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I keep seeing people say this: "I pay for YouTube Premium. For my money, it’s the best bang-for-the-buck subscription service on the market" and I don't underst

by troupo 1y ago

I keep seeing people say this: "I pay for YouTube Premium. For my money, it’s the best bang-for-the-buck subscription service on the market" and I don't understand. For me, Premium's only value proposition is removing ads. Recommendations are still the same (quite shitty). Search is unusable (4 relevant results then unrelated recommendations). Shorts are pushed aggressively no matter how many times you hide them. Search in history will often not find even something you just watched a few days ago. It's the same Youtube.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
You also get youtube music, instant skipping over sponsor sections, and the ability to play videos in the background
- SanjayMehta 1y ago
  There’s an excellent free ios app called “Unwatched” which lets you make playlists, set defaults per channel such playback speed, and lets you play videos in the background. I use it for “podcasts” which are video only. And you don’t have to log in.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Aside from Music, these are all negative features that are valuable only because YouTube is so obnoxious. I'm in vehement agreement with parent to be honest. "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience. I'm perfectly happy to pay for youtube since it provides by far the best content and the price is reasonable. The fact that people can get all of that for free with some minor limitations is fairly generous.
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      > fairly generous. Is Google "generous" ?
    - godshatter 1y ago
      > It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience. Agreed, but it's the difference between a restaurant serving a mid-tier soup for cheaper versus giving customers a really good soup that the chef spit's in to encourage people to pay for the more expensive version of it.
  - Magmalgebra 1y ago
    It feels bad as a consumer, but the alternative is usually worse. The "stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" is really efficient market segmentation. If you don't do that you need to find actual value props that separate the market in just the right way to generate the financials that allow the product to keep going as is. 9 times out of 10 the result is that failing PMs totally fuck up the product and everyone loses. It's the SSO kerfuffle in a different package - terrible, but the right choice surprisingly often.
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition so you want people to freely watch videos without paying anything or watching ads ??? how this works then, creator need to be paid, bandwidth need to be paid, infrastructure is not cheap it is a nice value proposition, if its not somebody would already make a better alternative that not require those 2 (without paying and without ads) the fact there is not then its not possible
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      To stay in the metaphor, wouldn't see some other business model that would allow them to provide the soup to people who order without having to threaten to spit into it ?
      - tonyhart7 1y ago
        lol, there is no spit on it it is the soup, people free to eat the soup or not the fact that people always focusing on youtube flaw but never recommend alternative is simply saying that they are the best
        makeitdouble 1y ago
        That's the hallmark of a monopoly: people can complain about it as much as they want, it won't have any material difference.
        tonyhart7 1y ago
        "That's the hallmark of a monopoly" but there is no monopoly ???? are you saying that you simply cant use another website/platform ???? this is ridiculous if its android/ios then I can understand why its monopoly. but we have bazillion other video/streaming website Youtube are simply the best, deal with it
- hdjrudni 1y ago
  You also get >2x playback speed and higher bitrates on some videos.
55555 1y ago
Yes basically all it does is remove ads. Those of us who are happy with it are those of us who don’t feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Most people think YouTube should just be free and have no ads for some reason, and they probably wouldn’t say Premium is such a great deal.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  The issue is you're still not paying for the content nor paying the creators. You're paying YouTube to stop annoying you, and they then decide what to do with that money, incidentally paying some creators.
  - TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
    YouTube pays creators more for each Premium view.
  - frankchn 1y ago
    YouTube seems to be pretty explicit that it is paying 55% of revenue from watching videos to creators: > If a partner turns on Watch Page Ads by reviewing and accepting the Watch Page Monetization Module, YouTube will pay them 55% of net revenues from ads displayed or streamed on their public videos on their content Watch Page. This revenue share rate also applies when their public videos are streamed within the YouTube Video Player on other websites or applications. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwhats-my-revenue-share https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=...
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      As you point out, that revenue split has a set of conditions, which also require a level of contract on Youtube and other requirements (not being DMCA stroke for instance) So where does your Premium money go when you watch a very small creator ? where does it go for a demonetized video ? etc. That might sounds like a subtle difference, but consider the gap with channel membership, super chats (which are also roughly 50% split I think?) or patreon for instance.
