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YouTube Premium is a very reasonably priced service that actually results in more money going to the creators of videos than watching ads does.

homefree 1y ago
+1 I can understand people being annoyed by in video sponsorship if it’s done too much, but if you’re not paying for premium and you’re complaining about ads you’re not worth taking seriously. Being able to pay to remove ads is one of the best things about the new media ecosystem. When I go to my parents house and see them watch cable it’s dystopic how many ads there are for a service with primarily trash content that’s still ridiculously expensive.
- anonym29 1y ago
  People who have no ads AND don't pay a penny look at you the same way you look at your parents. It's dystopic how much you're willing to pay for something that is already free and effortless.
  - homefree 1y ago
    I'm sure the people stealing stuff from Walgreens in SF also think the rest of us are chumps, but that doesn't make them right. I'm happy to pay to support the people making stuff I like - and the ability to do that directly instead of indirectly via ads (which I hate) is nice.
    - anonym29 1y ago
      Goods in Walgreens are fundamentally dissimilar to YouTube videos. When you steal something from Walgreens, a legal person has had private property unjustly taken from them that prevents the rightful owner from using or obtaining benefit from the scarce physical good (in Walgreens' case, sale of that good). Conversely, even full-blown piracy of copyrighted content does NOT deprive the owner of private property, there is no prevention of the rightful owner to watch the video, nor is the rightful owner prevented from obtaining benefit, because there was no scarce physical good lost. Courts might say you can "own" an idea. I disagree, it's plainly and obviously ridiculous to compare a speaker or some snacks to a infinitely reproducible digital file, to say nothing of a single stream of an infinitely reproducible digital file that was intentionally uploaded to a platform that makes content available to non-paying users.
      - strogonoff 1y ago
        A misconception I frequently see repeated is that if something can be copied effortlessly, then that becomes an argument for abolishing the concept of ownership in that domain. The mistake here is seeing it as a zero-sum game. The goal of IP rights is not to prevent party A from “depriving” party B of their property. Believe it or not, understanding that copying IP does not destroy the original is not some galaxy brain level thinking only available to the enlightened. Rather, the goal is to encourage the creativity and innovation that produces more of such intellectual property overall; offering a degree of control over your own IP is a mechanism[0] of getting there. A shining example of that is copyleft licensing. The concept of IP ownership powers GPL: in order to say “you must contribute back or disclose your source”, in order to give the assurance that programmer contributions will benefit the world rather than get embraced and extinguished by a megacorp, you must be able to execute the aforementioned control over the IP. Free and open software—including gems like Linux (probably the most popular OS in the world), Blender, etc.—flourished because of this control, not despite it. Many people, in their self-righteous crusade for free movies and stuff, completely miss that point. So, if anything, it is the opposite. The difficulty of stealing or copying a physical object already acts as a natural deterrent, which is why something that can be expropriated with no effort should require more explicit protection, not less. This should make intuitive sense to anyone who can see the value of intellectual property and it being the driving force of innovation. [0] If someone has an alternative mechanism in mind, I welcome a description of how it would work.
      - therealpygon 1y ago
        I’m not against it, because you are correct that the cost to make a copy is near zero, but let’s not go full self-delusion that the content has zero cost.
      - homefree 1y ago
        Just because a good is non-rival does not mean it therefore should be free. For a similar example, drug discovery often takes billions of dollars of investment - but once discovered is very inexpensive to copy. Does that mean once discovered it should be (nearly) free for anyone to manufacture? What would you consider the second order incentives of that kind of societal structure? These arguments when given a tiny bit of thought to the incentives they create fall apart instantly. It's a good way to end up in a communist type of social failure where nothing is created and everything is scarce. The goal of these laws is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" - it's about creating incentives that benefit the creator and the society. That's the purpose.
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    Oh, yeah, it's dystopian that you pay for a service you use and the creators who make your content. What a ridiculous statement. You know servers aren't "free and effortless", right? Nor the storage drives or the bandwidth. Nor are the engineers or creators who make it all happen. If you block ads and you don't pay for an ad-free alternative, you're a leech on the system and making good actors pay more. I don't really care about it too much - ads offend me too and I don't really respect modern IP law as it is handled, etc. But the sheer audacity on display in your comment is palpable. If you're going to be a thief, at least be honest with yourself and don't act like all the bakers should be thieves too. That's just a world without bread.
55555 1y ago
