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It’s cute that Google thinks we’re all going to pay for YouTube Premium/TV instead of just not watching YouTube. That’s where I’m at. I don’t watch anything on

It’s cute that Google thinks we’re all going to pay for YouTube Premium/TV instead of just not watching YouTube. That’s where I’m at. I don’t watch anything on YouTube anymore, and like when Reddit got “smart” and drove me away, I’ve noticed my mental health improve.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bosch_mind 3y ago
Same here! The UX is so bad on both I just can’t use either. Not hard to quit when usability sucks and I find other things to do… like read or go outside.
lacrimacida 3y ago
In the same boat here. But they couldn’t care less, the masses is what they’re after. I came to and been using invidio.us to listen to lectures without any video, a feture that works on Iphones with the screen turned off. Not sure whether apple or google are the ones who don’t allow for that.
- cmgbhm 3y ago
  Google. It’s not a problem with the default video element. The engineer that into the app and mobile then that’s the primary pitch for premium
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    Just like BMW tying the heated seats to a monthly subscription.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  Screen off only works for premium subscriptions. I hate it, but someone has made a good point to me once that advertisers are probably not okay paying the same amount and not having video show for their ads. So Google would either have to build support for a separate category of audio-only ads, and those ads would pay out less. Instead, they just only offer the feature to ad-free subscribers.
logifail 3y ago
> when Reddit got “smart” and drove me away, I’ve noticed my mental health improve We had a "showdown" moment with our kids some time ago due to inability to manage device usage. Ended up with me changing the wifi password and all the kids devices permanently lost internet access at home. The kids have been playing together - and outside! - and generally much happier ever since. Mental health definitely better. Who'd have thought it?
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  They aren't missing anything either. Subconciously I thought that I needed to stay on top of things like the news, how the stock market is doing, whatever the latest tech hardware releases are, etc. but now, most of the time I forget those are even things. I watched a lot of the History Channel, TLC and Discovery Channel growing up. I've seen all manner of documentary about all manner of thing. I'd say plop your kids in front of that every now and then, but these days it's just Pawn Stars and Hoarders and Deadliest Catch.
  - willsoon 3y ago
    Yes! And the shorts are very entertaining too! And, can you believe it, my wife watches them for recipes!
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Might be worth checking with your local library to see if they offer a Kanopy.com subscription. The monthly show checkouts are somewhat limited (I think 10 a month) but their offerings are pretty large and generally family friendly or education based, even though they do have some more modern or topical movies or shows from time to time.
londons_explore 3y ago
They'd prefer you stop watching. Bandwidth costs them a lot, and they have pretty much the cheapest bandwidth of any tech player. If 1% of users are freeloading like you and I, and they can block us and save 1% on their infrastructure bill, that's still a huge amount of money saved, and could easily turn the whole effort from a loss to a profit.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Do we know that bandwidth costs YouTube a lot?
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Bandwidth costs all video sites a lot. Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites. If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit and engineer time). Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...
    - vetinari 3y ago
      Not to distract from your point, but > It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.
      - fomine3 3y ago
        Interesting description: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpAOeoZWAAM-iHV?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpAOeoZWAAM-iHV?format=png&name=...
    - psnehanshu 3y ago
      This looks to me like a sane comment. No idea why this was downvoted.
psnehanshu 3y ago
I watch a lot of YouTube and I have premium subscription. I believe it is worth it for me. Yes I can use adblockers, but the premium experience is just better. It also comes with YouTube music which is much better than Spotify and others. There are other benefits like watch queue, background play on phone.
- cvak 3y ago
  Same here, it's the only subscription I pay for, worth it imo.
- pohuing 3y ago
  Tbh I mostly pay because I hate the modern ad and behaviour tracking financed Internet. If your service has a paid option I'll pay for it. I think had we all gone down the freemium road decades ago the Internet would be in much better shape today :/
- error503 3y ago
  I'm never going to be one to buy merch, and there are a lot of creators whose content I occasionally enjoy but don't want to pay directly via e.g. Patreon. Premium views pay more to them, so you're also doing a bit more to support the creators you watch as well.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  Premium subscription is just an antipattern of them removing options. The experience is not better than before premium was a thing. YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify. I actually had to leave Google play music (and YouTube music) for Spotify because the product was so subpar. The only benefit was that some random thing on YouTube might be there but, other than that, just part of the Google poor support of their paying users. The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps and, again, they worsened the experience to push you to premium which is extremely shady.
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    Interestingly came to this because I googled it after having essentially the exact same thought....
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
YouTube isn't targeting the hacker news demographic. Users who can't or won't be served ads are an acceptable loss on the path to profitability.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  The HN demographic is all the more likely to find, develop, and/or promote alternatives to YouTube. I didn't mention those in my comment above as the main issue was alternative front ends to mainstream services, but another obvious option is alternative services. The key stumbling points for that seem to be discoverability and monetisation.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Kind of surprised nobody is making a strong effort at solving monetization through P2P (lowering costs). Historically the problem was you had to get people to install an app instead of visiting a website, but now everybody's trying to get people to do that on mobile anyway. In theory P2P isn't great on mobile devices because they run on battery and have limited cellular data, but devices also allow apps to tell if the device is connected to a charger and unmetered WiFi. And if you only upload from devices that are, that's probably still enough bandwidth to give you a significant cost advantage. Then add in anyone you can get to install the app desktops and TVs, many of which are always on and have fast unmetered connections. Then offer streaming on the website, but only if you subscribe. The paywall on the website links to the app installer, which is free (with ads).
