Another happy customer of YouTube premium here. I canceled Netflix, never had Spotify. The only subscription I pay, worth it. The family plan works to 5 or 6 euros per person per month.
Same. I still feel the individual is worth it for me as YouTube is the bulk of content I watch. People also tend to forget that a portion of every subscription goes to the creators that you actually watch.
Yea YTP individual isn’t worth it, but the family plan is (if you can fill the slots)
Filling slots is how you make the family
Angry upvote.
I have begun to see that YT is being hostile to adblocker users - and this worries me. I assume YT is already probing the clients to see which are circumveting the ads.
I had an (let’s say unconventional) idea at one point: an add-on which only purpose is to show the YT ads in the background which uBO blocked. All of the blocked ads would be played (eventually) - except that the user can just ignore this happening in background and wouldn’t be actually seeing the ads. I.e. the browser would just move playing the ads into a background container not visible to the user.
🙄
If paying for a service you use is the worst thing you can imagine, you really need to read the news at least once a decade.
YT premium is a good value for me and my family. Guess I’m evil.
Literally Satan.
Remember when the big selling point of cable TV was no advertising? And then it became 99% ads?
Yeah.
Do I hate giving money to Google? Yes. Do I watch 6+ hours of Youtube a day? Also yes. I almost always have something playing in the background throughout my day, so it’s the one service I’m ok paying for and I don’t have to worry about it breaking like I would with other frontends.
You have already been paying Google for that 6+ hours before even a penny came out of your account - you’re just been paying in data. We have to stop pretending Google is some good guy that left an open platform in the world and just said “if you use it we’ll show you some ads.”
Ads aren’t even the main revenue stream for Youtube, data is. All of these points about “paying for a service” become moot the moment we acknowledge the value of the data Google is farming from our interactions. This is how we’re paying for Youtube. If you choose to buy Youtube Premium, understand that you’re paying to not have ad interruption. You aren’t paying for Youtube, because that was already happening, you’re just paying for the convenience of avoid ads.
Yeah, but it’s not Youtube making the content I guess is my problem. Everyone is mostly here because of all the Reddit crap, doing the EXACT same thing google did to videos with youtube. No one here is completely fine with a "Reddit Premium Account!"tm I patron a few creators so I help with what I can, I will not join the youtube “member” additional fee. I also have been trying to branch out to creators that upload to multiple sites, it can be a little bit of a pain like figuring out Lemmy and how everything works but obviously it’s better than sticking with a company gouging and controlling content on their platform for profit.
And Spotify does make it contents? They even stopped curating playlists
The channels you‘re watching get a noticeable chunk out of your YT Premium subscription though. I‘ve heard multiple YT creators say, that they get a lot more money from a premium view than an ad supported one (and nothing when you use adblock). And I definitely watch too many different creators to support each and every one individually on patreon/nebula/floatplane/whatever.
Yeah, but it’s not Youtube making the content I guess is my problem.
They might not be making the content, but providing a platform for video is not cheap.
Providing a platform that allows anyone to upload a ridiculous 10 hours in a single video in whatever crazy resolution they want, for free, really is not cheap. Then the bandwidth to deliver that 10 hour video at 4K, not to mention infrastructure to handle millions upon millions of people around the world is really really really not cheap.
So its not like they’re not contributing anything. Reddit OTOH handled mostly text, which is cheap. Most of everything else like images and videos were just links to other hosts that did the heavy lifting like imgur or YT
Patreon takes a cut of your money and gives the rest to the creator. Youtube does the same thing with Premium, plus creators receive a higher rpm from Premium viewers than they do from ads. And people left Reddit because they stopped supporting 3rd party apps. Youtube never supported 3rd party apps, plus there’s no suitable alternative to leave Youtube for.
Also, I’m not completely fine with Youtube Premium, but the pros outweigh the cons enough for me to justify paying for it.
From my research, Patreon takes a smaller cut than YouTube Premium. Comparing YouTube Premium to its own ad model is a “Worst Negates the Bad” fallacy. From what I gathered (not easy to find and has changed over time) YT takes 30% from the former and 45% from latter. Seems insanely high. More than taxes. May be why so many creators need sponsors and hawk merch.
YouTube never supporting 3rd party apps seems like a negative.
Lots of suitable alternatives to youtube: read a book, listen to music, go for a walk, hang with friends, play games, etc, but to your point, sounds like a monopoly. Their search was once great, then ubiquitous, now terrible. YouTube Premium is just in the “entice users and creators” phase of its inevitable enshittification.
