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There are two sides to this argument: - "If YouTube adds so much value to your life, then you should pay for YouTube Premium -- Why are you being frugal about

There are two sides to this argument: - "If YouTube adds so much value to your life, then you should pay for YouTube Premium -- Why are you being frugal about it?" - "I want to be in control of what I see on webpages -- No company should enforce their agenda on me. If I don't like to see YouTube Shorts or Recommendations, then I must have that freedom. uBlock is more than an adblocker at this point -- it allows me to "detox" the bloated YouTube UI and make it more tolerable." The second group might not even mind paying for YouTube Premium, but that doesn't solve their problem. If YouTube really wants to increase revenue, there are other ways.

happytoexplain 3y ago
There is also an argument that web services should not force you to pay after already pulling you in for free (unless it's explicitly a trial). Obviously this doesn't account for people using a service for free due to a hack of some kind, but there is also an argument that adblocking is not a hack - rather, that it is a "working as intended" feature of the web, and is simply a habit of a subset of the viewerbase, and, crucially, that this is known to YouTube, who chose of their own free will to explicitly allow it for many, many years.
falcolas 3y ago
There's a third side (as always): "I was fine with paying for YouTube, but the price has gotten so high that it's unreasonable." I'm not going to pay YouTube more than I do Netflix, Hulu, Disney, even Spotify. Especially when they're starting to get competition from Nebula, Curiosity Stream, and even TikTok.
jetrink 3y ago
My objection to the first argument is that I don't think YouTube adds a lot of value to my life; it's the individual contributors who do. These creators are on YouTube because that's where the audience is and vice versa. I have a lot of problems with Google's stewardship of this dominant position and I don't want to do anything to perpetuate it. The creators who do add significant value to my life I support directly through Patreon and/or through watching them on Nebula, which is a paid video service.
- Ographer 3y ago
  Part of YouTube premium dues go directly to the creators whose videos you watch. My understanding is that creators earn more from a premium subscriber view than from a free user with ads. Patreon is much more helpful and we don't know how much of a membership goes to creators. Nebula seems great but doesn't allow for free access to education for all of it is a paid service so that seems like a worse way to gatekeep information than ads alone.
amf12 3y ago
The thing though is, it's not really two distinct arguments. It's easy to pay for it and control the experience by blocking shorts or recommendations using uBlock. What the second group of people really want is to not pay for it and also block ads.
lawlessone 3y ago
I really despise shorts. I wish i could block them in YouTubes own app. About 10 years ago i put up some basic videos of some openGL stuff and games stuff I was working on for college. These were screen recordings. Not from a camera phone. A few months ago I checked and YouTube had converted them all to shorts. No way to undo this. Now my decade old very basic projects get randomly shown to people that didn't search for it. And the Shorts format removes/hides all the text explaining the video context etc. Youtube have no method to allow me to undo this. Any video of certain resolutions and lengths will be converted to a short. The only suggestion online from other users is to reupload the videos but add large side margins.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Wow, and I thought the only shitty thing about the shorts is that you can't really rewind them easily (there is a way, but it's enshittification at it's finest).
tzs 3y ago
I'm a little doubtful about that second argument. I find Shorts annoying, but at least on the web YouTube and on the app version that is on my streaming devices Shorts are grouped together making them easy to ignore. It's not like they autoplay or are animated. They just take up a little space on some pages. Recommendations are also easy to ignore.
O1111OOO 3y ago
> There are two sides to this argument: It is a disservice to users of the service to whittle down this issue to 2 simple points. Under Google's lead, YouTube has been offering a service - as we've been accustomed to accessing it - since 2006. That's ~17 years. Suddenly, they want to change the very nature of their business model. It is no longer the YouTube we've been accustomed to accessing for those ~17 years. A no log-in required service, ad-blockers, plenty of browser extensions, etc.. Let's keep in mind that YouTube made ~$29.2 billion in revenue in 2022 [0, 1]. They reported 2.7 billion active users in 2023 - this makes them second only to Facebook. Its YouTube Premium Service has 80 million subscribers (as of September 11, 2022). Netflix, in comparison, has 247 million subscribers worldwide (3rd qrt, 2023) [2]. Disney+ has 146 million worldwide subscribers (3rd qtr, 2023) but they've been bleeding subscribers [3]. These are actual Premium Video Services. YouTube is trying to be both an annoying (ad-ridden) general video site and a very expensive premium site. I call this arrogance. Basically... YouTube is doing very well financially right now ($29 billion). They want to make even more money because $282.8 billion (2022) in revenue for Alphabet is not enough [4]. We can all see the greed. The problem... Google wants to do this by changing the core of their business as far as access is concerned. It is this change to their core business model that we are up in arms about. It will no longer be the same site. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube?useskin=vector [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-... [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095372/disney-plus-number-of-subscribers-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095372/disney-plus-numb... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.?useskin=vector
- Guvante 3y ago
  Isn't there still not a lot of information on YouTube's profitability? I don't think it takes $29 billion to run it but if it hypothetically took say $24 billion that is a 20% revenue loss from take a loss in the billions.
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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happytoexplain 3y ago