    - ThatPlayer 3y ago
      It's an interesting idea, but I think it actually parallels a lot of problems of residential solar. How much are you paying for someone hosting? If you're paying them the same as your costs (high), then why not just pay for more servers which will be more reliable? Especially because of the difference between how much bandwidth during peak demand hours, which is probably going to be when there are the most devices on battery, and when you'll need the most servers anyways. The same way peak electricity demand in some areas is after peak solar. So even if you do 1:1 view time credits, now you're losing money if they upload at night, and watch that same amount during peak hours. Probably what most people are doing. This is what happened with California new solar NEM3 plan that changed the export rates from 1:1. You only get something like 20% credit for the power you're putting in. So can you pay hosters enough to want to host, but not enough that you're better off paying for your own servers? This doesn't even go into storage costs yet. There's a cryptocurrency for P2P storage and transfer, Storj. Looks like they even have an S3 compatible gateway, but they don't look that much cheaper than object storage on DigitalOcean or CloudFlare.
andrepd 3y ago
I don't lump in YouTube with other types of social media. While undoubtedly the vast majority of content on YouTube (either by count or by number of views) is utter garbage there is still more quality content than I will ever be able to watch in a lifetime. Documentaries, talks, lectures, concerts, content creators on all kinds of interesting things, from retro computers to history or science. I would buy YouTube premium but I don't really want to remunerate Google for their anticompetitive business practices or their mistreatment of content creators. So I just go for patreon of channels I like.
afavour 3y ago
If they achieve even a 1% conversion rate into subscribers it’ll be a net positive for them. I imagine they’re OK with you leaving the service since you cost more than they make from you.
jjallen 3y ago
Damn. YouTube is my favorite consumer product in existence. It has massively changed my life for the better (like learning about health and wellness topics that have actually transformed my life). I watch about fifty hours a month in mostly pure bliss. And it costs $12 or almost nothing. I will never understand how people can be reluctant to part with a few bucks a month for an amazing product. If you come from a third world country I get it, but many of us here do not. $12 is less than half an hour of work for even middle class Americans and Europeans. I guess if you don’t even watch YouTube I don’t understand why you are even in this thread.
- eek2121 3y ago
  I'd pay $3-$5/mo. I watch maybe 8 hours a month.
- manquer 3y ago
  The pricing is lesser in other countries I have seen $2-3 a month, so it is not necessary to qualify Americans/Europeans it is priced similarly across the globe . —- It is not just $12/month for YouTube that is the problem most people have to budget for all their content consumption between streaming services, sports subscriptions , music subs, newspapers you can easily spend upwards of $300/month , that is not including other productivity tools Saas you could end paying for like o365 , Dropbox and so on . YT would be the one easiest to cut because you won’t loose access just have to put up with some ads unlike everything else . For many not seeing ads is not worth $12 a month , for some like you the value is enormous so you see it as worth paying . —- I personally stopped paying for YT premium because I get most of the content from Nebula what I used YT for, at 1/10th the cost. Also there is no way to disable Shorts and they won’t improve the by design poorer implementation on Firefox; both these make my experience using the platform poor even if I pay for it so I don’t bother.
  - jjallen 3y ago
    We subscribe to almost every reasonable content provider and we pay about $60 or so IN SWITZERLAND, where we pay a swiss tax just because we have more money I guess. If someone is truly paying $300 they should cancel their cable subscription and subscribe to a handful of streaming services and YT for $<100. All the content you could ever watch.
qwertox 3y ago
Lately I've been watching `MIT 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2016` [0], also at night before I fall asleep. And during the day I occasionally leave the live stream of a stork nest running. One of them learned to fly just two days ago, and it was fun watching them getting to learn how their wings work, while they don't have much space to train [1], which makes me ask how many such livestreams exist which normally would be volatile data. I'm not sure if these live streams do get stored, but it would be a huge amount of bandwidth for almost no added value. Then there are fun mathematics videos which show you how to solve mathematical problems [2], daring you to solve them. Basically there's so much of value, like `the native web`, `ServeTheHome`, `Jeff Gerling`, `No Boilerplate`, `Code to the Moon`, James Briggs`, gliding, mtb-riding, windsurfing, so much quality content which is hard for a TV station to deliver. I don't see it comparable to Reddit. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9dYRPiyVWDd80G https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhvFd0i5nIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhvFd0i5nIo [2] https://www.youtube.com/@MathemaTrick/videos https://www.youtube.com/@MathemaTrick/videos
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  Eventually all three of those channels will wise up and move to another platform, if they haven't already.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
I happily pay for YouTube Premium, and I get more value out of it than literally any other subscription service I'm paying for. YouTube is an endless goldmine of quality videos made by people who actually give a shit about the topic they're talking about, rather then people who are just trying to make "content" to monetize. I also appreciate that at least some of my monthly payment goes to the people making the videos I'm watching. I'm honestly surprised to hear such a cynical take on it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bosch_mind 3y ago