Don’t mean to dump on something you like, just disagree with the reasoning. If you’re not fine with Premium and hate giving money to google, sounds like you’ll eventually seek out alternatives when they go into profit maximization mode. Hopefully enough resources will have been invested in viable alternatives by that time.
[edit: break wall of text]
Newpipe ftw
I am displeased with premium these days. My use of premium was to remove ads and give creators a little more money. The issue today is every single video will have a sponsor spot that is an ad. So here I am paying extra to get rid of ads and the creator just made their own. Using sponsor block has become a requirement to get past the wall of ads.
I don’t mind in video sponsor spots because at least the creators are being paid directly for those. Personally, I just skip em or if it’s a creator that makes them funny, I may just listen anyway.
Those sponsor spots absolutely blow my mind. They’re there, forever in the video no matter how times it’s viewed. That’s a lot of trust to have in an advertising relationship, both the creator (who is basically tattooing a person in a portrait they’re painting with an ad) and company have to determine if it’s enough compensation based on… feels I guess lol. I’m pretty sure there is some after data but how do you know which videos take off or not? Then if there’s any controversy, whole things a mess and I hope they get a lot for it.
I kinda got grandfathered into Youtube Music by using (and enjoying) Google Music, and since YT Premium was only like $2 more, I got it. I primarily use it for the music. The no-ads is just a bonus for me, I guess.
I did the exact same. Google Play Music was actually a good service back in the day. I hated it when they turned it into YouTube Music. I complained about all the broken stuff, so they gave me a home speaker for free and upgraded me to YT Premium for a year. After that year I stuck with YT Premium, since it was less than $2 extra. They also fixed a lot of stuff I complained about. Not everything, but a lot of it. I think YT Music was released a bit before it was ready. Now it still has some issues, but is mostly fine.
Usually I watch 1 or 2 YouTube videos a day and without Premium I would most definitely not. I opened a YouTube video on a computer I wasn’t signed in the other day and it started with a 2 minute unskipable ad about crypto stuff (an obvious scam). So I closed it real fast, no video is worth sitting through that. Even with Premium I still need SponsorBlock. But with that combination watching videos is actually fun.
Still listen to YouTube Music all day at work, so that’s a good value for money for me.
Paying for services?
Absolute evil.
“Absolute evil” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s YouTube/Google’s fault (by closing off and centralizing their video platform) that it is impossible to go elsewhere for videos.
I don’t really understand how that’s YouTube’s fault. They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit. There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did). You can literally post the same video to as many platforms as you want. Sites like Instagram and GitHub have more lock in than YouTube does.
They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit.
They created an inherently centralizing implementation of a video sharing platform. Even if it was done with good intentions (which it wasn’t, it was some capitalist’s hustle, and its social importance is a side effect), we should basically always condemn centralizing implementations of a given technology because they reinforce existing power structures regardless of the intentions of their creators.
It’s their fault because they’re a corporation that does what corporations do. Even when corporations try to do right by the world (which is an extremely generous appraisal of YouTube’s existence), they still manage to create centralizing technologies that ultimately serve to reinforce their existing power, because that’s all they can do. Otherwise, they would have set themselves up as a non-profit or some other type of organization. I refuse to accept the notion of a good corporation.
There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did).
That’s a good point, but while there isn’t a de jure lock-in for creators, there is a de facto lock-in that prevents them from migrating elsewhere. Namely, that YouTube is a centralized, proprietary service, which can’t be accessed from other services.
The main issue with YouTube premium is the price, I can’t imagine that they’re making anywhere near $14 a month from showing me ads that I never click on. I’d love to see a breakdown, including how much is subsiding free users, how much is going to creators, and how much is going into the pockets of shareholders.
I think like most if not all of the people I know would easily pay $5 dollars for premium
YouTube and creators make significantly more from premium users than ad-supported. But I’m okay with that. I’m paying for a service, that service works (mostly) great. I get essentially Spotify and ad-free YouTube for that price, and thus get far more bang for my buck than a Max subscription or a Hulu subscription or whatever.
A lot of the features of YouTube Premium (ad-free, downloads, offline music, background play and PiP on mobile, video queues, etc.) are likely available from other YouTube clients, but given how much I use the service I don’t mind paying for it. Especially since using other clients sucks for the creators (unless you’re personally subscribing to everyone’s Patreon, and I don’t know about you but there are a few channels I subscribe to on Patreon and FAR more that I just…watch).