magospietato 1y ago
YouTube music being included effectively replaces an additional music streaming service. From that perspective the family oriented plans in particular carry a lot of value.
- kelseydh 1y ago
  My gripe with Youtube Music is that the bitrate quality of their music is lower than Tidal or even Spotify. YTM audio files that are actually on Youtube will only stream in 128kbps.
  - cung 1y ago
    I’m surprised to hear that. I just switched from Spotify to Youtube Music and found the audio quality to be way better, even though I had Spotify set to high.
carabiner 1y ago
You should be paying (or taking some other action) to extricate ads from your life as much as possible.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Paying to remove ads is negotiating with terrorists. YouTube stays in the dominant position either way, it's not like tomorrow you'll go watch Nebula exclusively (you'd already have done it at this point). They're not providing anything materially, so the amount you pay is bound to nothing except how much you're willing to pay. And how much you're willing to pay depends on how much you're annoyed. So YouTube's main incentive for this program is to annoy you as much as you can tolerate to optimize the most money you get extracted.
  - smt88 1y ago
    It sounds like you're arguing that YouTube should be free and also ad-free, which makes no sense. YouTube is expensive to operate. They give me an option of paying by watching ads or paying money. That's much better than my options most other places, which is just to be forced to see ads.
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      I'm arguing that youtube should be paid for actual features. For instance membership and super chats are clearly labeled as extra content. Member only content is the same. You pay for a specific thing that is produced by a creator and provided by Youtube. "Pay to remove the ads we're pushing" is none of that. On Youtube being free, this is their business choice, and also the way they crush the competition and cement a near monopoly on the market. If it was a public service NGO I'd see it from a different angle, but it's not.
      - cung 1y ago
        Would you then argue for Youtube to take the Netflix path and not provide non-paying users anything?
Magmalgebra 1y ago
I imagine most people have the same value prop I do 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service 2) I really really value not having ads in my life So the price for ad-free youtube really seems phenomenal. None of the other features really matter to me - ad free dominates all value discussions.
- syncsynchalt 1y ago
  > 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service I would amend that to say "any *other streaming service". To me Youtube provides more and better content than the other streaming services, and I don't think people should balk at $14 for youtube when they happily pay that for netflix, disney+, hulu, or spotify.
PrivateButts 1y ago
On top of removing ads and giving you a couple extra minor features, it also has a way better rev split with creators (last I heard). Half of the sub gets divvied up to the people you watched that month, portioned out via watch time.
DimmieMan 1y ago
Absolutely, If premium sorted out all those problems and generally treated creators better i'd have a subscription. I come to youtube for the *creators*, the actual platform where I have watch history off and use extensions to block the aggressively pushed slop as it currently stands is not something I want to put money towards. I'm already a patreon to a few creators and have a Nebula subscription; adding it up it's probably slightly more than a premium subscription.
jojobas 1y ago
Yeah it's hard to compete with Ublock Origin and youtube-shorts-block.
marcyb5st 1y ago
Full disclousure: I work for Google, but nowhere near YT/YT music. Opinions are my own and I am actually a customer as I pay for YT premium with a family plan for me, my wife, and our son. While I agree YT without Ads is great, you also get YT music which is really good and for us it replaced Spotify completely. Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Shorts, however, they are really annoying.
- troupo 1y ago
  > Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Previously search was just search. It wasn't great, but it wasn't too bad. Now it shows 5-7 results from actual search (often really bad results). The next section is "People also watch" which quite often has very passing relevance to what you look for. Then there are shorts. Then there's "explore more" which may or may not be relevant to your search, and it has "+N more" underneath. And then there's the rest of the search which, again, may or may not be relevant to your search at all. --- I think it was slightly fixed recently, so the results are a bit more relevant, but it still is just ... weird
MinimalAction 1y ago
I use Brave and it's the premium experience already.
kelseydh 1y ago
The other useful Youtube Premium feature is the ability to offline download videos to your device. Useful for long plane rides and elsewhere where internet is limited or nonexistent.
jhallenworld 1y ago
The new thing that YouTube Premium includes is the one button press to skip over "commonly skipped parts of the video"- typically the in-video promotions. This just showed up last week on my nVidia shield connected to my TV. So finally there is a way to remove ads for real. It would be nice if it did it automatically. The creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.

