this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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I'm pretty happy paying for YouTube Premium; it seems like a fair deal given how much my family uses YouTube. But I'm worried that sooner or later YouTube Premium is gonna get Google Graveyarded, or they're going to insert ads anyway.
Youtube premium is a very short sighted band-aid solution. Because the more people sign up for it early, the more expensive and/or less convenient it will become later when the 'market is saturated' (meaning there's no one left who wants to sign up for it). When they can't grow their income through more users, they'll ramp up prices and shave off services. It's happening everywhere already and in the end you'll wish everyone advocated for adblockers a little more because by the time you're fed up with their pricing, it might already be too late to go back.
This is the real insidious thing about internet enshittification. It's run by publicly traded corporations so it's not enough just to squeeze every possible dollar out of your customers, you have to keep ramping up the squeeze. Even once you're bringing in billions and billions of pure profit with a product that everyone loves, you have an actual legal duty to your shareholders to make it worse in an effort to try to grow the profit even more
Premium has already been enshittified. You used to get Youtube Music alongside it, now you have to buy it separate. The worst part is that a lot of people only bought premium for one or the other, so even among those who bothered to switch over, they cut their userbase in half.
Guaranteed they’d find a way to double dip. Price gouging, restricting content behind further paywalls, adding ads anyway… absolutely they’ve investigated all those and undoubtedly more.
Switch to Firefox, Chrome is their biggest lever to force this kind of stuff onto people. While Firefox exists and it remains uncool for them to block it they’ll have to compete against piracy and adblockers which will limit their ability to aggressively monetise.
Switch to firefox!
Just look at where Netflix and Amazon Prime are going.
The days of YouTube premium being ad free are numbered. I suspect 2-3 years before it's announced, rolled back, and then a stealth rollout is done.
I consider it already not ad free considering how many video creators shove sponsored segments in all their videos.
That's largely because youtube native ads aren't a reliable, predictable or consistant source of income. Plus youtube takes the largest cut of the money from those ads.
I mean I get it and i don’t blame them for doing it, but it just makes googles claim of youtube premium being “ad free” insulting. Why would I give them money when they can’t even pay their content creators consistently enough, forcing them into alternative revenue systems? I’d rather just block ads on youtube and pay my favorite creators directly.
There are plugins to automatically skip those segments too. They crowd source the begin and end times of the ads and automatically skip ahead.
YT isn't going to drop premium any time soon. Subscriptions are astronomically more revenue generating then ads, and given YT was always operating at a loss until they stopped reporting revenue altogether premium will probably be the only route to scrape by.
Not to say they can't enshittify it by raising prices and adding restrictions, but I can't see them doing anything but trying to force more people to it.
I paid for it for a bit a while back, and it was decent. Of course free tools give considerably better features (adblock, sponsor block, DRM free downloads, better privacy). That and personally not wanting to financially support YT for a variety of reasons has kept me away from it for a long time.
The main reason I never went for premium is that they basically do what the writers strike in Hollywood recently had to deal with: YT keeps pretty much all of the money from subscriptions and creators get almost nothing. Many saw huge drops in revenue after the program went live.
To show just how exploitative their system is: subscribing to a channel (supporting them directly) still has you seeing ads. Even white supremacist "cracker is a slur" Twitch realized the importance of not playing advertisements on the channels you sub to.
FYI, subscribing on YT is equivalent to following on Twitch, free and just for notifications. Twitch subscriptions are more like YT channel members, emotes and all.
I used subscribing as shorthand for channel membership because that shit's hard to work into a sentence.
Fair enough, but subscribing is used two ways here, so it could be confusing to someone who doesn't know both.