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It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with
by Workaccount2 3y ago
It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust.
I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...
- yifanl 3y agoWell, you can't pay for Youtube. You can pay for a bundle of some mostly unrelated products that's named Youtube Premium, or you can live with an insanely degraded product experience on Youtube, but you can't pay for Youtube.
- JAlexoid 3y agoYouTube Premium is ad-free YouTube. That's literally "paying for YouTube". But it sure seems that you're trying to rationalize your unwillingness to pay for something and it does sound very entitled.
- yifanl 3y agoAm I paying for an ad-free Youtube or a Spotify competitor? I'm not at all confident the money I'd be paying is going to the creators of the videos, or even feature development of the main Youtube platform.
- JAlexoid 3y agoCreators get the income from views, with any copyrighted material licensing subtracted and a cut to YouTube. But no one is forcing you to use YouTube, it's just way more accessible for any content creator that can't spend weeks in getting a commercial license for music and such. But I have good news for you. Many creators have Patreons, that serves video.
- bravoetch 3y agoEh, you're really just paying to remove ads. The rest of the product is available free already.
- digging 3y agoSeveral creators I watch have said they get more profit sharing from premium views than ad views. So even though it pains me to give money to Google "just" to make their product not shitty (removing ads and allowing background play, back when I had goog products on my phone), it's also paying content creators more. I prefer to subscribe and watch on Nebula to support them more... but YouTube has such a good mix of content that isn't on Nebula that I find myself using it as a hub regardless.
- TremendousJudge 3y agoDo they get paid from premium views if their videos were demonetized?
- hightrix 3y agoIt isn’t adfree. It is “no ads inserted by Google”. In-video promotions are ads. You cannot pay to block them.
- JAlexoid 3y agoYou can, however, skip them immediately.
- hightrix 3y agoYou're absolutely right. I use SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin on Youtube and will continue to do so until there is a way to pay to 1) remove all ads and 2) remove all data collection by Google. Until then, I'll continue paying with my data while blocking ads. I will not pay for content twice or more.
- JAlexoid 3y agoSo you want not data collection by Google on YouTube, that is Google. That literally means that unless Google spins off YouTube, you will screw the creators on YouTube.
- hightrix 3y agoNo, it means that I'm willing to pay Google for YouTube without Google Ads with either my money or my data. I will not pay with both. It is that simple.
- pixxel 3y agoPlease stop spamming this thread. It’s unhealthy.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>You can pay for some unrelated product that's named Youtube Premium What do you mean "unrelated"? For the price of your Spotify subscription, you get an YouTube Music and ad-free YouTube. Seems like a good value prop. I'm a subscriber.
- yifanl 3y agoI mean unrelated as in unrelated, I, nor anybody have I talked to want a Youtube Music subscription or yet another podcast app.
- JAlexoid 3y agoMost of ads on YouTube are there to cover copyrighted music. YouTube Music is the free addon.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>I mean unrelated as in unrelated Okay, we've established you don't know what unrelated means. YouTube with no ads is $12 a month. How can it be more clear? >I, nor anybody have I talked to want a Youtube Music subscription or yet another podcast app. I'm sure some of these people happily subscribe to Spotify, and can't spot a good deal staring them in the face.
- brewdad 3y agoI happily subscribe to Spotify because it just works better for me. I would subscribe to YT Premium if I could get YT only for like $5-7. I'm not paying $14, or realistically whatever the family plan is up to now, for ad-free YT and an inferior music experience. So YT doesn't get any money from me.
- verdverm 3y agoI recently left Spotify because their web app makes my monitors flicker when it gains focus and they inserted ads into podcasts. What am I paying for with Spotify if not ad removal, just like YT? I actually bumped my YT plan to family and put my parents on it. They didn't know about ad free YT, now they don't know how they went without it.
- javawizard 3y agoCan you elaborate? It seems like you're just being pedantic about what it means to "pay for YouTube".
- timeagain 3y agoAs it has been framed before, it’s like the lemonade stand put all the other stands out of business by handing out free lemonade.
- Workaccount2 3y agoNo one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade. See the Vid.me rise and fall illustrates this perfectly. Their closing letter to users even says in so many words "Ya'll don't want to pay, so how can we stay open?"
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> Ya'll don't want to pay It's easy to wonder why. The status quo at the time had been that user-submitted video content (YouTube) is free. It was only free because Alphabet had their losses from YouTube subsidized by their profits from Google. Maybe not for all, but for many this is an anti-trust issue.