by troupo 1y ago

SchemaLoad 1y ago

You also get youtube music, instant skipping over sponsor sections, and the ability to play videos in the background

SanjayMehta 1y ago
There’s an excellent free ios app called “Unwatched” which lets you make playlists, set defaults per channel such playback speed, and lets you play videos in the background. I use it for “podcasts” which are video only. And you don’t have to log in.
makeitdouble 1y ago
Aside from Music, these are all negative features that are valuable only because YouTube is so obnoxious. I'm in vehement agreement with parent to be honest. "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience. I'm perfectly happy to pay for youtube since it provides by far the best content and the price is reasonable. The fact that people can get all of that for free with some minor limitations is fairly generous.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    > fairly generous. Is Google "generous" ?
  - godshatter 1y ago
    > It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience. Agreed, but it's the difference between a restaurant serving a mid-tier soup for cheaper versus giving customers a really good soup that the chef spit's in to encourage people to pay for the more expensive version of it.
- Magmalgebra 1y ago
  It feels bad as a consumer, but the alternative is usually worse. The "stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" is really efficient market segmentation. If you don't do that you need to find actual value props that separate the market in just the right way to generate the financials that allow the product to keep going as is. 9 times out of 10 the result is that failing PMs totally fuck up the product and everyone loses. It's the SSO kerfuffle in a different package - terrible, but the right choice surprisingly often.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition so you want people to freely watch videos without paying anything or watching ads ??? how this works then, creator need to be paid, bandwidth need to be paid, infrastructure is not cheap it is a nice value proposition, if its not somebody would already make a better alternative that not require those 2 (without paying and without ads) the fact there is not then its not possible
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    To stay in the metaphor, wouldn't see some other business model that would allow them to provide the soup to people who order without having to threaten to spit into it ?
    - tonyhart7 1y ago
      lol, there is no spit on it it is the soup, people free to eat the soup or not the fact that people always focusing on youtube flaw but never recommend alternative is simply saying that they are the best
      - makeitdouble 1y ago
        That's the hallmark of a monopoly: people can complain about it as much as they want, it won't have any material difference.
        tonyhart7 1y ago
        "That's the hallmark of a monopoly" but there is no monopoly ???? are you saying that you simply cant use another website/platform ???? this is ridiculous if its android/ios then I can understand why its monopoly. but we have bazillion other video/streaming website Youtube are simply the best, deal with it
hdjrudni 1y ago
You also get >2x playback speed and higher bitrates on some videos.

55555 1y ago

Yes basically all it does is remove ads. Those of us who are happy with it are those of us who don’t feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Most people think YouTube should just be free and have no ads for some reason, and they probably wouldn’t say Premium is such a great deal.

makeitdouble 1y ago
The issue is you're still not paying for the content nor paying the creators. You're paying YouTube to stop annoying you, and they then decide what to do with that money, incidentally paying some creators.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
  YouTube pays creators more for each Premium view.
- frankchn 1y ago
  YouTube seems to be pretty explicit that it is paying 55% of revenue from watching videos to creators: > If a partner turns on Watch Page Ads by reviewing and accepting the Watch Page Monetization Module, YouTube will pay them 55% of net revenues from ads displayed or streamed on their public videos on their content Watch Page. This revenue share rate also applies when their public videos are streamed within the YouTube Video Player on other websites or applications. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwhats-my-revenue-share https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=...
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    As you point out, that revenue split has a set of conditions, which also require a level of contract on Youtube and other requirements (not being DMCA stroke for instance) So where does your Premium money go when you watch a very small creator ? where does it go for a demonetized video ? etc. That might sounds like a subtle difference, but consider the gap with channel membership, super chats (which are also roughly 50% split I think?) or patreon for instance.

magospietato 1y ago

YouTube music being included effectively replaces an additional music streaming service. From that perspective the family oriented plans in particular carry a lot of value.

