this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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ITT: "it costs more than 5 bucks a month!" yeah, if you don't share with friends with family, it does. Also, music service included, deduct your spotify payment.
"You can just block ads" You can just miss the whole point.
"I rather support creators directly" I'm happy you do that. YouTube hosting is not free for Google/Alphabet, pay them too, or you'll have to teach each and every creator how to webhost + help em search a "real job" because selfhosted won't pay enough. Also, good fun browsing videos then.
IDK man, paying for YT Premium really isn't that bad. Assuming you already consume YouTube content, that is. And I'm pretty sure that's like 98% of first world population between 4 and 70.
Blocking ads on YouTube is no sustainable solution. Hosting Billions of Gigabytes of on-demand content is SUPER expensive. Like, it actually costs money. Other, wayyy smaller indie creator on-demand video platforms charge 5 bucks a month, but i'ts okay if they do it, because they aren't big bad Alphabet.
If that's your view, you don't have a problem with pricing, you have a problem with morals. And if you still do voluntarily consume YouTube content in private, with or without ads in any which way, you inarguably have a huge problem with your own morals.
YouTube premium is a good deal. It's priced very well compared with competition, it actually does pay indie creators and it let's you access to features that many users really do use.
BUTBUT THEY ARTIFICIALLY LIMIT FEATURES FOR NO REASON WITHOUT PREMIUM. I mean, it's subscription software and streaming, what else would they do? Every for profit subscription software provider and their mother does this. I develop hospital software and we literally do exactly this. If hospital A has feature x and hospital B also wants that, we don't just hand that out for free even when we just have to add it to their system in like 10 minutes... what did you expect? They already use our software (like you use YouTube), we don't have a huge incentive to just randomly add features if nobody paid for it. If we do, be happy about it, send me a gift card, if we or they don't, that's just business.
5 bucks? If only.. It's 12 euros per month here, which is simply too expensive for the kind of content I watch on YT. Especially considering the amount of baked in product placement (VPN, diet plans, that kind of crap) that I come across, I'm not paying that kind of money just to still get hammered with commercials. Sorry, but YouTube Premium is a bad deal here.
Either watch ads or pay for Premium. Or don't watch Youtube. Those are the three choices most people will have. And it's Youtube's right as a private platform to give them those choices.
It's worth it for me because I watch a lot of Youtube. In return, I don't watch traditional TV, so I don't pay for cable or similar things.
My choice: Firefox with uBlock Origin because I get to decide what reaches my screen
Unfortunately though it is 'pay for Premium and still watch ads'. So many videos have the ads baked in by the content creators. Yes, you can manually seek forward, but that's annoying and defeating the purpose of Premium. Especially for the price they ask in my country.
I fully agree, never suggested otherwise. But fortunately free speech allows us to have an opinion about a product.
I get what you're saying, and yes, sponsored segments can be pretty annoying, even if it's up to the creator how annoying they are. Either way, I just run SponsorBlock, so I can skip those segments with one click.
LMAO
You forgot the simplest of them: Firefox, uBlock Origins, SponsorBlock. Works on desktop and Android.
Homie missed the point. using ublock and sponsorblock is equal to petty theft. Disliking a company doesn't make it morally right to steal from them.
You're not going to guilt trip me out of adblocking Google of all fucking companies lmao
Imagine acting like removing unwanted content from MY screen is theft. My device my rules honey
You mean the browsers that Google is throttling Youtube on, if they're blocking ads? I use Firefox with SponsorBlock myself, but I'd say that most people are using either Chrome or Edge and would not switch to Firefox, despite of how much better it would be. Most people just like what they're used to.
Man, you're all over this thread sticking up to Google. You should apply there. They just laid off 100 YouTube employees. At least you'd be paid to shill.
Fuck off lol. I'm not sticking up for Google/Alphabet, they're an untrustworthy company and as someone working in tech, I hate the trend of layoffs currently going on, all to make shareholders happy.
I'm sticking up for people actually paying for the services they use. Streaming videos costs a shitton of money (servers, bandwith, platform maintenance, etc.) and Youtube has lost money for literal YEARS, which they are trying to fix. If Youtube went under for being too unprofitable, most creators on the platform would be out of a job. As long as there's no proper competing platform, Youtube is the best we have.
Then maybe YouTube deserves to die
Maybe. Got any alternatives?
Peertube
Why would I pay YouTube that when I can give it directly to the creators though. I'll just adblock and not put money in the hands of Google, while helping the creators more.
Without the content delivery system, creators don't really have a way to share their creations with you.
YouTube is far from the only video hosting site, and far from the only way to do it. Peertube, Vimeo, Patreon, Floatplane, Nebula, bitchute to name some examples of sites already set up, with monetisation, with youtube creators actively posting on them. Twitch rivals like Kick and Rumble could also absolutely pivot into taking YTs market share too
I mean without YouTube/ Google the alternative for most creators would be to host the videos themselves. And then you would have like 20 Sites which you had to check yourself regularly to get new videos. I get that YouTube isn't the best solution, but the alternative is much worse. There is a reason why we don't all still have our own small WordPress blogs.
