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I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium. And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is. All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.

Workaccount2 1y ago
By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.
- johncessna 1y ago
  Morally Righteous? I think it's more they don't have to so they don't. It's like the DVR days where you'd just fast forward ads. It wasn't a moral high ground, it was just easy to do and was better than the alternative.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Dutifully watching the ads doesn't seem moral either, it seems insane.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    I do actually think that putting ads in front of children at least is immoral, and it is neglectful not to block ads for kids in the same way that it is to just hand them an unfiltered violence-and-porn device. It's probably at least irresponsible to not block ads for an elderly parent who's starting to experience cognitive decline.
- x0x0 1y ago
  I accidentally browsed a site without ads this morning from my work profile. Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5 billionth google search and won blah blah blah. Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk so long as google et all refuse to audit and comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my laptop.
- pydry 1y ago
  Once google's shareholders have wet their beak, the on-campus sushi bars and manicurists and $400k pay packets are paid for and the Taylor Swifts of the world are paid off there isnt much left of your subscription to pay for the long tail of content creators who dont have Taylor Swift's leverage. Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    Youtube has a 55/45 (creator/google) split with content creators. YT premium views also pay substantially more. Most of the money youtube makes goes to creators.
    - account42 1y ago
      With some creators. Casual uploaders (which IMO produce the majority of worthwhile videos) don't get squat. The "professional content creators" produce watered down crap that I close as soon as I see the youtube-face thumbnail designed to game the algorithm.
- tjpnz 1y ago
  Given the downright illegal tactics adtech companies like Google and Meta resort to it has become morally righteous.
mschuster91 1y ago
> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction: - credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor. - in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones) - bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts - crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions - pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started. Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.
throw0101c 1y ago
> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. Depends on the price. I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier. WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook: * https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).
- filoleg 1y ago
  Not to dismiss your point about pricing numbers (as it is valid and makes sense to me), but I don’t think iCloud comparison is that applicable to my argument, given there is no option to pay for larger iCloud storage with ad exposure. What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.
- toast0 1y ago
  > Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. (I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019) From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying. A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed. B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time. Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger. I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689 [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000047/exhibit992unauditedwhatsap.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
cameldrv 1y ago
I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.
- yapyap 1y ago
  Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is HORRID. Youtube is also moving into that direction.
  - jobigoud 1y ago
    I think a good amount of people pay for Youtube just to be able to listen to audio with the screen off, which is a completely artificial restriction they added to the free version. Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.
    - timewizard 1y ago
      > Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable. That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive. It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse. If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        I feel the exact opposite. YouTube is the only streaming service I pay for, and it's well worth it. I have no trouble finding things I want to watch and there's a huge amount of it. Other services don't have nearly as much good stuff, and it's too hard to find among the crap.
LtWorf 1y ago
Amazon prime had a lot of customers but they started to put ads to paying customers as well. So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"
- tehjoker 1y ago
  We could also have public services.
- account42 1y ago
  They also bundled the prime delivery with the prime video streaming for double the price of what either one cost before.
maplant 1y ago
I pay for YT Premium and Protonmail. Very happy to do so.
ElijahLynn 1y ago
Paying for YT Premium is a no brainer. Especially for someone like myself with ADHD. I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Everyone else just uses newpipe, mpv, and so on
  - ElijahLynn 1y ago
    I value good content, or maybe it's not even that good, but it's valuable. I appreciate paying people for their time to make things that teach me new things.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      Then pay for their patreon. Paying youtube just makes google money.
xigoi 1y ago
I don’t want to pay for YouTube because the official app, even without ads, has a much worse UX than Tubular.
kalaksi 1y ago
I don't use YT much, but if I did and paid for premium, I'd assume they'd still track me, monetize the data and utilize dark patterns and enshittified UX. What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery. I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.
- acheron 1y ago
  Exactly. The earlier post is overlooking the insanity of giving Google money, and acting as if they wouldn’t just track you harder now that you have to be logged in with an account connected to your real identity and a credit card. I wouldn’t pay for YouTube for the same reason I wouldn’t pay for Gmail. But I’m happy to pay for another email provider.