kelseydh 1y ago
My gripe with Youtube Music is that the bitrate quality of their music is lower than Tidal or even Spotify. YTM audio files that are actually on Youtube will only stream in 128kbps.
- cung 1y ago
  I’m surprised to hear that. I just switched from Spotify to Youtube Music and found the audio quality to be way better, even though I had Spotify set to high.

carabiner 1y ago

You should be paying (or taking some other action) to extricate ads from your life as much as possible.

makeitdouble 1y ago
Paying to remove ads is negotiating with terrorists. YouTube stays in the dominant position either way, it's not like tomorrow you'll go watch Nebula exclusively (you'd already have done it at this point). They're not providing anything materially, so the amount you pay is bound to nothing except how much you're willing to pay. And how much you're willing to pay depends on how much you're annoyed. So YouTube's main incentive for this program is to annoy you as much as you can tolerate to optimize the most money you get extracted.
- smt88 1y ago
  It sounds like you're arguing that YouTube should be free and also ad-free, which makes no sense. YouTube is expensive to operate. They give me an option of paying by watching ads or paying money. That's much better than my options most other places, which is just to be forced to see ads.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    I'm arguing that youtube should be paid for actual features. For instance membership and super chats are clearly labeled as extra content. Member only content is the same. You pay for a specific thing that is produced by a creator and provided by Youtube. "Pay to remove the ads we're pushing" is none of that. On Youtube being free, this is their business choice, and also the way they crush the competition and cement a near monopoly on the market. If it was a public service NGO I'd see it from a different angle, but it's not.
    - cung 1y ago
      Would you then argue for Youtube to take the Netflix path and not provide non-paying users anything?

Magmalgebra 1y ago

I imagine most people have the same value prop I do 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service 2) I really really value not having ads in my life So the price for ad-free youtube really seems phenomenal. None of the other features really matter to me - ad free dominates all value discussions.

syncsynchalt 1y ago
> 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service I would amend that to say "any *other streaming service". To me Youtube provides more and better content than the other streaming services, and I don't think people should balk at $14 for youtube when they happily pay that for netflix, disney+, hulu, or spotify.

PrivateButts 1y ago

On top of removing ads and giving you a couple extra minor features, it also has a way better rev split with creators (last I heard). Half of the sub gets divvied up to the people you watched that month, portioned out via watch time.

DimmieMan 1y ago

Absolutely, If premium sorted out all those problems and generally treated creators better i'd have a subscription. I come to youtube for the *creators*, the actual platform where I have watch history off and use extensions to block the aggressively pushed slop as it currently stands is not something I want to put money towards. I'm already a patreon to a few creators and have a Nebula subscription; adding it up it's probably slightly more than a premium subscription.

jojobas 1y ago

Yeah it's hard to compete with Ublock Origin and youtube-shorts-block.

marcyb5st 1y ago

Full disclousure: I work for Google, but nowhere near YT/YT music. Opinions are my own and I am actually a customer as I pay for YT premium with a family plan for me, my wife, and our son. While I agree YT without Ads is great, you also get YT music which is really good and for us it replaced Spotify completely. Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Shorts, however, they are really annoying.

troupo 1y ago
> Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Previously search was just search. It wasn't great, but it wasn't too bad. Now it shows 5-7 results from actual search (often really bad results). The next section is "People also watch" which quite often has very passing relevance to what you look for. Then there are shorts. Then there's "explore more" which may or may not be relevant to your search, and it has "+N more" underneath. And then there's the rest of the search which, again, may or may not be relevant to your search at all. --- I think it was slightly fixed recently, so the results are a bit more relevant, but it still is just ... weird

MinimalAction 1y ago

I use Brave and it's the premium experience already.

kelseydh 1y ago

The other useful Youtube Premium feature is the ability to offline download videos to your device. Useful for long plane rides and elsewhere where internet is limited or nonexistent.

jhallenworld 1y ago

The new thing that YouTube Premium includes is the one button press to skip over "commonly skipped parts of the video"- typically the in-video promotions. This just showed up last week on my nVidia shield connected to my TV. So finally there is a way to remove ads for real. It would be nice if it did it automatically. The creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.