Wait, what the FUCK!?!
This price increase is live for new subscribers as seen on youtube.com/premium. Instead of $11.99, YouTube Premium now costs $13.99/month. Meanwhile, it’s $18.99 if you’re subscribing from the iOS YouTube app.
I’ve been paying $4/month over market rate this whole time?
Create a problem. Generate a paid for solution. ??? Profit!
I don’t have the money to sustain the “everything is a subscription” simple as that. So adblockers and piracy is the only way to get media content.
I still go to the cinema, but some cinemas over here are already experimenting with subscriptions.
It’s like what cable networks did back in the day, if you want to view a channel, subscribe to it. We have come full circle.
Good lord they are going to put ads again in streaming services aren’t they
They already have.
Where? Haven’t seen one on Amazon prime, Netflix or HBO yet
netflix has a plan with ads! https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831
amazon uses prime video as a hook to get you to sign up for prime membership (which itself has been steadily increasing in price).
i’d be shocked if HBO didn’t introduce an ad-supported price tier at some point in the future. that totally seems like zaslav’s MO.
Peacock, Paramount+, Hulu, and YouTube TV all have ads or ad plans. Some even just have ads on popular shows no matter the price you pay.
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I’d be willing to pay for a few subscriptions if I didn’t feel like subscription services are trying to gouge me left and right. I miss the days when subscriptions to Netflix and Spotify gave me access to 90% of content online.
Contrast this with Steam, which gives me centralized convenience, seamless updates, online sync, achievements… No wonder that’s where I spend almost all of my entertainment money these days.
By the time steam chokes and shittifies we are all doomed
Software subscriptions are what really bums me out. Back in the day you could just buy your software and have it forever. Now Microsoft Office is a subscription, Adobe Photoshop is a subscription, and so much more. Nothing pisses me off more than when I install a basic app on my phone and find out it’s actually a subscription app.
Literally the only major software I can think of right now that isn’t subscription based or insanely expensive is Apple’s Final Cut Pro at $300.
This right here is one of the biggest reasons I turned to exclusively open source software, cuz man the amount of internal rage I feel any time I have to log into software is unreal, like I open the software I want it to just go
Fortunately Microsoft Office isn’t fully subscription yet, but with how much they’re pushing Office365 it’s not too surprising that people don’t seem to realize this. You can still buy a permanent license from MS directly (with some digging around to get to the correct page) or from 3rd party websites. Only downside is it locks you into the current version of Office, but for the average user (me) that’s not too much of a big deal - I can’t recall them releasing any major must have features over the past 10 years.
If you’re going to all that trouble, why not try some open source alternatives next upgrade before shelling out for another license? You might be surprised how narrow the gap between Microsoft and libre office options has become.
“buy your software and have it forever” was not really true other than in the very early days. everything that was in active development like office, photoshop, all the pro music software i used, was updated regularly and had an upgrade cost. my music app had a paid upgrade every year like clockwork for $150. it was essentially a subscription in all but name. yeah i could stop paying and stay with the last version forever but operating system and hardware advances would make it so those versions would stop running on newer machines eventually.
A single ticket to my local movie theater costs $16.50 for an adult ticket to a typical movie. That is already more expensive than a month of unlimited Youtube premium, even at the inflated price.
Video streaming is a consumable product. What model would you prefer. Ad supported is still available. A la carte is reasonable in theory, but doesn’t seem like it would work well for a site like youtube (even though youtube does have some a-la-carte offerings such as movies)
We used to have a movie subscription service around here. It failed because it was essentially sellings dimes for nickels.
They emailed me thanking me for being a part of their journey for so long and as a gift they are delaying my rate going up by 3 months. Cool……
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“Thank you for being a loyal member! As a gift, we won’t fuck you over just yet.”
It increased a couple months ago to like $25 CAD lmao. Still worth it, though. I watch so much YouTube.
It’s weird how people are fine paying for Netflix, Hulu, CrunchyRoll, Twitch, etc, but draw the line at YouTube, the platform that has infinite more content and actual value.
It’s still less than my parents pay for satellite. Also comes with YouTube Music if you wanna ditch Spotify. Kinda a 2 in 1 deal.
It’s weird how people are fine paying for Netflix, Hulu, CrunchyRoll, Twitch, etc, but draw the line at YouTube, the platform that has infinite more content and actual value.
I see your point, but I think there’s a psychological reasoning behind this.
