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You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins.

by scoofy 1y ago

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
Specifically it's about $14 a month in the US, from what I see. I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.
whyenot 1y ago
Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.
stiray 1y ago
You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services) Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more. And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.
- scoofy 1y ago
  I’ll switch to Nebula if that ever happens. Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.
  - stiray 1y ago
    There is no if. This is how corporate greed works. What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners. Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content. In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free. And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.
    - scoofy 1y ago
      Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc. None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty. That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
      - anticensor 1y ago
        Or stratify users into creators and viewers and force both strata to pay, where viewer users cannot upload and creators cannot watch (even if they paid).
      - stiray 1y ago
        We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators. Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
        scoofy 1y ago
        This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube. Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
        stiray 1y ago
        No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads. And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary? Yes, I know. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.
  - stiray 1y ago
    Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage. Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late. First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
    - anticensor 1y ago
      They already discontinued the premium-only content (YouTube Originals, turned out the audience isn't fit for that).
    - tempodox 1y ago
      Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples
    - phito 1y ago
      So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)
      - stiray 1y ago
- Mindwipe 1y ago
  Number of video streaming services who have removed their ad free tiers: zero.
- raincole 1y ago
  By this logic you lose in long term no matter what you do. If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too. If you watch ads: they'll add more ads. If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video. If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.
  - draugadrotten 1y ago
    > If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video. Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death" Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.
  - godshatter 1y ago
    > If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video If they do this then the right arrow becomes your best friend. If it's part of the stream then they have no way of blocking things so you can't skip past them. If they embed some way of notifying the app that it needs to block skipping here or there then that's what adblock would start triggering from. I'm assuming that's why they don't do it now.
  - ChromaticPanic 1y ago
    You just described the evolution of every streaming platform out there
uncircle 1y ago
I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less. Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website
- wincy 1y ago
  At least it respects it for 30 days, the Facebook app (which I use to keep in touch with family) is a desolate place where literally every time you open the app your feed is filled with shorts and posts from people you aren’t friends with. And those aren’t event the ads!
  - Brian_K_White 1y ago
    Doesn't respect it on any of my tvs.
matwood 1y ago
Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music. If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  > It also comes with YT music. This is a big part of it. It drives the price up a lot but I don't want it so I pay for nothing, > If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. I don't pay and I use adblock and sponsorblock. I don't watch enough to make it worth it and with ads YT is literally unwatchable now. I watched a mentour pilot video the other day without the blockers and every 2-3 minutes there was an ad interruption, every time for the same stupid car. Not even relevant because I don't buy or use cars. And there is no competition for YT right now. Also, I really don't care about the ethics. I don't care if you think it's wrong. I'm just saying why I do it, not trying to justify it ethically. Because I have no ethics when it comes to big corporations. Just like they don't towards their customers.
- PurestGuava 1y ago
  > If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads." I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
  - dimator 1y ago
    You'll notice that it's always YouTube that is the target, though. People feel entitled to free YouTube as though by birthright. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they cancel and move on, they don't usually claim they deserve it free. Maybe because it was not monetized originally, and so those who were around back then argue it must remain that way?
Oarch 1y ago
Agreed, this is one of the times I'm fully behind a Google business model. I'd happily pay for products rather than have them datamine me senseless.
- anticensor 1y ago
  Remember, cash can only be spent once, information and data can be spent infinitely many times over.
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  You have to have an account and log in to it!
- notpushkin 1y ago
  I would gladly pay for YouTube as well, but I’m sure they’ll mine the shit out of me either way.
apples_oranges 1y ago
This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;) I currently pay for Apple Music though ha
Brian_K_White 1y ago
I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs. * I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it. * I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device. * I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads. * I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did. * I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.) Here is the value you get from paying for youtube: It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
- golergka 1y ago
  > * I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it. The whole point of YouTube is watching your subscriptions or recommendations based on your previous history. What is your use case if you don't even want to be logged into it?
  - georgebcrawford 1y ago
    That's only partially true for me. Recommendations? Not at all. Subscriptions less and less. I can think of two that I regularly watch, and even those I'll just binge their most recent 2-3 every couple of months. For me it's Ctrl/CMD+L "y [thing I'm searching for]" Enter. I've dabbled with tools like PinchFlat to archive/stream via Jellyfin but there's niggles I haven't tackled.
- raincole 1y ago
  Sure. All you said is completely true. I have a good solution: don't use YouTube then.
zwnow 1y ago
Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?
- dimator 1y ago
  Why pay for clothes? Nordstrom's is already rich enough, just walk in and take something.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    If you take a youtube video, they don't have one less of course.
- golergka 1y ago
  Because they provide a great service that delivers more value than the subscription is worth.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    The people provide the value, the platform just happens to have a monopoly standing in that domain...
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  > youtube is already rich enough maybe, hard to say. but the people who make videos, and get 55% of the revenue (give or take a bit), frequently are not (unless you insist on watching mega channels only).
  - zwnow 1y ago
    Well it should be a hobby to be a youtuber not a job. Monetizing it destroyed the whole platform.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
wiseowise 1y ago
Except for some reason I have to watch ads installed by the creators themselves despite paying 26 EUR.
- jonex 1y ago
  I find that annoying too. In case you haven't seen, there's the sponsor block extension for that, which is not limited by anti-adblock measures.
  - Brian_K_White 1y ago
    Not on tvs.
    - hnburnsy 1y ago
      Smarttube Next... https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube
    - harvey9 1y ago
      On the rare occasion I watch YouTube via my Roku stick, ads cause me to mute the tv and skip when I can. I guess I could put a mini pc behind the TV and get all the browser extensions but this compromise is good enough for my lazy self.
mrob 1y ago
I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
- cesarb 1y ago
  > I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. [...] The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience. I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.
xigoi 1y ago
Then I’d have to use the official YouTube app, whose UX is utter garbage compared to Tubular.
ManlyBread 1y ago
The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price. Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display. Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile. Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  > Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile. Then stop watching youtube. You're just free-riding on the backs of whatever mechanisms exist to motivate the people who make videos to keep doing so. Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
  - malka1986 1y ago
    > Then stop watching youtube. Why would I, since I can watch it for free without ads ? > Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>. Oh they definitely are worth something. But I also definitely do not want to give Google money.
  - ManlyBread 1y ago
    Or I could continue to watch YouTube and ignore this insane rule that seems to exist solely in your head.
perryizgr8 1y ago
It doesn't get rid of the ads. Most medium to big youtubers will have one or more sponsored segments inside the video.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  But that's their choice, not youtube's.
  - perryizgr8 1y ago
    Sure, but I'm paying youtube, not the creator. So I'm expecting youtube to solve the problem they promised to solve.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
      The problem they promised to solve was "us showing you ads".
      - perryizgr8 1y ago
        But youtube is still showing me ads.