YouTube Premium is some of the best money I spend. Just buy it if you have the money. 55% goes to creators.
- nyjah 1y ago
  One of my handful of follows puts out multiple 2 hour videos a day sometimes, almost every day. I hardly watch, but I always throw it on and let it play through, and will replay it on mute while doing other things, just so this guy with 1.8k views is getting a bigger share of my youtube premium money. I don't participate in the channel, like I said, I really hardly watch, but monthly I have been getting free memberships to his channel since I started doing it.
dataflow 1y ago
I suspect this reasonable ad-free pricing will only last as long as needed to gain the majority of users on board. Video hosting costs will have to rise (there are ever more videos being created; you can't host all of them indefinitely available at everyone's fingertips at low cost) and they will have to increase prices to keep up. Not that this implies you shouldn't get premium, but just worth keeping in mind I think.
lurk2 1y ago
Almost every video I watch these days has a sponsored segment that ends up taking around 1/10th of the video’s total run time. Better than TV, but if I’m paying for the service I’m not willing to watch any ads.
- anonym29 1y ago
  sponsorblock + uBO. Giving into the wishes of tyrants (pay us or else we're going to saddle you with ads) never weakens the power of the tyrants, it only strengthens and encourages them.
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    Ahh, the tyrants refusing to provide free content for you that costs money to produce, and not get any compensation. Tell us your suggestions. Exposure bucks?
    - anonym29 1y ago
      Google doesn't spend a cent producing the content on YT (user-generated). Also, they did provide free content produced by others without compensation. They have for many years, long before ads showed up.
      - FireBeyond 1y ago
        And? Don't make the mistake of thinking I have any love for Google. Or ads. But you're no better than Google, in this case, taking the free content produced by others without compensation. Except you're also acting self-righteous and superior about doing so.
        Tadpole9181 1y ago
        Don't forget that Google provided all the hosting, storage, and advertising for the creator's content. So there is, in fact, a service being provided. They're worse than Google in this exchange.
spacemadness 1y ago
Influencers like to stick ads right in their videos now so you can’t avoid that. Thankfully that’s just influencers and not other types of videos.
acquisitionsilk 1y ago
It also results in more money going to Youtube/Google LLC/Alphabet Inc. There are many wonderful videos and video-makers on youtube - but I think the platform has been a net negative for creativity, and for humanity, in many ways. Hence I personally would never support them with my money. We haven't ever ran the counterfactual, and maybe there's some reason we can't or won't. But I would absolutely love to see youtube without youtube - no middleman, direct payments to the video-makers. I'm not proposing a technical discussion here on what such a platform might look like or whether it's feasible - I just mean culturally, I'd love to see what videos we would come up with if we weren't constantly adjusting to suit the all-powerful and unknowable "algorithm". I think this pressure to conform to the algorithm, to always chase more views, subscriptions, and comments, to frame every choice around that, has probably been much more prohibitive on creativity than we are able to imagine.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  It also results in more money going to Youtube/Google LLC/Alphabet Inc. yup, they should run this whole service free of charge, no ads and no subscription :)
  - acquisitionsilk 1y ago
    I'm not saying I want them to run the whole service free of charge, I'm saying I'd consider it a gain for the species if the business closed down. I look forward to alternative ideas (with e.g. no middlemen, and direct payment) being tested out. The TV era held some promise but steadily declined, and the Youtube era has went similarly. The audiovisual onslaught continues. Technically competent people on here are innoculated against the realities of the average usage on these platforms, which equates to brain-rot of the lowest calibre.
    - bdangubic 1y ago
      with e.g. no middlemen, and direct payment this sounds amazing but it can’t be done. no one is going to 79 websites to watch things from 79 different artist. the middleman are core evil part not just in this area but many others but I can’t see how this kind of society we have built can function without it
const_cast 1y ago
Paying for streaming services used to result in zero ads too, and now lots of services either don't offer ad-free or charge double for it. I think ads are extremely valuable to brands, more than we realize. It's basically allowed propaganda for consumerist behavior. I don't think we can set a pricetag on ads, which is why I don't think they'll ever go away. This is just temporary, don't get used to it.
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  Which streaming services added ads to their paid ad-free plan? I don't know of any, although many of them are not offered in my country.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    HBO Max, Disney plus, netflix. So... you know, all the big ones. The only one that stands out really is Hulu, which always had ads.
    - mvdtnz 1y ago
      Netflix most certainly didn't. They added a cheaper ad-supported plan. I don't know for sure about the other two.
      - const_cast 1y ago
        Well but then they also raised their prices repeatedly so the cheaper plan isn't actually cheaper, it's what the ad-free plan used to cost.