YouTube in its early days ONLY had a free option whereas services like Netfix have always only had a paid option.
YouTube in its early days certainly had a ton of ads, but they were non-obtrusive. Things like banner ads and ads on the side of the video. Then slowly, they added in-video ads. Iirc it started out only as a single pre-roll ad, but in its current form it has devolved into multiple pre-roll ads and an ungodly amount of imcredibly jarring and obtrusive mid-roll ads that violently break up the content you are consuming. YouTube then has the gall to say that if you want to consume the platform how you used to, you have to shell out money. YouTube hasn’t added anything with its subscription service. Instead it wants you to pay them money to return the service to the usability it had prior.
Discord Nitro has a subscription feature that ads something. They didn’t take away say, the ability to voice chat, and lock a feature it used to have for free behind a paywall.
We can also examine Spotify with this. Unlike YouTube, Spotify has always had both a free tier and a paid tier. The free tier has between song ads and the paid tier has always had no ads. It’s less jarring to have to pay for something if it has always been there. Imagine also if Spotify started putting ads in the middle of a fucking song and forced you to pay to remove them even though there never used to be ads in the middle of a song.
Tl;Dr - A twofold issue. 1. YouTube sort of shot itself in the foot in a way by not starting out with a paid tier. 2. YouTube did not really ad anything with premium, but instead is making you pay to use the service as you used to be able to for free. Obtrusive in-video ads are cancer and one of the worst types of ads.
Who in the actual fuck still uses satellite? Are they also still on dial-up? Do they have a rotary phone at home in lieu of cell phones?
What? millions and millions of people? Do you realize not everyone lives in a city? Satellite TV is insanely popular in Canada. Every single provider offers it.
They have WISP and Starlink also. Both using satellites.
Not sure why you think a satellite is some ancient technology lmao. It’s the norm outside of cities.
I’d pay 5$ a month just for YouTube, I don’t want all the extra bullshit. YouTube doesn’t produce any content themselves, they don’t have to hire actors writers and make big budget movies.
They are literally just hosting content and paying creators cents. Yet they want to charge Hulu / Netflix money.
Gtfo with that. I cancelled Netflix earlier this year because it was getting too expensive as well for what it was providing.
Because you can always just use adblock… for free
See my comment here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/1807420
Ad block isn’t really a solution.
I’d pay money to break my Youtube addiction completely to be honest. There is good content, but I don’t like the way it’s served. Not just ads, but recommendations. I don’t get addicted to Netflix in the same way, though I do sometimes binge watch shows. Certainly wouldn’t pay for Youtube, and if they made it impossible to watch for free without ads by preventing ad blockers working I think I’d rather just quit entirely and pay for Nebula, since it focuses on the kind of content I value more and don’t get as addicted to watching.
Oh I thought about subscribing for a couple of months, then again I have cancelled Netflix because money is tight. Now I have another reason not to subscribe to YT Premium.
Thanks, Google!
Does…. Any one, actually, you know, subscribe for YouTube?
Yes, a family plan makes it cheaper. You won’t see any ads on your devices, from your TV to your PC, and you can listen to YouTube videos even when your phone is locked. It also includes YouTube Music. It’s a great deal, and I’m not sure why some people don’t see it that way. Sure, you could get a different YouTube client for your phone, install an ad blocker on your PC, block ads on your router to get rid them on your smart TV, and listen to music on Spotify for free. But the value of a good service is that you pay a reasonable amount of money and get all these features without any additional work on your part.
I primarily watch YouTube on tv, it is my most used video streaming platform, so yes I do. As does all my friends.
out of all the subscriptions, it’s probably the best one. you can get youtube for free but either you’re gonna get ads or you’ll block them, and the creators you like will start seeking other forms of revenue that are just as/more annoying, or just quit.
yt-premium makes youtube an actually nice experience and keeps money flowing to creators. There’s a limit to how much that nice-experience is worth but it’s better than paying for netflix, and a bunch of netflix execs get paid, and the creators don’t. then the show you like is cancelled and removed anyway.
Yea I’ve been kinda watching youtube through this whole social media moment, suspicious that they’ve successfully taken a middle road here that will probably last. Ads and profiteering? You bet … but it seems that there’s a monetisation model for “creators” that kinda works (though I’m not sure at all about that). And so, for anyone that actually wants to make any sort of living doing the creative stuff that the rest of us lurkers want to consume, the inevitable question of how do you live within capitalism seems to have an answer of some sort in youtube while all the other platforms perhaps don’t have healthy or appealing answers.