You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins.

by scoofy 1y ago

You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins.

Specifically it's about $14 a month in the US, from what I see. I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.

whyenot 1y ago

Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.

stiray 1y ago

You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services) Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more. And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.

scoofy 1y ago
I’ll switch to Nebula if that ever happens. Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.
- stiray 1y ago
  There is no if. This is how corporate greed works. What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners. Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content. In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free. And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.
  - scoofy 1y ago
    Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc. None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty. That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
    - anticensor 1y ago
      Or stratify users into creators and viewers and force both strata to pay, where viewer users cannot upload and creators cannot watch (even if they paid).
    - stiray 1y ago
      We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators. Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
      - scoofy 1y ago
        This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube. Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
        stiray 1y ago
        No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads. And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary? Yes, I know. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
- blitzar 1y ago
  Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.
tshaddox 1y ago
I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.
- stiray 1y ago
  Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage. Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late. First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
  - anticensor 1y ago
    They already discontinued the premium-only content (YouTube Originals, turned out the audience isn't fit for that).
  - tempodox 1y ago
    Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples
  - phito 1y ago
    So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)
    - stiray 1y ago
Mindwipe 1y ago
Number of video streaming services who have removed their ad free tiers: zero.
raincole 1y ago
By this logic you lose in long term no matter what you do. If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too. If you watch ads: they'll add more ads. If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video. If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.
- draugadrotten 1y ago
  > If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video. Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death" Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.
- godshatter 1y ago
  > If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video If they do this then the right arrow becomes your best friend. If it's part of the stream then they have no way of blocking things so you can't skip past them. If they embed some way of notifying the app that it needs to block skipping here or there then that's what adblock would start triggering from. I'm assuming that's why they don't do it now.
- ChromaticPanic 1y ago
  You just described the evolution of every streaming platform out there

uncircle 1y ago

I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less. Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website

wincy 1y ago
At least it respects it for 30 days, the Facebook app (which I use to keep in touch with family) is a desolate place where literally every time you open the app your feed is filled with shorts and posts from people you aren’t friends with. And those aren’t event the ads!
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  Doesn't respect it on any of my tvs.

matwood 1y ago

Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music. If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.