homefree 1y ago

+1 I can understand people being annoyed by in video sponsorship if it’s done too much, but if you’re not paying for premium and you’re complaining about ads you’re not worth taking seriously. Being able to pay to remove ads is one of the best things about the new media ecosystem. When I go to my parents house and see them watch cable it’s dystopic how many ads there are for a service with primarily trash content that’s still ridiculously expensive.

anonym29 1y ago
People who have no ads AND don't pay a penny look at you the same way you look at your parents. It's dystopic how much you're willing to pay for something that is already free and effortless.
- homefree 1y ago
  I'm sure the people stealing stuff from Walgreens in SF also think the rest of us are chumps, but that doesn't make them right. I'm happy to pay to support the people making stuff I like - and the ability to do that directly instead of indirectly via ads (which I hate) is nice.
  - anonym29 1y ago
    Goods in Walgreens are fundamentally dissimilar to YouTube videos. When you steal something from Walgreens, a legal person has had private property unjustly taken from them that prevents the rightful owner from using or obtaining benefit from the scarce physical good (in Walgreens' case, sale of that good). Conversely, even full-blown piracy of copyrighted content does NOT deprive the owner of private property, there is no prevention of the rightful owner to watch the video, nor is the rightful owner prevented from obtaining benefit, because there was no scarce physical good lost. Courts might say you can "own" an idea. I disagree, it's plainly and obviously ridiculous to compare a speaker or some snacks to a infinitely reproducible digital file, to say nothing of a single stream of an infinitely reproducible digital file that was intentionally uploaded to a platform that makes content available to non-paying users.
    - strogonoff 1y ago
      A misconception I frequently see repeated is that if something can be copied effortlessly, then that becomes an argument for abolishing the concept of ownership in that domain. The mistake here is seeing it as a zero-sum game. The goal of IP rights is not to prevent party A from “depriving” party B of their property. Believe it or not, understanding that copying IP does not destroy the original is not some galaxy brain level thinking only available to the enlightened. Rather, the goal is to encourage the creativity and innovation that produces more of such intellectual property overall; offering a degree of control over your own IP is a mechanism[0] of getting there. A shining example of that is copyleft licensing. The concept of IP ownership powers GPL: in order to say “you must contribute back or disclose your source”, in order to give the assurance that programmer contributions will benefit the world rather than get embraced and extinguished by a megacorp, you must be able to execute the aforementioned control over the IP. Free and open software—including gems like Linux (probably the most popular OS in the world), Blender, etc.—flourished because of this control, not despite it. Many people, in their self-righteous crusade for free movies and stuff, completely miss that point. So, if anything, it is the opposite. The difficulty of stealing or copying a physical object already acts as a natural deterrent, which is why something that can be expropriated with no effort should require more explicit protection, not less. This should make intuitive sense to anyone who can see the value of intellectual property and it being the driving force of innovation. [0] If someone has an alternative mechanism in mind, I welcome a description of how it would work.
    - therealpygon 1y ago
      I’m not against it, because you are correct that the cost to make a copy is near zero, but let’s not go full self-delusion that the content has zero cost.
    - homefree 1y ago
      Just because a good is non-rival does not mean it therefore should be free. For a similar example, drug discovery often takes billions of dollars of investment - but once discovered is very inexpensive to copy. Does that mean once discovered it should be (nearly) free for anyone to manufacture? What would you consider the second order incentives of that kind of societal structure? These arguments when given a tiny bit of thought to the incentives they create fall apart instantly. It's a good way to end up in a communist type of social failure where nothing is created and everything is scarce. The goal of these laws is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" - it's about creating incentives that benefit the creator and the society. That's the purpose.
- Tadpole9181 1y ago
  Oh, yeah, it's dystopian that you pay for a service you use and the creators who make your content. What a ridiculous statement. You know servers aren't "free and effortless", right? Nor the storage drives or the bandwidth. Nor are the engineers or creators who make it all happen. If you block ads and you don't pay for an ad-free alternative, you're a leech on the system and making good actors pay more. I don't really care about it too much - ads offend me too and I don't really respect modern IP law as it is handled, etc. But the sheer audacity on display in your comment is palpable. If you're going to be a thief, at least be honest with yourself and don't act like all the bakers should be thieves too. That's just a world without bread.