As for the fediverse, I think there’s a massive opportunity for donations and crowd funding to become a much more central and normal aspect here so that making some sort of living by contributing to and being a part of this space is actually viable. Even some sort of subscription model for platfroms that are essentially non-profit creator-driven would make a lot of sense here.
That’s a problem that goes beyond any single platform though, and at the moment, cross-platform or fediverse-wide work seems to be lacking behind a little bit.
I do, you get Youtube Music as well and no ads, which is a great combination.
I have a YouTube Premium subscription
Why
It’s not bad if you max out the family subscription (5 members) and use YouTube music.
Still, I’m a hypocrite because I absolutely hate their habit of hiding features behind the paywall, and making ads more obnoxious to irritate users into paying for premium.
Ya’ll should just VPN to Argentina and get the sub for cheap, it’s a few bucks per month compared to the obnoxious 13.99.
I pay around 2€ for mine per month plus the VPN fees, it’s a no-brainer
Just sign in via a turkey tunnel and sign up from there?
Ah ok, certainly makes sense for ur usecase. I didn’t meet anyone who was YouTube music yet. Does it have high quality audio or is it just YouTube quality?
It has 256kbps AAC, which is the same as Spotify (in the web browser anyway - I think the Spotify apps do 320kbps)
That’s enough for most people I guess
It really boils down to a few reasons:
- I don’t like ads, and I prefer not to see them
- Running a platform like YouTube is not cheap, and I understand that Google needs money to keep things running.
- The revenue of Premium is split between YouTube and the creators, much like ad revenue is. So it also supports the channels that I follow.
I didn’t know the channels get some of the revenue. Do you get to influence who the money goes to? Like a twitch prime sub?
It replaces the ad revenue the channel would otherwise have gotten from your view, at a higher rate than an ad impression.
Thanks
I’m not entirely certain, but as far as I’m aware it is divided based on watch-time.
On your watch-time? I mean then it’s cool, cause you don’t even have to do anything. On the other hand I would probably have to log out to watch content I don’t want to support financially.
Basically a percentage of your premium is divvied out based on watch time. When I signed up it was half of my payment went to creators, I don’t know the current split though
I use it so much for work that I just can’t rely on a typical ad blocker and I can’t justify not paying for it at this point.
Haha fair, I mean it’s cool that people pay for it. I was just curious what the reasons were, because I never thought about it.
I dont like ads on my iPhone.
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Does that work for the app itself? Or do I have to use safari? I use PiP all the time and don’t want to lose that either.
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There’s no save function yet so commenting to come back to this
Because I use YouTube more than every streaming app and my Plex server combined. And the creators I watch get money and I don’t have to see ads
Fair enough
I got premium because I have ADHS and need to listen to something when I want to sleep or do chores. With premium I can turn my phone screen off of let it run in the background.
Dunno if you have iOS or Android, but on Android you can also just use Newpipe :)
As blockers don’t work on Google TV
Ditto. It is my most used subscription.
I watch more YouTube than cable (never) or Netflix (maybe one binge a month).
I use it for music in the car and at work.
I play audio from some sciencey channels while I try to goto sleep.
I’ll probably keep paying. I do get value out of it.
You should do an AMA
you hopefully mean you had a prem subscription, the more people quit because of price policy the better it will be for everyone
I don’t think the prices in Europe are increasing (yet). My plan is still 12 euros / month.
And regardless… It’s been 12 euros since it was launched in Europe in 2018.
If the price were to go up to 14 euros in 2023, that would pretty much be in line with inflation.
The combo with YT Music is a good deal.
I pay ~£1 a month for it by ‘being Argentinian’.
This is on top of already using ReVanced and SmartTube because I actually use the download feature of YT Music.
OP here. I do in fact confess that I share a YT Premium subscription with a friend, though I myself eschew the bog-standard YT apps with those patched using Revanced Extended just because of long-standing QoL issues on said regular apps.
I want to but the price is to high for what they’re asking for. I could have gotten myself a subscription for crunchy roll or Netflix with the money they’re asking
Out of all the streaming services I pay for I get by far the most value out of yt premium, I probably spend 10x longer watching yt vids compared to movies and TV shows, and it has a dedicated music app that links nicely with my android auto.
I do. I watch a ton of YouTube. Revanced and NewPipe are rad but there’s no effortless way to have an adfree experience on the TV.