wkat4242 1y ago
> It also comes with YT music. This is a big part of it. It drives the price up a lot but I don't want it so I pay for nothing, > If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. I don't pay and I use adblock and sponsorblock. I don't watch enough to make it worth it and with ads YT is literally unwatchable now. I watched a mentour pilot video the other day without the blockers and every 2-3 minutes there was an ad interruption, every time for the same stupid car. Not even relevant because I don't buy or use cars. And there is no competition for YT right now. Also, I really don't care about the ethics. I don't care if you think it's wrong. I'm just saying why I do it, not trying to justify it ethically. Because I have no ethics when it comes to big corporations. Just like they don't towards their customers.
PurestGuava 1y ago
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads." I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
- dimator 1y ago
  You'll notice that it's always YouTube that is the target, though. People feel entitled to free YouTube as though by birthright. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they cancel and move on, they don't usually claim they deserve it free. Maybe because it was not monetized originally, and so those who were around back then argue it must remain that way?

Oarch 1y ago

Agreed, this is one of the times I'm fully behind a Google business model. I'd happily pay for products rather than have them datamine me senseless.

anticensor 1y ago
Remember, cash can only be spent once, information and data can be spent infinitely many times over.
Brian_K_White 1y ago
You have to have an account and log in to it!
notpushkin 1y ago
I would gladly pay for YouTube as well, but I’m sure they’ll mine the shit out of me either way.

apples_oranges 1y ago

This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;) I currently pay for Apple Music though ha

Brian_K_White 1y ago

I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs. * I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it. * I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device. * I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads. * I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did. * I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.) Here is the value you get from paying for youtube: It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.

golergka 1y ago
> * I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it. The whole point of YouTube is watching your subscriptions or recommendations based on your previous history. What is your use case if you don't even want to be logged into it?
- georgebcrawford 1y ago
  That's only partially true for me. Recommendations? Not at all. Subscriptions less and less. I can think of two that I regularly watch, and even those I'll just binge their most recent 2-3 every couple of months. For me it's Ctrl/CMD+L "y [thing I'm searching for]" Enter. I've dabbled with tools like PinchFlat to archive/stream via Jellyfin but there's niggles I haven't tackled.
raincole 1y ago
Sure. All you said is completely true. I have a good solution: don't use YouTube then.

zwnow 1y ago

Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?

dimator 1y ago
Why pay for clothes? Nordstrom's is already rich enough, just walk in and take something.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  If you take a youtube video, they don't have one less of course.
golergka 1y ago
Because they provide a great service that delivers more value than the subscription is worth.
- zwnow 1y ago
  The people provide the value, the platform just happens to have a monopoly standing in that domain...
PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
> youtube is already rich enough maybe, hard to say. but the people who make videos, and get 55% of the revenue (give or take a bit), frequently are not (unless you insist on watching mega channels only).
- zwnow 1y ago
  Well it should be a hobby to be a youtuber not a job. Monetizing it destroyed the whole platform.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago

wiseowise 1y ago

Except for some reason I have to watch ads installed by the creators themselves despite paying 26 EUR.

jonex 1y ago
I find that annoying too. In case you haven't seen, there's the sponsor block extension for that, which is not limited by anti-adblock measures.
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  Not on tvs.
  - hnburnsy 1y ago
    Smarttube Next... https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube
  - harvey9 1y ago
    On the rare occasion I watch YouTube via my Roku stick, ads cause me to mute the tv and skip when I can. I guess I could put a mini pc behind the TV and get all the browser extensions but this compromise is good enough for my lazy self.

mrob 1y ago

I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.

cesarb 1y ago
> I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. [...] The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience. I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.

xigoi 1y ago

Then I’d have to use the official YouTube app, whose UX is utter garbage compared to Tubular.

ManlyBread 1y ago

The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price. Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display. Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile. Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
> Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile. Then stop watching youtube. You're just free-riding on the backs of whatever mechanisms exist to motivate the people who make videos to keep doing so. Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
- malka1986 1y ago
  > Then stop watching youtube. Why would I, since I can watch it for free without ads ? > Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>. Oh they definitely are worth something. But I also definitely do not want to give Google money.
- ManlyBread 1y ago
  Or I could continue to watch YouTube and ignore this insane rule that seems to exist solely in your head.

perryizgr8 1y ago

It doesn't get rid of the ads. Most medium to big youtubers will have one or more sponsored segments inside the video.

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
But that's their choice, not youtube's.
- perryizgr8 1y ago
  Sure, but I'm paying youtube, not the creator. So I'm expecting youtube to solve the problem they promised to solve.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    The problem they promised to solve was "us showing you ads".
    - perryizgr8 1y ago
      But youtube is still showing me ads.