that.
    • brewdad 3y ago
      My state has given Google a truckload of tax breaks to build data centers here while raising my tax rate consistently over the past half decade. Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for their hosting costs.
      • Thorrez 3y ago
        Unless the tax breaks are so high that the taxes actually go negative, they won't pay for hosting costs. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
• TeeMassive 3y ago
  > So what is the alternative? Most of the people and channels I follow are on Rumble. And no, most of them are not "right-wing" and fairly apolitical.
• StanislavPetrov 3y ago
  While I still use Youtube (for now, while adblockers work), the alternative is Rumble (or something Rumble like). The censorship/narrative control from Youtube(Google), along with the removal of the ability to "dislike" videos has resulted in site where it is difficult to sift through spam when it comes to non-controversial topics, and difficult to find what you are looking for if you are looking for information that may conflict with the current "official narrative" on disputed topics. It is very similar to the way Substack has become (for the most part) my alternative to magazine and "news" journals. Legacy platforms owned by corporate conglomerates still have a leg up when it comes to audience size and archival library size, but as far as content goes, they are rapidly falling behind.
• zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
  I used to pay for it when it came with Google Play Music
• bitcurious 3y ago
  The problem with YouTube premium is that it’s a music subscription service bundled with a video service. I have no interest in subsidizing the former to get the latter.
• Veserv 3y ago
  No, it perfectly showcases that people do not want to pay 1000% more money for the privilege of paying a monthly subscription. Youtube Premium costs $12/month [1]. Ads average something like $2 per 1000 views to the creators (in some of the most common categories) [2]. Youtube takes a ~45% cut, so Youtube makes ~$4 per 1000 views from ads. So, to reach $12/month, you would need to average 3000 views per month. At a average of 30 days per month, you would need to consume on average 100(!) videos a day for Youtube to come out behind. Wikipedia says Youtube made ~$28.8B in 2021 and had ~2.5B MAU as of the beginning of 2022. So, the average MAU only brings in ~$10/year. You need to average over 10x the number of views as the average MAU for Youtube Premium to come out behind for Youtube. The actual alternative is that you charge a comparable price to the advertising revenue instead of complaining that it does not work because your consumers are not dumb enough to pay a 1000% markup. [1] https://www.youtube.com/premium https://www.youtube.com/premium [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzb54Upcink https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzb54Upcink [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
  • 12907835202 3y ago
    I don't think you're taking everything into consideration here. For one it's not only creators who make money. You also have to pay for hosting/development as well as Google's own profit. So the cost to buy ads is clearly greater than $2 per 1000. I just looked and apparently the cost to buy 1000 views is about $20. So your off by 1000% yourself. At that rate premium is priced equivalent to 600 views a month or 20 a day. Which doesn't sound absurd to me for someone who uses it as their main source of screen time. Remember ad views /= video views. There may be 4 ads per video which mean we're talking about watching 5 videos per day. How many ads would you see in a day watching cable? If you only use it a few times a week to look up the odd tutorial or something then it's probably not worth it. For anyone who watches hours everyday it seems a no brainer. I reckon the only reason people aren't buying is because of habit. They're used to ads so a subscription seems outrageous. With Netflix they're used to a subscription so an ad seems outrageous. Or maybe the people being outraged are different people, I dunno.
    • Veserv 3y ago
• dotnet00 3y ago
  I'd disable my adblocker and revanced youtube if they stopped randomly terminating channels unreasonably and gave them proper means to contest wrongful terminations. If Google respects the people making a living off of them (mainly off superchats and memberships, not ads) so little, they don't deserve my respect either. I'll just keep up with the inevitable cat and mouse game with adblockers.
• ehnto 3y ago
  The trouble with YouTube premium is that there are still ads. Every YouTuber I watch does paid promotions, submarine marketing or self-promotion. That happened when YT ad revenue was reduced but even if ad rev went back up, it will continue. The marketing relationships are there now and who would turn down exrtra cash.
• perryizgr8 3y ago
  My problem with youtube premium is that it doesn't remove ads. Most of the videos I watch on the platform have multiple in-video segments with advertisements directly from the video author. Youtube can easily solve this, considering the community-driven plugin SponsorBlock does it so effectively. But they are happy to charge you the premium fee and let you sit thru intrusive ads.