55555 1y ago

YouTube Premium is some of the best money I spend. Just buy it if you have the money. 55% goes to creators.

nyjah 1y ago
One of my handful of follows puts out multiple 2 hour videos a day sometimes, almost every day. I hardly watch, but I always throw it on and let it play through, and will replay it on mute while doing other things, just so this guy with 1.8k views is getting a bigger share of my youtube premium money. I don't participate in the channel, like I said, I really hardly watch, but monthly I have been getting free memberships to his channel since I started doing it.

dataflow 1y ago

I suspect this reasonable ad-free pricing will only last as long as needed to gain the majority of users on board. Video hosting costs will have to rise (there are ever more videos being created; you can't host all of them indefinitely available at everyone's fingertips at low cost) and they will have to increase prices to keep up. Not that this implies you shouldn't get premium, but just worth keeping in mind I think.

lurk2 1y ago

Almost every video I watch these days has a sponsored segment that ends up taking around 1/10th of the video’s total run time. Better than TV, but if I’m paying for the service I’m not willing to watch any ads.

anonym29 1y ago
sponsorblock + uBO. Giving into the wishes of tyrants (pay us or else we're going to saddle you with ads) never weakens the power of the tyrants, it only strengthens and encourages them.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  Ahh, the tyrants refusing to provide free content for you that costs money to produce, and not get any compensation. Tell us your suggestions. Exposure bucks?
  - anonym29 1y ago
    Google doesn't spend a cent producing the content on YT (user-generated). Also, they did provide free content produced by others without compensation. They have for many years, long before ads showed up.
    - FireBeyond 1y ago
      And? Don't make the mistake of thinking I have any love for Google. Or ads. But you're no better than Google, in this case, taking the free content produced by others without compensation. Except you're also acting self-righteous and superior about doing so.
      - Tadpole9181 1y ago
        Don't forget that Google provided all the hosting, storage, and advertising for the creator's content. So there is, in fact, a service being provided. They're worse than Google in this exchange.

spacemadness 1y ago

Influencers like to stick ads right in their videos now so you can’t avoid that. Thankfully that’s just influencers and not other types of videos.

acquisitionsilk 1y ago

It also results in more money going to Youtube/Google LLC/Alphabet Inc. There are many wonderful videos and video-makers on youtube - but I think the platform has been a net negative for creativity, and for humanity, in many ways. Hence I personally would never support them with my money. We haven't ever ran the counterfactual, and maybe there's some reason we can't or won't. But I would absolutely love to see youtube without youtube - no middleman, direct payments to the video-makers. I'm not proposing a technical discussion here on what such a platform might look like or whether it's feasible - I just mean culturally, I'd love to see what videos we would come up with if we weren't constantly adjusting to suit the all-powerful and unknowable "algorithm". I think this pressure to conform to the algorithm, to always chase more views, subscriptions, and comments, to frame every choice around that, has probably been much more prohibitive on creativity than we are able to imagine.

bdangubic 1y ago
It also results in more money going to Youtube/Google LLC/Alphabet Inc. yup, they should run this whole service free of charge, no ads and no subscription :)
- acquisitionsilk 1y ago
  I'm not saying I want them to run the whole service free of charge, I'm saying I'd consider it a gain for the species if the business closed down. I look forward to alternative ideas (with e.g. no middlemen, and direct payment) being tested out. The TV era held some promise but steadily declined, and the Youtube era has went similarly. The audiovisual onslaught continues. Technically competent people on here are innoculated against the realities of the average usage on these platforms, which equates to brain-rot of the lowest calibre.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    with e.g. no middlemen, and direct payment this sounds amazing but it can’t be done. no one is going to 79 websites to watch things from 79 different artist. the middleman are core evil part not just in this area but many others but I can’t see how this kind of society we have built can function without it

const_cast 1y ago

Paying for streaming services used to result in zero ads too, and now lots of services either don't offer ad-free or charge double for it. I think ads are extremely valuable to brands, more than we realize. It's basically allowed propaganda for consumerist behavior. I don't think we can set a pricetag on ads, which is why I don't think they'll ever go away. This is just temporary, don't get used to it.

mvdtnz 1y ago
Which streaming services added ads to their paid ad-free plan? I don't know of any, although many of them are not offered in my country.
- const_cast 1y ago
  HBO Max, Disney plus, netflix. So... you know, all the big ones. The only one that stands out really is Hulu, which always had ads.
  - mvdtnz 1y ago
    Netflix most certainly didn't. They added a cheaper ad-supported plan. I don't know for sure about the other two.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Well but then they also raised their prices repeatedly so the cheaper plan isn't actually cheaper, it's what the ad-free plan used to cost.