Guest9081239812 1y ago
My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast majority are long term members that have been on the site for years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so, only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.
- stavros 1y ago
  How much do you make per user on ads, and how much is the subscription?
  - Guest9081239812 1y ago
    It only generates about 15k a year in ad revenue. It's fairly low revenue because: 1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors. 2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise. 3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements. I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience. Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars. What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.
    - tobias3 1y ago
      This illustrates a bit the price discrimination "problem" that is solved via ads. With ads, higher-income people probably earn you more money automatically. With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue. E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would still not be close to the price discrimination possible via ads. I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when they were not paying for WhatsApp.
wvh 1y ago
I am conflicted because to some extent, paying for some of these services feels like paying a blackmailer, spying on you, holding a whole ecosystem hostage and even jeopardising mental health and the public discourse. I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to. If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.
- sigotirandolas 1y ago
  To be devil's advocate, this is the kind of all-talk argument the parent was referring to. Once the paid option is available, people will demand it to be [cheaper / better / someone else] and still not pay. While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.
  - anton-c 1y ago
    I agree with the premise of your argument but just have to point out we seem to have been given 'unalived' and a few other new terms thanks to youtubes aggressive demonetization. They haven't been amazing on censorship but still probably better than those others. Now whether someone who is putting out an opinion should care about getting paid is another thing, but it kills your video traffic usually too.
  - wvh 1y ago
    I got divorced last year, had a rough period, watched some self-help videos, Youtube found out and started increasingly serving unwanted content. I did not appreciate the attempt at pushing my proverbial buttons. I do not need gender war content when I look for a guitar review. Youtube is excellent and has replaced television for me the last 10 years. But I just don't trust or want an algorithm trying to hook me, and I'm generally already old and wise enough to unplug when I need to. To me, this goes a bit beyond being choosy. I don't want to be profiled.
nkrisc 1y ago
Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free. If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now. There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.
- scrivanodev 1y ago
  What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.
  - hiq 1y ago
    What did you learn thanks to it?
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      How to open my computer
    - dh2022 1y ago
      I did learn how to diagnose car problems and how to fix them. these were relatively minor tasks - replace the spark plugs and replace light bulbs. Also Subaru Forester has a problem if the battery gets disconnected too long-I found out about that and what to do about it on YouTube. I also learned how to cook some foods. That being said, lately YT has way too many ads for my liking; thus I am using Reddit more and more for these things.
  - nkrisc 1y ago
    I don't know what I would replace YouTube with, because YouTube is free so I have never needed to consider alternatives. But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.
  - 1y ago
timewizard 1y ago
> crowd is mostly all-talk. I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties. > who actually pays for YT Premium. Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?" Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.
- michaelt 1y ago
  Good news: Youtube Premium is trivial to cancel, comes with no multi-month obligations, and if you don't trust Google with your credit card you can pay for it with Google Play gift cards.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
austhrow743 1y ago
Surely it has to be somewhat ideological given that adblockers exist? Have you seen your high paid engineer friends actually watching the ads? I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube. Probably not watch. I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience. When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it. Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails. Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.
nytesky 1y ago
YT Premium is pretty expensive. I think it costs as much for one user for a multi-device plan on Netflix? They don’t create nor curate much content. I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.
- qwerpy 1y ago
  There's great content on YouTube but there's a lot of garbage. AI-generated slop, clickbait thumbnails/titles that actually don't payout, sales pitches, and plain old low-quality garbage. The lack of a thumbs down really makes it hard to avoid these. I realize that thumbs down is also used to punish "wrong" political viewpoints and companies, so it's a hard problem. But as a viewer who never uploads content, it only makes my experience worse.
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    There's a "I don't want to see content like this" option you can signal on content and I find it works quite well
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      If only they would respect that when you tell them to hide shorts. Drives me crazy that they utterly refuse to let you turn those off.
      - boldlybold 1y ago
        Get a browser extension that does it, I finally looked for one after clicking the "not interested" button one too many times.
        spaqin 1y ago
        If you're at getting a browser extension level, you're not too far off from also getting an adblocker and not having to pay for premium.