I do! Would probably give up my Netflix subscription before YouTube to be honest. As a family, we spend more time using YouTube than most other streaming services.
I used to when I used have it when subscribed to Google Music—which was amazing but then they tried to replace it with YouTube Music and yet another big amazing Google product died—and there was no point anymore.
I’ve considered it to stop ads on the TV app, but always thought it wasn’t worth it. I can’t even be bothered ad-blocking the network to include the TV, so raising cost of Premium now may as well make the product cease to exist in my mind.
People with overpaid white collar jobs do that plenty and there are plenty of them who will pay probably up to $50 a month or more. Youtube is already testing predatory measures to make chrome users ditch adblockers by giving out warnings to people who use them. Many more will go Youtube Premium in the near future because of such measures and Youtube will keep ramping up prices of course.
So you are pissed off that people are actually willing to pay for service? Youtube hosts millions if not billions of videos and streams them to billions of users, dozens of times a day and they do all this essentially lag free. That infrastructure is not cheap.
Additionally youtube actually shares their premium revenue with content creators allowing people to actually make a successful living with their creative pursuits and you control how that revenue is shared by which videos you watch.
I have one through my legacy Google Play Music subscription. I get YouTube Music and YouTube Premium for $7.99/month
Yep, Family Plan here as well. It’s 4+1 of us, we all watch YT pretty much continuously at different age levels (two adults, one teenager and one preschooler), and since there was one extra seat left grandma also got ad free experience on her mobile. All 5 of us are also into different kinds of music so having access to YT music is also huge plus. The only other subscription I don’t mind paying for is Amazon Prime, for obvious reasons. Netflix, D+, Apple TV+ and such got the boot long time ago, with no plans to resubscribe any time soon.
Yep. I watch more YouTube than TV. Once you get a curated list of channels set up, YouTube is great. And I don’t like ads.
I did, sorta.
I subscribed to Google Play Music All Access from day 1, because (at the time) it was like Spotify but also allowed me to upload my own music. I added a family plan when that became available for my friends/family who wanted it as well, and was grandfathered into that price when GPMAA eventually turned into YouTube Music, which was also bundled with YouTube Premium. Ad-free YouTube isn’t something I specifically sought out but it was bundled into a service that I was using as a perk.
I kept that subscription going at the grandfathered rate until I got an email from Google one day informing me that they were increasing the price, which was last October, and would only allow me to keep the grandfathered cost for an additional 6 months before hiking me up to the new price. That would bring me from $14.99/mo to $23.99/mo, so I said “fuck that” and canceled. The service only got worse after they killed GPM anyways.
MAN I miss Google play music. Uploading your own music was lit
Yup. YouTube is most of what I watch.
YouTube has the creators I actually want to support. I don’t mind paying for all the hours of content I’m getting for it
I do, and YouTube is my primary Media consumption for both video and music.
That said, I have the family plan which went from $15-23 back a few months ago and it was difficult to keep. I actually cancelled it and used Spotify and some of the available ad-blocking apps, but ultimately didn’t like Spotify, so I came back.
If it were to go up again anytime remotely soon I’d be gone.
Firefox+UBO and Revanced users: Oh no… anyway…
My YouTube subscription costs 0. ublock Origin.
They started blocking users with advanced adblockers completely in some places. It’s expected they’ll roll out that policy in most countries. Prepare to either ditch Youtube completely, watch dozens of ads as well as sponsored segments every couple of minutes (because why would Google pay content creators who make them a huge pile of money by providing content for free adequately, right?) or pay hundreds of dollars a year. Even then they might start showing you some ads because why the hell not? Big tech stole the internet from us and now they’re banking in on it big time. Needlesly to say this is not a sustainable business model, but since when did that ever bother mega corporations?
Unless they put YouTube content behind a paywall there will always be ways to block ads.
Probably that would be their future take, free 3 minutes of the video, if you want more… pay.
And then will the era of pirating and downloading YouTube videos begin.
Oh no my dns provider broke and it cant resolve the ad servers. Pihole for the win
Prepare to either ditch Youtube completely
Your terms are acceptable…
Can you cast it to your TV with no ads?
I cast videos to Kodi on my nvidia shield. No ads.
Google’s really been on one lately. They’ve also been laying off staff, increasing ads while trying to ban ad blockers from YouTube, raised the pricing of workspaces yet again and closed the unlimited drive storage loophole. Removed photos from the album archive thingy. And I feel there’s been a few other things within the last couple months I’m forgetting.