• jszymborski 3y ago
  I pay for Nebula, which has far less content, but would never dream of paying YouTube. I like Nebula and I like its creators and their values. I loath Google and I can't stand by much of the content.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases)." If this is true, and I have long believed it is, then the following, from the article, is a lie: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide," the message adds. If YouTube does not "stay free" then it shrinks to a small fraction of its current size. So-called "tech" companies know users will not pay. This is not surprising since so much of the "content", none of which the "tech" company produces, is garbage. The stuff that goes "viral", that generates the most ad revenue, is not stuff people are going to pay for. Either the "tech" company's website/app is free and a Trojan Horse by which its users can be spied on, or the "tech" business model isn't worth much of anything. Like someone said, "You are the product." Not the stuff uploaded by so-called "creators", YouTube's unpaid workforce. "Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide." YouTube has to be free or it won't be able to continue operation. It's wonderful experiment, all this uploaded video, if we ignore all the surveillance Google is conducting and all propaganda and worse videos Google is forcibly putting in front of people, but this is not something many people with pay for. YouTube cannot convert "billions of users wordlwide" into paying subscribers.
  • prox 3y ago
    Google might gain my favour if they become human again. Google is literally the most robotic company out there. There is so much they could do to make YT a better experience. But it suffers from developeritis, where it’s just a fancy tech stack (bravo!) but it wasn’t build for actual humans.
• dijit 3y ago
  I pay for premium. On one of my google accounts, and only if I am logged in. For about 80% of my youtube watching experience this works. But there are times I am logged in with my work account as (at the least) the primary account and I dont bother switching. Or a random tutorial video I am looking at from a new laptop or untrusted device. The pain of logging in outweighs looking at a couple of ads in the moment. So dont think that premium is a failed model based on usage. I certain I am not alone in engaging with youtube in a non-premium capacity despite having a subscription.
• isoprophlex 3y ago
  For me, text is fine. I'm a minority but I just avoid videos altogether. Paying youtube for an infinite catalogue of shit? No thanks. And the rare gems that do interest me are invariably... overly expanded and filled with sponsor bullshit, so, ads. Paying for YT premium to give Google their pound of flesh, only to be stuck in same horrorshow of well-meaning content creators having to whore themselves out to their sponsors... To me that means that the only winning move is not to play.
• mns 3y ago
  YouTube premium costs in Germany €15,99, which is more than Disney+ and AppleTV+ combined. I personally just don’t see the value in paying so much for it, considering all the other subscriptions that we have.
• bushbaba 3y ago
  Uh, go to peering.google.net. See their “GGC” google global cache nodes. Those are all in-ISP. YouTube arguably has a larger in isp cache network than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, …etc combined. Id argue a large amount of YouTube’s traffic is cacheable.
• mobiuscog 3y ago
  Does youtube premium: - Make the TV app be useful and not utter trash - Allow me to globally disable/remove 'shorts' - Stop promoting the front-page trash that is 'trending' - Allow me to permanently filter music by genre or remove sports entirely - Fix the recommendations engine to actually work - Allow grouping/filtering subscriptions Unless it does all of the above, there's no way I'm paying. Ads are an annoyance (and as others have said, most videos now run their own sponsorships/ads inside the video as well), but not having a well functioning 'application' in the first place means there's nothing worth paying for.
• ddtaylor 3y ago
  If I was given some assurances of what I was paying for, sure, I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks a month to get access to YouTube. Right now, I'm not willing to pay for a platform that is operated so poorly: * Content is prioritized and screwed with too often. Videos that have no business anywhere near front-page or that are overall not well received are promoted because of shady backdoor deals with media companies. This is why late night talk show content is on the front page. I do not want to pay to support this. * Content I have opted into seeing is suppressed, censored, etc. Creators that I enjoy have to modify how they make videos because of obscure and virtually unexplained reasons that YouTube mostly hand waves away as "the AI does a thing". They do not properly staff any kind of human review. The only way creators get their accounts back after the system goes completely haywire is by complaining on Twitter or other platforms and those without a megaphone get lost to the broken system. I am not interested in paying to support this. * Basic features like comments have serious problems with them. The community has to attempt to hodge-podge together solutions while a multi-billion dollar company fails to do anything or provide the tools to stop rampant scams of a few basic types from ruining the comment section. I do not want to pay to support this. * Features are randomly removed or subject to strange choices like the dislike button because a few people at YouTube think they know what the massive billions of people on the platform is best for them. I don't want to pay to support this. Give me the option to pay and be free from these terrible choices YouTube makes and you can have my entire wallet.