- Workaccount2 3y agoYoutube was not free at the time vid.me came to be. Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice. Plenty of tech companies have had the technical and monetary firepower to run a youtube competitor. But you just have to read a few threads on the internet from anytime in the last decade talking about youtube and monetization to see why no one wanted to jump in. This thread included.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> Youtube was not free at the time vid.me came to be. Sorry but this take is pretty wild to me. I can understand that there is a paid option but YouTube is free today given that I can currently watch a video after watching a couple ads without paying any money. > Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice. I'm not sure this is true in theory but, regardless, to each their own. This practice of keeping competitors down by subsidizing business losses with profits from another business, only to try to change the status quo for their customers, seems pretty shitty from where I'm standing.
- throwaway743950 3y agoCome on. This is a bad take. They "profit-share" with otherwise UNPAID creators. Other platforms license or produce content. On top of that, the pricing feels high for most people, and no one trusts Google to not jerk them around, killing a product or changing pricing.
- hhh 3y agoI guess it depends on the content you get. I would feel more reserved at like $25/mo but not at $15.
- mentalpiracy 3y agoGoogle destroying goodwill with a low-effort rent seeking agenda, after years of effort to extinguish real competiton. Giving money to Google for programmatic ads ≠ funding creators. Most creators are small and don’t make any real money from YT anymore, and every year fewer and fewer are willing to endure the infinite mystery box of YT moderation and contentID policy.
- lamontcg 3y agoYeah, if it wasn't run by Google, I'd be more likely to pay for it. And paying for it will result in most of my money going to Google and asshats like xQc even though I'd never willingly watch one of his videos and barely know who he is. And I've watched the algorithm wreck some youtube channels that I used to enjoy as the creators chase after revenue. (Not to mention that the ads that Google shows are fucking awful)
- bhelkey 3y ago> And paying for it will result in most of my money going to Google and asshats like xQc even though I'd never willingly watch one of his videos and barely know who he is. 55% of the subscription goes to the channels you watch [1]. This money is divided based on your watch time [1]. If you don't watch a channel, none of your subscription pays for that channel. [1] https://support.unionforgamers.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048841911-YouTube-Premium-FAQ#:~:text=How%20is%20the%20subscription%20revenue,so%20there's%20no%20change%20there https://support.unionforgamers.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600488...
- lamontcg 3y agoUh no, that doesn't say that. > To determine how much subscription revenue each channel receives, YouTube will aggregate viewing data from Premium users to determine a value based on watch time. The word "aggregate" there is particularly important. And: > The exact amount of money you will receive for each minute of YouTube Premium viewer watch time will always vary based on viewing habits, and there are complex aspects of the distribution algorithm that are not disclosed by YouTube That's a very long way from 55% of _my_ subscription going out to the channels that _I_ watch. That would have been a simple thing for them to state, and they certainly didn't state anything close to that. I'm pretty convinced by those statements actually that a good chunk of my subscription would go to xQc and his ilk to keep him on youtube collecting more views since he's more valuable to the platform than anyone that I watch.
- savingsPossible 3y agoAs another has said: we have a problem with dumping With giving youtube for free for long, to reduce the possibilities of other platforms, and then charging, when your library is "unbeatable"
- katbyte 3y agoexcept it hasn't be free for a very long time? its had ads for at least 10+ years and youtube premium for 8 now
- sandworm101 3y ago>> when your library is "unbeatable" It isn't the library. Youtube's trove of videos will age fast if there was any meaningful alternative. What prevents any competitor is youtube's legal backing. They have already fought the RIAA/MPAA and the content rules of hundreds of jurisdictions. Youtube has deals, understandings, in place that allow youtube to keep going. But if anyone else tries to setup a similar video service, at scale, those hard-fought deals will not apply. Those past enemies of youtube are now its tame watchdogs ready to unleash themselves on anyone who else attempting to enter the market.
- Workaccount2 3y agoVid.me did and it failed because no one wants to views ads and no one wants to pay for a subscription. They gained a lot of traction too and were really flying for a bit. But eventually they had to become profitable without showing ads. Youtube only exists because google was ok with not making any money from it for years.
- _urvc 3y agoYouTube does not provide the same value as it used to and therefore paying for it seems only to block ads. These days I rarely find new content creators and content creators are probably struggling even more. The recommendation algorithm is totally biased towards some screwed sterotypes and clicking I do not want to watch this content creator's video never helps. Some ads are so offensive/dangerous you do have to use an ad blocker just to protect your mental health. It is like someone peed into the free lemonade and demands money for it.