rconti 1y ago
I'm about to start paying for YouTube for the first time ever. Of course, they make it complicated because I don't actually want their bundled music service. And the "lite" version says most videos are ad-free. But what's preventing them from changing that deal the day after I sign up? And of course, once I become a customer, now I'm hooked, and I'm subject to their arbitrary price increases. Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  Don't start, please
kwijibob 1y ago
YouTube announced in March that they have 125 million premium subscribers. I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads. I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing. Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-subscribers-lyor-cohen/ https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...
tcfhgj 1y ago
I am not interested in paying Google for anything. It's a company too big and powerful through immoral business (ads) I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.
- ivell 1y ago
  I can understand weapons industry or alcohol industry as being immoral. However I do not understand how ads are immoral. It is annoying for some, while for some it is informative. Businesses inform the public about their services through ads. Or do you mean how Google implemented its ads?
  - int_19h 1y ago
    You may disagree on this, but many people believe that the current state of affairs wrt online ads (i.e. massive privacy violations and using ads to get people literally addicted) in general is the inevitable end result of any predominantly ad-supported ecosystem.
  - tcfhgj 1y ago
    Commercial unrequested ads in general, they are designed to manipulate you to make you buy products you wouldn't have bought otherwise. Additionally, a related negative side effect is consumerism.
  - account42 1y ago
    Would you tolerate a human being following you around, telling you to buy things you don't need and that you are worth less if you don't. That's what ads do, except it's not just one person but a whole team of professional psychologists that know just what buttons to push to make you cave in. Pretending that they are simply businesses informing you is beyond dishonest.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
The problem with YT premium is that they simply do not have content worth paying for. Even the very best content (say, videos where people give music lessons) is not actually something I would pay for. I don't mind paying for a streaming service - I pay for Netflix and will for the foreseeable future. But that's because Netflix has stuff where I actively want to watch it and would miss it if it was gone; YT does not.
- rhines 1y ago
  Depends on your perspective I guess, personally I find YT far more valuable than any streaming platform. University lectures from hundreds of professors, conference recordings, music videos, millions of independent creators covering nearly any niche you could think of - YouTube's service of hosting that and making it available is worth so much more to me than whatever shows Neflix currently has on rotation. But since I have the option to not pay, I don't. If it was paywalled I'd be willing to pay probably 3-5x what a normal streaming service charges though.
  - account42 1y ago
    University professors are already (often publicly) funded and should be sharing videos on university infrastructure, not ad-funded commercial platforms.
muppetman 1y ago
I pay for YT Premium. Not because I care for stupid videos, but because you get YT Music for free with it... Spotify is the hottest of garbage in my opinion, constantly trying to push podcasts at me. Why more people don't cancel Spotify and just pay for YT Premium - you get ad-free videos and all the music of Spotify. Plus with YT Music you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account.
- anshumankmr 1y ago
  Its baffling how bad YT Music reccomendations are for me though (personally). My personal email account is something I have had since 2008 and there is probably history going back till then and even then somehow YT Music just gives bad reccomendations
  - muppetman 1y ago
    Yea, recommendations aren't great, but then Spotify wasn't much good either. This is an area where I hope their work in AI can help. Instead they seem to be focusing on stupid integrations like in the Play Store - now I can ask the Play Store about an app... wtf?
- daveoc64 1y ago
  I pay for both YouTube Premium and Spotify Premium, because I don't think that Google's music offerings have ever been that good. There's no desktop app for YouTube Music for starters.
  - muppetman 1y ago
    What would you want/need a desktop app for? If you use Chrome (and yes, I'm aware some people use Firefox) you can install it as an App that way, so it appears in your start menu/finder. It can cast to your local devices etc. I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway. So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.
MaxikCZ 1y ago
> met one person [...] who actually pays for YT Premium. I dont like that while the ad revenue barely extracts a dollar from me, my subscription suddenly expects $10-30 per month regardless of my usage. Thats not "we need to charge you to continue our services", thats "we need to charge you and then 20x times again just because we can".
worldsayshi 1y ago
Solving this properly probably means solving how to pay for open source. I think it needs a somewhat complex scheme of pooling money together into an ad-hoc fund like entity and distributing it to service providers by someone elected for the task.
- account42 1y ago
  If only society had a structure like that, for taking care of things that need to be done for the benefit of everyone.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    I think it's a very different problem than what welfare usually solves for us. Paying a doctor to treat patients is different from paying someone to build an MRI machine. We don't pay individual engineers there. So I don't think solving such complex problems within a welfare system is a solved problem at all. In Sweden we pride ourselves in health care for everyone. But we are quite bad at buying software systems for our welfare institutions.
account42 1y ago
$13.99 /month is hardly a small fee IMO. But more importantly it's an arbitrary price point set by Google. Pretending that people are not willing to pay just because they choose not to accept a particular set of conditions is dishonest.