• throwawayyy9382 3y ago
  At least for me, YouTube premium does not work because I do not want Google to save everyting I watch, that's why I use it as unlogged. I already have a gmail account, I use Google search, therefore Google has already quite amount of data about me, let's just not have it my Youtube history also. When Youtube arrived first, I had an account with some playlists, then Google decided to merge account and asked me to switch a google account in order to keep my youtube account, that was the time I decided not to have an account on Youtube and subscribtion requires an account. Also for subscriptions generally, thing are getting wild. There are several paid video / streaming services. Just to be able to watch 3 or 4 shows requires almost being subscribed to all streaming services, which is both expensive (at least for some part of the world) and ridicilous.
• ben_w 3y ago
  > Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources How much would they save if "free" users only got 480p videos? I'd be fine with 480p resolution.
  • geraldhh 3y ago
    don't be so modest. 720p is an acceptable low bar
    • ben_w 3y ago
      For me, 480p is not even modest, it's close to the height I get for a landscape video when holding my phone in portrait. I also don't usually need the extra pixels, as there is seldom important content in the fine details — a few years ago, when I was prepping to leave the UK but not everything lined up to the same dates, I was using PAYG mobile for home internet and therefore set the videos to 240p; the only reason that didn't really work was that not all videos had such low resolution, and when they didn't the site defaulted to 720p.
      • geraldhh 3y ago
        yea, 480p is ok for phones. 720p brings a noticeable improvement for watching on something 40"+ (tv). going further to 1080p is only a marginal improvement over 720p so i usually "keep it simple/small"
• Daedren 3y ago
  >people do not want to pay We don't REALLY know that. If adblockers are effectively blocked, we might see an increase in people paying. The big value add of Premium was something people here were taking for granted because that "feature" was available for free. Anecdotal but I knew a few people who are paying for it because of Apple TVs and iPhones where it's less trivial to block the ads on the apps.
• mschuster91 3y ago
  The problem at the core is subscription fatigue. Netflix, Prime, Disney, HBO, newspapers, cable TV, sports... that shit adds up.
• BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  > YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay Absolutly wrong. I pay for spotify to not have ads, I pay for netflix despite the fact I can download torrents because of the benefit of the service. Hell, I pay for Telegram premium and chatgpt, both of which have very good free offer without ads! But GAFAMS have exhausted our trust, so they don't get the same treatment. I will never pay for a Google service, because that would mean having a google account tie to a payment system. And Google spies, collect data, close accounts and services on a whim and has terrible support. It doesn't respect their customers, and so they lost our will to give them money. Plus, even if you pay, you have no way to know if they are going to respect their own contract anymore because they don't care and have no consequence for messing up. You pay for an amazon product? Can be a scam and amazon will not prevent that. You pay for twitter blue to see less ads? We just learned this month tweeter blue users say exactly as many ads as regular users. > So what is the alternative? We don't want an alternative. Those companies made billions with their short term abusing policies, now they finally pay some price. Good. For once the market is behaving as a regulating force as it should, which is not often nowadays.
• throwaway290 3y ago
  A model where the uploader pays. Vimeo pro plans have something like that. This idea that uploading is free artificially created by big data and somehow we think that's the way it should be. But really it's just their strategy, get as much data in then tax those who want to access it, even forgetting about the whole ML angle it's very simple to understand.
  • crop_rotation 3y ago
    That model doesn't work, see the link I included about Vimeo.
    • throwaway290 3y ago
      The model would work, it just needs to be properly implemented. I guess it's hard when YouTube etc. keeps people accustomed to not even rock bottom prices but completely free stuff.
• testHNac 3y ago
  Reasons for not going Youtube Premium - 1) Don't want Youtube to connect me to my real identity. I browse incognito, or using alt IDs. 2) Many creators I follow are demonetized. Why should I reward Youtube ? If I want to pay, I would rather pay them directly. It's their content that I watch. 3) I have seen a Ton of financial scams for targeting poor people using the names of Credible Top Brands in the country . The fact that Youtube approves such shady Ads doesn't feel right to me. What's the alternative ? Instagram Reels and TikTok already rule short form videos. If they can introduce a better Search Experience and a Long Form Video product, there will be a credible competitor to Youtube.
• tomjen3 3y ago
  I strongly disagree Netflix isn’t a comparable alternative as it enables me to watch moving pictures to occupy my time. Worse YouTube gets their movies for free. I understand that they are in a bind. Not my problem, however.
• dmuso 3y ago
  I would pay if they stopped censoring creators.
• freediver 3y ago
  > YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay I'd argue exactly the opposite, since over 25 million people pay for YouTube Premium.