- contravariant 3y agoThis isn't about paying for youtube, this is about ads. People don't want youtube ads, and frankly it's their good right to not have to download, display and watch them if they so choose. What youtube now wants is proof that people have watched ads. This is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is that there is no way to prove you've watched an ad in a way that's not a privacy nightmare and extremely hostile to users. The second is that most people are simply unwilling to watch youtube ads. I'm not disgusted with the idea of a paid youtube, I'd simply go somewhere else, I'm disgusted by having ads shoved down my throat and that of others.
- mvdtnz 3y agoThere's a sure-fire way to avoid 100% of YouTube ads without paying a cent, though.
- huytersd 3y agoWhat’s that?
- cykros 3y agoUsing bypass-paywalls works so far if you add it to the custom list, and as a bonus, you end up getting in less of an echo chamber because it displays as if you've never logged in. There's also a set up for ublock origin that works that's out on their reddit somewhere, though I can't be asked to go through it, nor use reddit anymore, so you may need to search that up on your own, but it's recent and works.
- mvdtnz 3y agoDon't watch Youtube videos.
- huytersd 3y agoHonestly that’s not an option. There is way too much, ever growing good content on it.
- hau 3y agoI feel like you're right about initial value proposition, but it doesn't seem odd to me at all. There are other things about treating youtube as netflix/hbo/hulu: - I can't upload random video to the netflix, and I have a certain expectation regarding content there - 99% of videos on youtube are not something I would pay for or expected to be paid for uploading - I can pay for youtube subscription and would still get a lot of advertisement, because I dared to turn SponsorBlock off. Creators have a very good reason to use this type of ads, and youtube have all responsibility of not providing solutions for this. - I can pay for HBO max and watch Sopranos. On youtube I can pay and content of interest could be deleted next second - I have no idea if my favourite creator was demonetised for DMCA spam by youtube, but I certainly know they are not treated as equal partners in this business in many ways. - Ultimately I pay for content, and subscription guarantees some kind of investment from the platform in acquiring or producing it. Not true for youtube. edit: not saying one should not pay for youtube, but these points are for comparing youtube with established paid platforms. I believe youtube could offer very interesting and fair subscription schemes and conditions in principle.
- is_true 3y agoWhere I live YT Premium costs USD0.5 a month.
- bravoetch 3y agoPeople might be less disgusted with paying for YouTube if their model was "make a good product for end users" instead of "premium is to make the experience less worse by removing the worst part of a bad experience".
- NemoNobody 3y agoThis is exactly why I refuse to give Google money voluntarily. All of my issues with YouTube they created intentionally. I just recently found a trick that had YouTube play in the background when I switched tabs and I recalled how life was before they created Red and it annoyed me all over again. Google is the devil of today's tech companies - most of what they do utilizes the outright theft of our data and what they do with it is purely manipulative in nature.
- JAlexoid 3y agoSo... Why do you use YouTube? Ask your creators to move to something like Patreon and you'll be free. You'll have to pay, but you will not be paying Google. Why do you personally think that you're entitled to consume content from YouTube?
- nvy 3y agoThis is going to sound harsh but maybe your videos just aren't worth that much monetarily? You aren't entitled to a revenue purely because you upload some stuff onto someone else's computer. If you produced content that had value worth paying for, then people would happily pay it. Perhaps if "getting screwed" upsets you so much, you should move to a paid, subscription-only model where your content will get 100% of the earnings (you feel) it merits.
- hysan 3y agoSame. I’m still waiting (8+ years now) for their *promised* “better” replacement for subscription collections.[1] Until that day comes (along with all the other features that I used to use but have since been removed (not replaced)), I will not pay for a still not as good as the past subscription service. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954740
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- huytersd 3y agoYou’re right in that people are more reluctant to pay for something they’ve had for free for so long. I also think YouTube is pushing this pretty late in the game. People already have $15 subscriptions to multiple services at this point. The $15 YouTube subscription feels expensive to me on top of the ones I already own. I wish it was like $6 for no ads especially since I don’t care for the bundled music service.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoIncidentally, it's teh other way round for me. I find the contents of Netflix etc. utter crap and won't pay for it. However, there are some extremely valuable tech channels on YT that I appreciate a lot and I support individual creators. But YouTube/Alphabet? I have zero sympathy for these folks, two decades of small malicious steps did their work.
- jlarocco 3y agoNetFlix, Hulu, and HBO aren't trying to spy on everything I do online, and there's no evidence that paying for YouTube stops Google from doing that.
- JAlexoid 3y agoGoogle tracking you and you screwing over content creators using ad-blocking aren't inherently linked. The majority of ad spend goes directly to content owners.