Same here! The UX is so bad on both I just can’t use either. Not hard to quit when usability sucks and I find other things to do… like read or go outside.

lacrimacida 3y ago

In the same boat here. But they couldn’t care less, the masses is what they’re after. I came to and been using invidio.us to listen to lectures without any video, a feture that works on Iphones with the screen turned off. Not sure whether apple or google are the ones who don’t allow for that.

cmgbhm 3y ago
Google. It’s not a problem with the default video element. The engineer that into the app and mobile then that’s the primary pitch for premium
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  Just like BMW tying the heated seats to a monthly subscription.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
Screen off only works for premium subscriptions. I hate it, but someone has made a good point to me once that advertisers are probably not okay paying the same amount and not having video show for their ads. So Google would either have to build support for a separate category of audio-only ads, and those ads would pay out less. Instead, they just only offer the feature to ad-free subscribers.

logifail 3y ago

> when Reddit got “smart” and drove me away, I’ve noticed my mental health improve We had a "showdown" moment with our kids some time ago due to inability to manage device usage. Ended up with me changing the wifi password and all the kids devices permanently lost internet access at home. The kids have been playing together - and outside! - and generally much happier ever since. Mental health definitely better. Who'd have thought it?

gymbeaux 3y ago
They aren't missing anything either. Subconciously I thought that I needed to stay on top of things like the news, how the stock market is doing, whatever the latest tech hardware releases are, etc. but now, most of the time I forget those are even things. I watched a lot of the History Channel, TLC and Discovery Channel growing up. I've seen all manner of documentary about all manner of thing. I'd say plop your kids in front of that every now and then, but these days it's just Pawn Stars and Hoarders and Deadliest Catch.
- willsoon 3y ago
  Yes! And the shorts are very entertaining too! And, can you believe it, my wife watches them for recipes!
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  Might be worth checking with your local library to see if they offer a Kanopy.com subscription. The monthly show checkouts are somewhat limited (I think 10 a month) but their offerings are pretty large and generally family friendly or education based, even though they do have some more modern or topical movies or shows from time to time.

