I get that it started for free with less intrusive ads, but YouTube has had a huge impact on the way we all share and consume information. Understanding how much money it takes to run a service with the technology needed to provide high definition videos on a site that is up 99.9999999% of the time, I have no issue paying for a service that has changed my life in many positive ways. Now I do hate price gouging like everyone else, but it’s inescapable from gas & groceries to all streaming platforms.
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You like it now, just wait though. In another year “YouTube Premium” will probably split further into basic and premium plus tiers. Basic will cost exactly the same except you now have to watch “limited” ads again, while Premium Plus will cost twice as much and be basically the same thing you’re paying for now plus some new bullshit feature no one cares about.
This is what YouTube has become. It’s what all the corporate services that like to make you think they care about you do. As long as we all keep shelling out more money for less services they will all just keep pumping us for every dollar they can possibly get.
It’s an unethical strategy called a “loss leader” where these companies offer a service they actually lose money on for a limited time until they get you to the point that you take it for granted. Then they make that same price point terrible and jack up the price for the good service you’ve come to expect.
Same with all of them. Remember when Netflix was $8 and you got all of the features? People said back then that they didn’t mind paying for it either.
Same for Disney, it was $7 a month in 2019, it is now $16. That is an increase of over 40% in 5 years.
Technically that’s a 228% increase increase from what you were paying 5 years ago. Now, inflation is a thing… but I don’t think it’s up 228%.
No. That’s an increase of 129% to 229% of the original price.
You are right that you always use the original price as the base, but if it were still $7 that would be a 0% increase, not 100% as by your math.
Ah yeah you’re right
Well as a counterpoint, that’s when you bounce. I had HBO MAX for years but their latest price hike was unjustifiable for me. I suppose I should prob shitcan Netflix too. And of course Amazon Prime went the exact direction you’re talking about.
That’s always an option sure, but since EVERY company does this now it means we all just stop watching TV basically. Maybe that would be the best thing after all though lol
I think now is the reference window op is describing
I already paid for a lifetime of free Google services with all the data they stole from me before I had any sense that something so massive and invasive could even exist.
Thanks to ReVanced and Freetube and some others, Google can effortlessly pay out their equitable share.
I bought premium years ago as part of Google Music family (pre yt-music) and stuck with it, it was affordable. I am more than capable of blocking the ads over the years. Other members of my family want to use YT without ads on a myriad of devices. When the price got hiked at the start of the year I was really annoyed, and probably would have dropped the service if it were just me. However my family made it pretty clear that they did not want to jump through the hoops of blocking the ads.
Ditto
There was a time where I would have been happy to pay for it too, back when the ads were less intrusive. However, the number of ads increased drastically when they started pushing premium, and it’s only gotten worse - not to mention the fact that, even though they make more money, the content creators (employees) are paid less per view. I don’t mind paying for a product or service. I do mind paying to make an engineered inconvenience from a mega corporation that has a de facto monopoly go away.
I was under the impression premium views result in more revenue for the creators you watch compared to views with ads.
They do but it’s not that much more significant than overall ad revenue. Having a Patreon or a merch store will probably outperform 10 fold anything that YouTube pays from both ads and premium views combined.
They do!
I miss Metacafe and Big-Boys/Break.com. You know, from the days when YouTube actually had competition.
I’ll pay Tubular (NewPipe) / PeerTube first.
Try Pipepipe its like Tubular but better ime. Tubular crashed a lot for me.
Thanks!
Even if YT Premium was cheap AF, I wouldn’t pay for it because:
- I know they will raise the price non stop (we all know this).
- It doesn’t come with Sponsorblock, that is already a downgrade.
It also does not come with downvote count.
You are right.
Nice try Diddy.
Would rather pay the creators directly instead of it going 80% to anyone in ceo position and maybe 5% to the creator.
At least with ads, 60% goes to the creator and 40% to YouTube. I had a video go viral because it was newsworthy, and a CDN (Storyful) offered to help with licensing and marketing, and their price was 40% of my 60%. I wasn’t really expecting the video to go viral, so decided “why not.”
I only got 36% of the money from the YouTube views, but Storyful delivered and got it on the news and a few documentaries and I ended up making thousands of dollars for a few minutes of video. 10/10 would do again, but then YouTube changed the rules and now you need like 1,000 subscribers for your video to even qualify for monetization :(
Interesting !
That’s neat. Good on you! I like the platform but to be flushed with ads and pay more ceo salary versus creators like yourself, I rather choose to support those I enjoy my entertainment from. Of course realistically A VERY difficult thing to do. I like the idea of Jaybird and Floatplane to an extend. It’s just that if I was more settled with life, i probably could afford it finely but its not that high on my worthy things list.
Which department do you work for?
Google is fucking evil and has had a big hand in making society worse over the last 15 years. They will never get another penny from me.
Thank you for having a conscience. I agree.
I don’t work for Google, but I have been in IT Support for almost 20 years.
Careful, you don’t want to fall and hurt yourself from up there on your pedestal
What I dont get is most of the people shitting on it pay for premium on Spotify…
Google play music was awesome, and rolled into YouTube Music, which is decent.
It comes with YouTube Premium and at least used to cost similar.
No ads on YouTube was just an extra.
I don’t mind ads.
But I do mind having targeted ads. To be fair, most of what Google presumes about me is wrong, but from the ad patterns it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. Our data shouldn’t be hoarded and we shouldn’t be herded like cattle from which they can extract money through ad placement.
I’m fine with subscription services, and ads, but the steps they’re taking to maximize their revenue is gross and I don’t just mean youtube. This is just the stuff we know about for sure.
You can just turn off targeted ads in the Google settings though
I also don’t mind using ReVanced and getting the same features as YouTube Premium for free.
It made economic sense for us to get the YouTube Premium family plan. When we dropped several streaming services and also Spotify, it was a bit more expensive than Spotify’s family plan, but YouTube without the ads was worth it, especially considering they have a huge library of movies that they are offering in high quality for streaming.
Honestly, I’m more satisfied than when I was paying for Spotify Family and Disney+ and Paramount+. And if I must see the eight billionth Marvel show of the year, which I generally don’t, there’s always the high seas.
I also post for it and I also don’t mind. I watch a lot of YouTube (nearly 2000 hours so far), I listen to a lot of YouTube music (nearly 4000 hours) and I find it to be a reasonable price.
If you are paying for premium, you are paying twice.
Once with money, a second time with your data.
I’d gladly pay for an option where they stopped tracking me.
You can literally change that in your settings.
But then YouTube doesn’t know what you have watched or anything it’s pretty bad for user experience