- reactordev 3y agoTrying to get customers to pay for something they have been readily getting for free is a difficult proposition. Ask Vice News. This is the problem. YouTube was “free” for a long time and now it needs to turn a profit. Ads was the easy way to do that. Subs is the only way to sustain it.
- irrational 3y agoWell, I don’t subscribe to any services like Netflix, et al. I do use YouTube, for watching some videos around my hobbies, like woodworking, but they aren’t important enough to me to pay for. I could easily live without them. The ads have become onerous enough that watching a video is painful now. It became bearable with an ad blocker, but I’m prepared to not use YouTube anymore.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoI would question that "readily" statement now that most people can't afford netflix and hulu and hbo and etc. anymore because everyone's priced their plans to the point where a cable subscription is starting to look attractive again. The same goes for youtube: I would gladly pay however much my ad impressions are actually worth to not see them, but I would be VERY surprised if they amounted to more than a Canadian dollar a month, so the idea of paying 150 Canadian dollars a year just doesn't make any sense.
- falcolas 3y agoI've been paying for premium for years now - at least 6 years. I think the problem for me now, and why I'm canceling it shortly, is their push to raise the price by 40% in the coming months. The value for that new price is just not there. Some of that is due to my own changing habits, but even more of it comes from the content creators I follow in the gaming space being serially demonetized thanks to overly sensitive advertisers. So even though I'm trying to pay to support the content I watch, my money isn't going to the right creators. As such, even at the seemingly reasonable $14 every month... it's no longer worth it.
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoIs the 40% increase region-specific? I'm a YT Premium subscriber and they just had a price increase in the US three months ago ($120 to $140 yearly, similarly billed monthly).
- falcolas 3y agoThe $10 to $14 is coming (for me) in December. I've been paying long enough I believe I was grandfathered past the increase you mentioned.
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoThanks! I recognize this doesn't solve your reasons at all, but for anyone facing an un-grandfathering who is simply price-conscious, if you're willing to commit for a year to YT Premium, it's effectively $11.66/mo. I just squeaked into pre-increase Nest pricing for the final year I'll use it. This has been a big year for 40%+ subscription price increases, Google and otherwise, it seems.
- carlosjobim 3y agoIf you're a paying customer, no videos you watch will be de-monetized, as far as I know.
- turtlebits 3y agoBecause piracy is easier (just install adblock). Once it becomes inconvenient enough, people will start paying for it.
- scubbo 3y agoAlongside the distaste of the bait-and-switch, I suggest that there's a perception among most folks that what is primarily being paid for is the content, not the services (hosting, transmission, recommendations, etc.). In that sense, paying for Netflix "feels" less bad because, in some sense, Netflix "owns" the content in its catalog for which you are buying access - whatever you may feel about the rights or wrongs of copyright law, it is undeniably a practical fact. By contrast, it feels less accurate (though is, in fact, still just as legally accurate) to say that YouTube "owns" the content uploaded to it - the content feels more personal, and YouTube is merely the conveyance mechanism. Part of the negative reaction might be due to this perception of being asked to pay for a support mechanism rather than for what you actually care about - the content. > youtube [...], who directly profit shares with small creators you adore Citation very much needed :P every report I've seen and insight I've heard is that anyone below the very top echelons earns negligible profit from their YouTube content. A commenter lower in the chain points out that "many of the YouTubers I watch have Patreons earning thousands of dollars", which...sort-of proves the point that YouTube, in isolation, is insufficient.
- zeruch 3y ago"but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust." Probably a combination of misgivings: 1. Google cant keep a product/service alive worth a damn, or ones that do get changed to be piss eventually 2. Paying other content providers for content they provide feels different than paying Youtube for mostly content they carry that was pirated/unlicensed anyway (e.g. full disclosure,I mostly use it to watch jazz and funk bootleg concerts or old 80s music videos or other ephemera YT really had damn all to do with and likely dont monetize for the actual creators worth a damn). 3. Somewhere between the two is the fact that for some licensed materials, you still have the region-constraint. If Yt Premium covered truly global reach, it might be more tantalizing, but as it stands...meh. It's dryshite ROI.
- jancsika 3y ago> It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. It's almost like Youtube is a different product and UX! People obviously think of Youtube as the place where nearly all the important, timely video/streaming content exists in some form or another. Professionally produced content sits right next to town hall meetings with 13 views, or some kid's first remix. People sometimes use it as an extension of their harddrive for random video content. Hell, there's a whole genre of people sitting silently in picture, watching professionally produced content. Plus a genre of obviously fake reactions to content that rando's claim they've never seen before. It's difficult to unwind a product pitched for decades as a kind of public good video cloud, and re-pitch that as monthly-charge cable television. "Aren't people fickle?" is a hilarious way to misunderstand the situation. I mean, ok, but that take applies equally to nearly any non-trivial business challenge of any company that has ever existed.