There is also an argument that web services should not force you to pay after already pulling you in for free (unless it's explicitly a trial). Obviously this doesn't account for people using a service for free due to a hack of some kind, but there is also an argument that adblocking is not a hack - rather, that it is a "working as intended" feature of the web, and is simply a habit of a subset of the viewerbase, and, crucially, that this is known to YouTube, who chose of their own free will to explicitly allow it for many, many years.

falcolas 3y ago

There's a third side (as always): "I was fine with paying for YouTube, but the price has gotten so high that it's unreasonable." I'm not going to pay YouTube more than I do Netflix, Hulu, Disney, even Spotify. Especially when they're starting to get competition from Nebula, Curiosity Stream, and even TikTok.

jetrink 3y ago

My objection to the first argument is that I don't think YouTube adds a lot of value to my life; it's the individual contributors who do. These creators are on YouTube because that's where the audience is and vice versa. I have a lot of problems with Google's stewardship of this dominant position and I don't want to do anything to perpetuate it. The creators who do add significant value to my life I support directly through Patreon and/or through watching them on Nebula, which is a paid video service.

Ographer 3y ago
Part of YouTube premium dues go directly to the creators whose videos you watch. My understanding is that creators earn more from a premium subscriber view than from a free user with ads. Patreon is much more helpful and we don't know how much of a membership goes to creators. Nebula seems great but doesn't allow for free access to education for all of it is a paid service so that seems like a worse way to gatekeep information than ads alone.

amf12 3y ago

The thing though is, it's not really two distinct arguments. It's easy to pay for it and control the experience by blocking shorts or recommendations using uBlock. What the second group of people really want is to not pay for it and also block ads.

lawlessone 3y ago

I really despise shorts. I wish i could block them in YouTubes own app. About 10 years ago i put up some basic videos of some openGL stuff and games stuff I was working on for college. These were screen recordings. Not from a camera phone. A few months ago I checked and YouTube had converted them all to shorts. No way to undo this. Now my decade old very basic projects get randomly shown to people that didn't search for it. And the Shorts format removes/hides all the text explaining the video context etc. Youtube have no method to allow me to undo this. Any video of certain resolutions and lengths will be converted to a short. The only suggestion online from other users is to reupload the videos but add large side margins.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Wow, and I thought the only shitty thing about the shorts is that you can't really rewind them easily (there is a way, but it's enshittification at it's finest).

tzs 3y ago

I'm a little doubtful about that second argument. I find Shorts annoying, but at least on the web YouTube and on the app version that is on my streaming devices Shorts are grouped together making them easy to ignore. It's not like they autoplay or are animated. They just take up a little space on some pages. Recommendations are also easy to ignore.

O1111OOO 3y ago

> There are two sides to this argument: It is a disservice to users of the service to whittle down this issue to 2 simple points. Under Google's lead, YouTube has been offering a service - as we've been accustomed to accessing it - since 2006. That's ~17 years. Suddenly, they want to change the very nature of their business model. It is no longer the YouTube we've been accustomed to accessing for those ~17 years. A no log-in required service, ad-blockers, plenty of browser extensions, etc.. Let's keep in mind that YouTube made ~$29.2 billion in revenue in 2022 [0, 1]. They reported 2.7 billion active users in 2023 - this makes them second only to Facebook. Its YouTube Premium Service has 80 million subscribers (as of September 11, 2022). Netflix, in comparison, has 247 million subscribers worldwide (3rd qrt, 2023) [2]. Disney+ has 146 million worldwide subscribers (3rd qtr, 2023) but they've been bleeding subscribers [3]. These are actual Premium Video Services. YouTube is trying to be both an annoying (ad-ridden) general video site and a very expensive premium site. I call this arrogance. Basically... YouTube is doing very well financially right now ($29 billion). They want to make even more money because $282.8 billion (2022) in revenue for Alphabet is not enough [4]. We can all see the greed. The problem... Google wants to do this by changing the core of their business as far as access is concerned. It is this change to their core business model that we are up in arms about. It will no longer be the same site. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube?useskin=vector [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-... [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095372/disney-plus-number-of-subscribers-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095372/disney-plus-numb... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.?useskin=vector

Guvante 3y ago
Isn't there still not a lot of information on YouTube's profitability? I don't think it takes $29 billion to run it but if it hypothetically took say $24 billion that is a 20% revenue loss from take a loss in the billions.
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]