londons_explore 3y ago

They'd prefer you stop watching. Bandwidth costs them a lot, and they have pretty much the cheapest bandwidth of any tech player. If 1% of users are freeloading like you and I, and they can block us and save 1% on their infrastructure bill, that's still a huge amount of money saved, and could easily turn the whole effort from a loss to a profit.

wpietri 3y ago
Do we know that bandwidth costs YouTube a lot?
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Bandwidth costs all video sites a lot. Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites. If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit and engineer time). Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...
  - vetinari 3y ago
    Not to distract from your point, but > It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.
    - fomine3 3y ago
      Interesting description: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpAOeoZWAAM-iHV?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpAOeoZWAAM-iHV?format=png&name=...
  - psnehanshu 3y ago
    This looks to me like a sane comment. No idea why this was downvoted.

psnehanshu 3y ago

I watch a lot of YouTube and I have premium subscription. I believe it is worth it for me. Yes I can use adblockers, but the premium experience is just better. It also comes with YouTube music which is much better than Spotify and others. There are other benefits like watch queue, background play on phone.

cvak 3y ago
Same here, it's the only subscription I pay for, worth it imo.
pohuing 3y ago
Tbh I mostly pay because I hate the modern ad and behaviour tracking financed Internet. If your service has a paid option I'll pay for it. I think had we all gone down the freemium road decades ago the Internet would be in much better shape today :/
error503 3y ago
I'm never going to be one to buy merch, and there are a lot of creators whose content I occasionally enjoy but don't want to pay directly via e.g. Patreon. Premium views pay more to them, so you're also doing a bit more to support the creators you watch as well.
isaacremuant 3y ago
Premium subscription is just an antipattern of them removing options. The experience is not better than before premium was a thing. YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify. I actually had to leave Google play music (and YouTube music) for Spotify because the product was so subpar. The only benefit was that some random thing on YouTube might be there but, other than that, just part of the Google poor support of their paying users. The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps and, again, they worsened the experience to push you to premium which is extremely shady.
- DropInIn 3y ago
  Interestingly came to this because I googled it after having essentially the exact same thought....

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

YouTube isn't targeting the hacker news demographic. Users who can't or won't be served ads are an acceptable loss on the path to profitability.

dredmorbius 3y ago
The HN demographic is all the more likely to find, develop, and/or promote alternatives to YouTube. I didn't mention those in my comment above as the main issue was alternative front ends to mainstream services, but another obvious option is alternative services. The key stumbling points for that seem to be discoverability and monetisation.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Kind of surprised nobody is making a strong effort at solving monetization through P2P (lowering costs). Historically the problem was you had to get people to install an app instead of visiting a website, but now everybody's trying to get people to do that on mobile anyway. In theory P2P isn't great on mobile devices because they run on battery and have limited cellular data, but devices also allow apps to tell if the device is connected to a charger and unmetered WiFi. And if you only upload from devices that are, that's probably still enough bandwidth to give you a significant cost advantage. Then add in anyone you can get to install the app desktops and TVs, many of which are always on and have fast unmetered connections. Then offer streaming on the website, but only if you subscribe. The paywall on the website links to the app installer, which is free (with ads).
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    It's an interesting idea, but I think it actually parallels a lot of problems of residential solar. How much are you paying for someone hosting? If you're paying them the same as your costs (high), then why not just pay for more servers which will be more reliable? Especially because of the difference between how much bandwidth during peak demand hours, which is probably going to be when there are the most devices on battery, and when you'll need the most servers anyways. The same way peak electricity demand in some areas is after peak solar. So even if you do 1:1 view time credits, now you're losing money if they upload at night, and watch that same amount during peak hours. Probably what most people are doing. This is what happened with California new solar NEM3 plan that changed the export rates from 1:1. You only get something like 20% credit for the power you're putting in. So can you pay hosters enough to want to host, but not enough that you're better off paying for your own servers? This doesn't even go into storage costs yet. There's a cryptocurrency for P2P storage and transfer, Storj. Looks like they even have an S3 compatible gateway, but they don't look that much cheaper than object storage on DigitalOcean or CloudFlare.