- Shawnj2 3y agoNebula, especially the curiosity stream bundle, just looks like a better and better deal every year. $15/year, most of which goes to the people actually making videos based on your watch time for a better experience than YouTube is totally worth it when google pulls this kind of shit lol
- wruza 3y agoIs it at all surprising? Free content replaces all kinds of free time, not only quality kind. So when it goes non-free there’s enough people who say “nah not worth it” in different accents. Personally if I was forced by youtube to do what they want, I’d probably just watch it much less (with ads, only required content) and spend time in a similar or less useless activity.
- cykros 3y agoI too find it odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO, etc.
- arprocter 3y agoApples to oranges (live vs not), but last Sunday (the very expensive) NFL Sunday Ticket via YouTube TV had terrible buffering problems for about the first half of every 1pm game Eventually they made a config change and it began varying the bit-rate instead of just stopping, but it wasn't a great demonstration https://downdetector.com/status/youtube-tv/ https://downdetector.com/status/youtube-tv/
- beej71 3y agoGoogle is immorally trying to control the web, is a significant difference. I pay creators through patreon or their tip jars, and it's rather more than they'd make from me paying Google.
- acdha 3y agoIf you don’t want to support Google, you need to stop using YouTube even with an ad blocker. Your activity still counts in the usage stats and choosing to watch there tells the creators of the videos you watch that they have to stay on YouTube because it’s where their audience is.
- beej71 3y agoI don't really care if they stay on YT or not. If I like them, they get paid through patreon either way. (And I'm not sure how I could convince them their audience is elsewhere through any action of mine. It would take a pretty serious concerted effort.)
- JAlexoid 3y agoSo... Logically, you also don't use YouTube and watch their videos on Patreon... Because Patreon also hosts videos.
- beej71 3y agoNow that you mention it... [checks] The app I use does have patreon as a source! Thanks! Edit: that's all set up now so it'll show me the patreon videos first. And creators are making many times more money off me than they were before. Google is unnecessary!
- matheusmoreira 3y agoNot really. What pisses me off is they still have a free tier backed by an advertising+surveillance business model. They should charge everyone for access, stop advertising and stop tracking us.
- 4star3star 3y agoAds are not necessarily the problem. It's the way they're delivered. For one thing, if they are so damn dominant at advertising, why can't they show me a better variety of ads? Another problem is the jarring nature of ads. They are just IN YOUR FACE all of a sudden, and it's basically rude the way they're presented. Is there not a more "polite" way to go about it? You could have me watch 5 minutes of straight ads, reset every 12 hours, and I'd be OK with that. I'd even be glad to rate each ad along the way. Are they hellbent on interruptions, or do they just want the ads to be seen? I hate the interruption.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoThe reason they don't do 5 minutes of straight ads every 12 hours is because you'd get people that just walk away, switch to another tab and mute Youtube for 5 minutes, or any number of other things that would end up with juiced ad statistics with no corresponding real benefit to the advertiser. Then, you'd get the response to that, which is ads you have to interact with to essentially tell the server you've seen the ad. I've seen this in mobile games already, and it's damn annoying. There's no way I'd want to spend 5 minutes doing that kind of thing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- korse 3y agoBut I don't pay for any of that now, and never have (Amazon video aside, which comes with Prime, a service invaluable to my wife). If YouTube's ad blocking finally comes for me, then I will cease to use YouTube.
- Gud 3y agoI wouldn't mind paying for YouTube, but considering how hostile Google are to the open web, I just can't put money in their pockets.
- tomjen3 3y agoI don't know that I would put Netflix and youtube in the same category, but regardless I now don't want to pay Google for youtube just to spite them. Instead I built and elaborate and very overenginered hack that pulls RSS feeds from channels and then pulls videos from the feed, before putting them up on a private Trello board where I can organise them. Then I can watch them, order them, etc and optionally tag them for download. Its unstable, its totally not worth my time, it has serious issues and I had a ton for fun building it.
- weystrom 3y agoBecause it wasn't the deal when they were consolidating the all online video content into themselves. And then once they've gotten "too big to fail", the greed rolled in. They bait and switched us. Youtube killed private video hosting. Reddit killed small thematic php-bb forums. If people knew that they'd eventually do that, none of these platforms would be as big as they are today.