My adblockers are holding steady with a 0% rise! I still ain’t paying!
Sucks for me. I use iOS (I’m sorry) and that’s the original reason I got YouTube Red (back then): they make iOS users pay for background playback. Most of my YT consumption is documentary / essay / spoken word stuff so I need that feature to treat it like a podcast player, basically. Most of the rest of my YT consumption is in my living room, where ad blocking isn’t an option (and I hear even if it was, they’re catching up fighting ad blockers).
I hate the Web 2.0 “enshitification” of platforms, and I hate advertisements, and I’m willing to pay for a good, useful service. But this is a mixed bag. It’s still ‘enshitified’ because most of what it serves me is algorithmic and nothing to do with the hundreds of channels I’ve subscribed to over the 13 years I’ve had this particular account. It’s still chock full of ads because videos do sponsor blocks these days.
And the worst of it is they’ve got you by the balls and there’s really nothing stopping them from being Netflix and just continuing to raise and raise the price. I was an OG Netflix Instant Streaming for Xbox 360 user…years later when they finally booted me off my own family plan, we were paying like…$23 a month? For what had at that point become the worst video service? What stops YouTube from bumping up to $19.99/mo a couple years from now? It’s the only game in town.
OH and they’re also selling all your metrics. That’s the other thing. If I’m paying (through the nose) for a service, it shouldn’t be double-fucking me by selling predictive measures of who I am and what I care about to filthy fucking “advertisers” (for-profit behavior manipulators).
YouTube (like every last piece of Web 2.0) was fun while it lasted. But it is now barely better than worthless.
+1 to the last part.
I hate that you can be perpetually paying a company, but you also are still the product. I’m pretty sure it’s like this with just about every subscription.
For clarity: Google is THE for-profit behaviour manipulator selling the manipulation to whoever is having the budget for it. YT, search and all the other products are there to enable that manipulation. No more, no less.
YouTube Revanced ftw. Firefox with uBlock Origin ftw too.
Uhm, so what extra value to subscribers did they add recently? Is it just a case of Google’s costs going up or simply their need to make more profit to delight shareholders?
We believe this new price reflects the value of YouTube Premium
I disagree. YouTube offers nothing without the content creators. While reason I ever started using it because TotalBiscuit made a good case for it. But I have to say, while they keep jacking up prices I don’t feel like I’m getting anything more. I never asked for YT Music and would gladly take a discount to have it removed.
Keep fucking around and find out Google, I got no issues going back to ad blockers. Whole reason I got premium was to support those I watch and all I ever hear is how Google is fucken them over.
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I disagree. YouTube offers nothing without the content creators.
While yes, they depend on the creators, many of those creators would not make any money without a platform like YouTube. I don’t like the price raising, but YouTube stores your videos for free, and makes it easy to monetize content.
Increasing the price of a service that is already piss-poor value for your money is incredibly smart. Who the hell is gonna pay 14$ per month just to get rid of ads?
It also includes YouTube Music. Yes, I know, many will say they value proposition it’s still poor even with that. Honestly it’s worth it to me. I subscribe to the family plan because we watch a lot of YouTube and listen to a lot of music. No ads plus unlimited music for 4 people is worth it to us.
Yeah same here, I use the hell out of my Youtube Premium. Though the biggest feature lately has been 0 ads on content, as the majority of my video streaming is from Youtube.
Same I get a lot of use out of the family plan. My group of friends just exchange various family plans to save money. I take care of YouTube, another friend Spotify, etc. I absolutely hate ads and can work around them but still like supporting my favorite channels. I’ve been on YouTube for well over a decade and is pretty much my main video entertainment, so well worth it.
People who’re gullible. I’m sure Twitch thought the same thing when their subscription service is exactly the same thing. $12 a month, just to remove ads. On top of them assuming you have Prime too, which is $15. So they want you paying $27 to get rid of ads.
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I will (and do currently). I watch a bunch of YouTube on my TV through an AppleTV, and it’s the easiest way to get no ads and also support the people I watch.
I suspect that most existing subscribers won’t even notice that the price is increasing and will keep letting it charge them anyway. AOL still makes money this way.
And not everyone is as savvy to set up an ad blocker, especially on mobile.
As for value, that’s always subjective. There are probably people who would argue that is more than worth their money. Not me though.