Workaccount2 1y ago

By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.

johncessna 1y ago
Morally Righteous? I think it's more they don't have to so they don't. It's like the DVR days where you'd just fast forward ads. It wasn't a moral high ground, it was just easy to do and was better than the alternative.
- card_zero 1y ago
  Dutifully watching the ads doesn't seem moral either, it seems insane.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  I do actually think that putting ads in front of children at least is immoral, and it is neglectful not to block ads for kids in the same way that it is to just hand them an unfiltered violence-and-porn device. It's probably at least irresponsible to not block ads for an elderly parent who's starting to experience cognitive decline.
x0x0 1y ago
I accidentally browsed a site without ads this morning from my work profile. Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5 billionth google search and won blah blah blah. Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk so long as google et all refuse to audit and comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my laptop.
pydry 1y ago
Once google's shareholders have wet their beak, the on-campus sushi bars and manicurists and $400k pay packets are paid for and the Taylor Swifts of the world are paid off there isnt much left of your subscription to pay for the long tail of content creators who dont have Taylor Swift's leverage. Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Youtube has a 55/45 (creator/google) split with content creators. YT premium views also pay substantially more. Most of the money youtube makes goes to creators.
  - account42 1y ago
    With some creators. Casual uploaders (which IMO produce the majority of worthwhile videos) don't get squat. The "professional content creators" produce watered down crap that I close as soon as I see the youtube-face thumbnail designed to game the algorithm.
tjpnz 1y ago
Given the downright illegal tactics adtech companies like Google and Meta resort to it has become morally righteous.

mschuster91 1y ago

> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction: - credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor. - in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones) - bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts - crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions - pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started. Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.

throw0101c 1y ago

> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. Depends on the price. I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier. WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook: * https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).

filoleg 1y ago
Not to dismiss your point about pricing numbers (as it is valid and makes sense to me), but I don’t think iCloud comparison is that applicable to my argument, given there is no option to pay for larger iCloud storage with ad exposure. What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.
toast0 1y ago
> Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. (I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019) From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying. A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed. B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time. Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger. I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689 [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000047/exhibit992unauditedwhatsap.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...

cameldrv 1y ago

I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.

yapyap 1y ago
Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is HORRID. Youtube is also moving into that direction.
- jobigoud 1y ago
  I think a good amount of people pay for Youtube just to be able to listen to audio with the screen off, which is a completely artificial restriction they added to the free version. Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.
  - timewizard 1y ago
    > Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable. That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive. It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse. If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      I feel the exact opposite. YouTube is the only streaming service I pay for, and it's well worth it. I have no trouble finding things I want to watch and there's a huge amount of it. Other services don't have nearly as much good stuff, and it's too hard to find among the crap.

LtWorf 1y ago

Amazon prime had a lot of customers but they started to put ads to paying customers as well. So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"

tehjoker 1y ago
We could also have public services.
account42 1y ago
They also bundled the prime delivery with the prime video streaming for double the price of what either one cost before.

maplant 1y ago

I pay for YT Premium and Protonmail. Very happy to do so.

ElijahLynn 1y ago

Paying for YT Premium is a no brainer. Especially for someone like myself with ADHD. I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.

LtWorf 1y ago
Everyone else just uses newpipe, mpv, and so on
- ElijahLynn 1y ago
  I value good content, or maybe it's not even that good, but it's valuable. I appreciate paying people for their time to make things that teach me new things.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Then pay for their patreon. Paying youtube just makes google money.

xigoi 1y ago

I don’t want to pay for YouTube because the official app, even without ads, has a much worse UX than Tubular.

kalaksi 1y ago

I don't use YT much, but if I did and paid for premium, I'd assume they'd still track me, monetize the data and utilize dark patterns and enshittified UX. What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery. I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.

acheron 1y ago
Exactly. The earlier post is overlooking the insanity of giving Google money, and acting as if they wouldn’t just track you harder now that you have to be logged in with an account connected to your real identity and a credit card. I wouldn’t pay for YouTube for the same reason I wouldn’t pay for Gmail. But I’m happy to pay for another email provider.