@ReadingCat @Sunfoil https://joinpeertube.org/en_US
Yep. And if you look at video platforms that actually have to pay for their own bandwidth (Floatplane by LTT), you're going to end up paying $5 PER CREATOR. Hosting video on Vimeo is also super expensive.
You know, RSS exists to literally circumvent this problem, albeit for articles. A lot of sites still have it, people just forgot that this is a thing. Little bit of a chore to setup, but its actually pretty nice. Obviously finding these sites is the hard part, but a good search engine (kagi btw) could make it work.
Also PeerTube exists as well, which reduces the cost of hosting videos.
"most creators would be to host the videos themselves."
And where the problem is ?
The Venn Diagram of "people with web hosting skills", "people with content generation skills", and "people who want to do this" is basically zero.
Do you?
Yes
Yep
5 bucks? I am in. But it’s 16 swiss francs. That’s just too much for me as I don’t need Youtube Music.
Google tells me 24 bucks for family. That's equal to what I do. I actually do pay that for all of em, but technically, it's just under 5 bucks a person since I share with 4 others.
Can the other people still use their own accounts like Apple does it? As in I just give my subscription to other accounts and that’s it. Nothing actually changes for them except that they have a subscription now.
Basically, not sure how Apple does it though. You have a Google family group. You can add individual accounts to that. The group owner cannot see any activities of other accounts, but he could remove people without their permission.
Removed users only lose active family subscriptions like youtube premium and google one (storage). Their watch histories and whatnot will remain the same. Watch out with Google one. If you have Google one and use more storage than google free, then remove google one, you only get a limited time period to remove data over the limit. Afterwards it gets inaccessible, I don't think they delete anything, but no insurance on that.
Thanks, now to convince 4 friends :D
Or 5. It holds 6 people... 4 € per person best case. As for now, they aren't enforcing same household sharing only, like Netflix do. I can't tell you about the future.
Also, not to support such behaviour, but if you aren't made of money, I'm totally okay with you teleporting to Argentina, subscribing to YT Premium at maybe 5 $ a month, and teleporting back to never go there again. That doesn't require an argentinian CC.
I'm not sure about legal technicalities, but I do know that it currently works. Personally, I don't risk it if they ever decide to ban associated accounts, because u know, they totally can refuse to service you, if they were to feel like it.
I pay for family account (6 Gmail account subscriptions I think). And share it with family. Between my sister/BIL and a friend, I would be paying 5 bucks a month. I pay for it myself but that's because I'm subsidizing it for them. She is an amazing cook and he's a doctor one speed dial away. Don't want to jinx that. But I digress.
My point is, it's way cheaper when you get family account and share the cost. If that's a possibility . Also, I don't use Spotify, and I download music and videos for trips. So there's that.
It's wild to me that this is so often called "just business" when, described this way, it's textbook racketeering.
Could you explain to me how "if someone wants to use my work, they should pay me for it" could be perceived as racketeering, let alone "textbook?"
There's "if someone wants to use my work, they should pay me for it" and there's "intentionally sabotage the work/service provided in order to extract more profits."
"The work or service provided for free?" If so what's the difference? If you're getting something for free you have no right to complain
But it's not free, just because you aren't paying in money doesn't mean you aren't paying for it in other ways.
The textbook this person owns:
service provider: "Hello, I'm a window cleaner, do you want me to clean your windows? I'll actually do it for free this time! Please recommend me to your peers"
customer: "yes please"
service provider: "all done! Want me to do it again in three months time?"
customer: "yes, I love free stuff!"
service provider: "actually, I'd have to charge for that, can't work for free all the time."
customer: "Racketeering!"
"Racketeering" is definitely the wrong word.
I'll put it like this. I think YouTube Premium is too expensive. I also think YouTube is too aggressive with it's ads.
I opt to send them that message by using an ad blocking service tailored to YouTube and paying the content creators in other ways.
If the family plan weren't 20 dollars a month to cover 2 accounts I would probably buy it. But they opted to offer only 1 or many never just 2.
I'm capable of affording it. I pay nearly every major streaming service monthly even when I am not using them, so long as their cost is reasonable.
YouTube Premium's cost is not reasonable. Especially when you consider they are still collecting and making money off of your data in the end.
I don't see how the pricing for Premium is unreasonable. I do, however see, how they are too aggressive with ads. That's why I said paying for premium is a better deal than watching ads. If you don't agree with either compensation, don't use their service
It's completely fair that your view on the pricing is different than mine.
Complete transparency, I do play their ads sometimes. I only refuse if I'm watching on my phone directly, but I cast from the official app. And I will have YouTube playing when I'm eating or playing a game on the steam deck.
The thing people should be referring to instead of it being a racket is that YouTube has a stranglehold on creators. I can watch streaming vids on another service, but if I want to consume content from small creators, I have to use YouTube. There isn't a real option for alternatives.
So, I do provide the platform with some money. Then I pay creators in a way where they get a higher dollar amount than YouTube would give them.
It depends on the how the contract is written but generally billing a client the full time to develop an existing feature that "could be turned on in 10 min." is a good example of fraudulent misrepresentation. A business/industry that replies on that (like your example) is a racket.
Yes, I understand that's how the world of 'software as a service' works and yes I am calling it a racket.