andrepd 3y ago

I don't lump in YouTube with other types of social media. While undoubtedly the vast majority of content on YouTube (either by count or by number of views) is utter garbage there is still more quality content than I will ever be able to watch in a lifetime. Documentaries, talks, lectures, concerts, content creators on all kinds of interesting things, from retro computers to history or science. I would buy YouTube premium but I don't really want to remunerate Google for their anticompetitive business practices or their mistreatment of content creators. So I just go for patreon of channels I like.

afavour 3y ago

If they achieve even a 1% conversion rate into subscribers it’ll be a net positive for them. I imagine they’re OK with you leaving the service since you cost more than they make from you.

jjallen 3y ago

Damn. YouTube is my favorite consumer product in existence. It has massively changed my life for the better (like learning about health and wellness topics that have actually transformed my life). I watch about fifty hours a month in mostly pure bliss. And it costs $12 or almost nothing. I will never understand how people can be reluctant to part with a few bucks a month for an amazing product. If you come from a third world country I get it, but many of us here do not. $12 is less than half an hour of work for even middle class Americans and Europeans. I guess if you don’t even watch YouTube I don’t understand why you are even in this thread.

eek2121 3y ago
I'd pay $3-$5/mo. I watch maybe 8 hours a month.
manquer 3y ago
The pricing is lesser in other countries I have seen $2-3 a month, so it is not necessary to qualify Americans/Europeans it is priced similarly across the globe . —- It is not just $12/month for YouTube that is the problem most people have to budget for all their content consumption between streaming services, sports subscriptions , music subs, newspapers you can easily spend upwards of $300/month , that is not including other productivity tools Saas you could end paying for like o365 , Dropbox and so on . YT would be the one easiest to cut because you won’t loose access just have to put up with some ads unlike everything else . For many not seeing ads is not worth $12 a month , for some like you the value is enormous so you see it as worth paying . —- I personally stopped paying for YT premium because I get most of the content from Nebula what I used YT for, at 1/10th the cost. Also there is no way to disable Shorts and they won’t improve the by design poorer implementation on Firefox; both these make my experience using the platform poor even if I pay for it so I don’t bother.
- jjallen 3y ago
  We subscribe to almost every reasonable content provider and we pay about $60 or so IN SWITZERLAND, where we pay a swiss tax just because we have more money I guess. If someone is truly paying $300 they should cancel their cable subscription and subscribe to a handful of streaming services and YT for $<100. All the content you could ever watch.

qwertox 3y ago

Lately I've been watching `MIT 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2016` [0], also at night before I fall asleep. And during the day I occasionally leave the live stream of a stork nest running. One of them learned to fly just two days ago, and it was fun watching them getting to learn how their wings work, while they don't have much space to train [1], which makes me ask how many such livestreams exist which normally would be volatile data. I'm not sure if these live streams do get stored, but it would be a huge amount of bandwidth for almost no added value. Then there are fun mathematics videos which show you how to solve mathematical problems [2], daring you to solve them. Basically there's so much of value, like `the native web`, `ServeTheHome`, `Jeff Gerling`, `No Boilerplate`, `Code to the Moon`, James Briggs`, gliding, mtb-riding, windsurfing, so much quality content which is hard for a TV station to deliver. I don't see it comparable to Reddit. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9dYRPiyVWDd80G https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhvFd0i5nIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhvFd0i5nIo [2] https://www.youtube.com/@MathemaTrick/videos https://www.youtube.com/@MathemaTrick/videos

gymbeaux 3y ago
Eventually all three of those channels will wise up and move to another platform, if they haven't already.

LeoPanthera 3y ago

I happily pay for YouTube Premium, and I get more value out of it than literally any other subscription service I'm paying for. YouTube is an endless goldmine of quality videos made by people who actually give a shit about the topic they're talking about, rather then people who are just trying to make "content" to monetize. I also appreciate that at least some of my monthly payment goes to the people making the videos I'm watching. I'm honestly surprised to hear such a cynical take on it.