Guest9081239812 1y ago

My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast majority are long term members that have been on the site for years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so, only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.

stavros 1y ago
How much do you make per user on ads, and how much is the subscription?
- Guest9081239812 1y ago
  It only generates about 15k a year in ad revenue. It's fairly low revenue because: 1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors. 2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise. 3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements. I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience. Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars. What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.
  - tobias3 1y ago
    This illustrates a bit the price discrimination "problem" that is solved via ads. With ads, higher-income people probably earn you more money automatically. With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue. E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would still not be close to the price discrimination possible via ads. I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when they were not paying for WhatsApp.

wvh 1y ago

I am conflicted because to some extent, paying for some of these services feels like paying a blackmailer, spying on you, holding a whole ecosystem hostage and even jeopardising mental health and the public discourse. I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to. If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.

sigotirandolas 1y ago
To be devil's advocate, this is the kind of all-talk argument the parent was referring to. Once the paid option is available, people will demand it to be [cheaper / better / someone else] and still not pay. While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.
- anton-c 1y ago
  I agree with the premise of your argument but just have to point out we seem to have been given 'unalived' and a few other new terms thanks to youtubes aggressive demonetization. They haven't been amazing on censorship but still probably better than those others. Now whether someone who is putting out an opinion should care about getting paid is another thing, but it kills your video traffic usually too.
- wvh 1y ago
  I got divorced last year, had a rough period, watched some self-help videos, Youtube found out and started increasingly serving unwanted content. I did not appreciate the attempt at pushing my proverbial buttons. I do not need gender war content when I look for a guitar review. Youtube is excellent and has replaced television for me the last 10 years. But I just don't trust or want an algorithm trying to hook me, and I'm generally already old and wise enough to unplug when I need to. To me, this goes a bit beyond being choosy. I don't want to be profiled.

nkrisc 1y ago

Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free. If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now. There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.

scrivanodev 1y ago
What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.
- hiq 1y ago
  What did you learn thanks to it?
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    How to open my computer
  - dh2022 1y ago
    I did learn how to diagnose car problems and how to fix them. these were relatively minor tasks - replace the spark plugs and replace light bulbs. Also Subaru Forester has a problem if the battery gets disconnected too long-I found out about that and what to do about it on YouTube. I also learned how to cook some foods. That being said, lately YT has way too many ads for my liking; thus I am using Reddit more and more for these things.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  I don't know what I would replace YouTube with, because YouTube is free so I have never needed to consider alternatives. But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.
- 1y ago

timewizard 1y ago

> crowd is mostly all-talk. I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties. > who actually pays for YT Premium. Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?" Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.

michaelt 1y ago
Good news: Youtube Premium is trivial to cancel, comes with no multi-month obligations, and if you don't trust Google with your credit card you can pay for it with Google Play gift cards.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

austhrow743 1y ago

Surely it has to be somewhat ideological given that adblockers exist? Have you seen your high paid engineer friends actually watching the ads? I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube. Probably not watch. I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience. When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it. Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails. Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.

nytesky 1y ago

YT Premium is pretty expensive. I think it costs as much for one user for a multi-device plan on Netflix? They don’t create nor curate much content. I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.

qwerpy 1y ago
There's great content on YouTube but there's a lot of garbage. AI-generated slop, clickbait thumbnails/titles that actually don't payout, sales pitches, and plain old low-quality garbage. The lack of a thumbs down really makes it hard to avoid these. I realize that thumbs down is also used to punish "wrong" political viewpoints and companies, so it's a hard problem. But as a viewer who never uploads content, it only makes my experience worse.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  There's a "I don't want to see content like this" option you can signal on content and I find it works quite well
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    If only they would respect that when you tell them to hide shorts. Drives me crazy that they utterly refuse to let you turn those off.
    - boldlybold 1y ago
      Get a browser extension that does it, I finally looked for one after clicking the "not interested" button one too many times.
      - spaqin 1y ago
        If you're at getting a browser extension level, you're not too far off from also getting an adblocker and not having to pay for premium.

rconti 1y ago

I'm about to start paying for YouTube for the first time ever. Of course, they make it complicated because I don't actually want their bundled music service. And the "lite" version says most videos are ad-free. But what's preventing them from changing that deal the day after I sign up? And of course, once I become a customer, now I'm hooked, and I'm subject to their arbitrary price increases. Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.

tcfhgj 1y ago
Don't start, please

kwijibob 1y ago

YouTube announced in March that they have 125 million premium subscribers. I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads. I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing. Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-subscribers-lyor-cohen/ https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...

tcfhgj 1y ago

I am not interested in paying Google for anything. It's a company too big and powerful through immoral business (ads) I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.

ivell 1y ago
I can understand weapons industry or alcohol industry as being immoral. However I do not understand how ads are immoral. It is annoying for some, while for some it is informative. Businesses inform the public about their services through ads. Or do you mean how Google implemented its ads?
- int_19h 1y ago
  You may disagree on this, but many people believe that the current state of affairs wrt online ads (i.e. massive privacy violations and using ads to get people literally addicted) in general is the inevitable end result of any predominantly ad-supported ecosystem.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  Commercial unrequested ads in general, they are designed to manipulate you to make you buy products you wouldn't have bought otherwise. Additionally, a related negative side effect is consumerism.
- account42 1y ago
  Would you tolerate a human being following you around, telling you to buy things you don't need and that you are worth less if you don't. That's what ads do, except it's not just one person but a whole team of professional psychologists that know just what buttons to push to make you cave in. Pretending that they are simply businesses informing you is beyond dishonest.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

The problem with YT premium is that they simply do not have content worth paying for. Even the very best content (say, videos where people give music lessons) is not actually something I would pay for. I don't mind paying for a streaming service - I pay for Netflix and will for the foreseeable future. But that's because Netflix has stuff where I actively want to watch it and would miss it if it was gone; YT does not.

rhines 1y ago
Depends on your perspective I guess, personally I find YT far more valuable than any streaming platform. University lectures from hundreds of professors, conference recordings, music videos, millions of independent creators covering nearly any niche you could think of - YouTube's service of hosting that and making it available is worth so much more to me than whatever shows Neflix currently has on rotation. But since I have the option to not pay, I don't. If it was paywalled I'd be willing to pay probably 3-5x what a normal streaming service charges though.
- account42 1y ago
  University professors are already (often publicly) funded and should be sharing videos on university infrastructure, not ad-funded commercial platforms.

muppetman 1y ago

I pay for YT Premium. Not because I care for stupid videos, but because you get YT Music for free with it... Spotify is the hottest of garbage in my opinion, constantly trying to push podcasts at me. Why more people don't cancel Spotify and just pay for YT Premium - you get ad-free videos and all the music of Spotify. Plus with YT Music you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account.

anshumankmr 1y ago
Its baffling how bad YT Music reccomendations are for me though (personally). My personal email account is something I have had since 2008 and there is probably history going back till then and even then somehow YT Music just gives bad reccomendations
- muppetman 1y ago
  Yea, recommendations aren't great, but then Spotify wasn't much good either. This is an area where I hope their work in AI can help. Instead they seem to be focusing on stupid integrations like in the Play Store - now I can ask the Play Store about an app... wtf?
daveoc64 1y ago
I pay for both YouTube Premium and Spotify Premium, because I don't think that Google's music offerings have ever been that good. There's no desktop app for YouTube Music for starters.
- muppetman 1y ago
  What would you want/need a desktop app for? If you use Chrome (and yes, I'm aware some people use Firefox) you can install it as an App that way, so it appears in your start menu/finder. It can cast to your local devices etc. I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway. So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.

MaxikCZ 1y ago

> met one person [...] who actually pays for YT Premium. I dont like that while the ad revenue barely extracts a dollar from me, my subscription suddenly expects $10-30 per month regardless of my usage. Thats not "we need to charge you to continue our services", thats "we need to charge you and then 20x times again just because we can".

worldsayshi 1y ago

Solving this properly probably means solving how to pay for open source. I think it needs a somewhat complex scheme of pooling money together into an ad-hoc fund like entity and distributing it to service providers by someone elected for the task.

account42 1y ago
If only society had a structure like that, for taking care of things that need to be done for the benefit of everyone.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  I think it's a very different problem than what welfare usually solves for us. Paying a doctor to treat patients is different from paying someone to build an MRI machine. We don't pay individual engineers there. So I don't think solving such complex problems within a welfare system is a solved problem at all. In Sweden we pride ourselves in health care for everyone. But we are quite bad at buying software systems for our welfare institutions.

account42 1y ago

$13.99 /month is hardly a small fee IMO. But more importantly it's an arbitrary price point set by Google. Pretending that people are not willing to pay just because they choose not to accept a particular set of conditions is dishonest.