I’d pay for YouTube premium if t wasn’t more expensive than HBO. It’s ridiculous. Especially considering YouTube has no production costs. It’s all user-generated content.
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You can get Premium cheaper through other countries. It’s super simple. I only pay about 1€ / month and that feels about right to me unlike the 15€ or something I’d have to pay otherwise.
I’m guessing via a VPN, but which country do you connect to for the low prices?
Argentina or (in my case) Turkey seem to be popular options. You only need to use a VPN when setting up the first payment. Your credit card can be from your home country, no checks at all. After that it’ll just work and you won’t need a VPN anymore.
I’m from India and it’s about ₹120 ~ $1.4.
Which country did you go through? I assume you purchase on a VPN and then after it applies normally?
Yep! I left another reply with more details. I’m using Turkey and it’s super easy to set up.
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It should be a crime the way they make you subscribe to YouTube Music to get YouTube Premium.
Idk if the price is that ridiculous, the family plan costs me 16 bucks and I have YT premium for my household+. I also have YouTube music from that as well, I find it better than spotify for my use and I dont have to put up additional cost for music streaming elsewhere. There was also youtube premium content (Youtube Red?) if that is still a thing, I remember the Vsauce series being available because of this.
Youtube having no costs is a hot take if ive ever seen one, but I dont think I can say anything about this that hasnt been said.
Only a kid used to having mommy and daddy pay for everything would claim youtube has no costs. It is amazing how many people on social media think everything should be free. The real issue here it is the lack of competition.
A part of your YT Premium payment goes directly to creators that you watch based on your watch time. That is their content expenses just like HBO for making new shows.
Yeah they just need storage for millions of people and bandwidth for billions no biggie, thank you for your expertise
lol zero production costs because they’re not a production studio, genius, lmao. they do have a shit ton of overhead costs though - look into it instead of acting like it costs nothing to be the largest video hosted site on the planet.
Keep 720p only for users who upload crap and aren’t generating revenue and keep 4k for the channels who are uploading quality content. I’ve seen a podcast uploading hours of content in 4k. That is incredibly costly to stream to people.
I’m not going to pay for a service that is so wasteful with their income and then they want more.
ublock origin users:
Sponsorblock and Return YT Dislikes FTW as well.
I’m confused, if ublock origin and sponsor block and all those are bypassing this, then who is it actually targeting?
have you ever searched “ad blocker” on your browser of choice’s extension store and scrolled down? or had a cheap/free VPN that advertised ad blocking functionality?
those. for some reason people install those. and they never get updates.
(some of them are actual malware too)
They want to frame it so that internet ID is the solution. That way you as a person can be banned, not just the account or ip. Good luck buying and selling when everything becomes digital and you get banned.
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I understand that, but look at who I am responding to - they seem to think that they’re immune from it.
Dear Youtube: Bring back the downvote count, allow me to disable shorts, allow me to disable your bullshit annoying ass startup music, then half the price and then we’ll talk about paying for your “service”.
That got me, the “you can only upvote stuff” bull. I should also have the option to block channels and videos.
Being able did disable content you don’t want aside from ads with a paid membership would be a huge boon.
Killing shorts would be fantastic, and they shouldn’t care if I’m not using a feature as long as I’m paying.
Why would they ever do that when they can make the website more intrusive and annoying to use?
Why would they ever do that for free? Either the advertiser pays for the infrastructure, or you do. IT isn’t free. Hence YouTube premium.
The problem is that they make it unreasonable when they get greedy and many people don’t tolerate their shit. This isn’t a “people won’t pay for the service” problem. We’ve all paid for streaming services. I personally won’t when it feeds into their shenanigans.
Well, it was exactly as described and also free like 8 years ago.
I am paying for YouTube Premium, and yet I still have to skip over US-exclusive sponsor sections which almost every Youtuber has nowadays…
and this is why you should use third party clients/patches like revanced
No. This is why if you like a service, you pay for it.
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Underrated comment
Google has been shamelessly destroying all their projects the last few years in a desperate fit to make money. They’ve weakened ad blockers on chrome, they’ve altered the search algorithm so random BS is mixed in with regular to drive towards sponsored content, their starting to setup browser level DRM and creating un skipable ads. None of this is for anything more than greed and desperation. They no longer see anything other than money as the end goal and don’t care if their selling a shittier product at a higher price than no one was ever even willing to pay for. F*ck google.
YT Premium costs less than $4 for me and I also get YT Music. It sure beats paying $4 for only a music service.
Until its no longer profitable like the hundreds of other BS google tricks you into supporting only to ditch later https://killedbygoogle.com/ . Also in what world are you paying under $4 the standard package today is $13.99
I’ll stop paying when it stops working. Also regional pricing. I pay around $3.9 for Premium + Music.
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Because somehow paying $4 a month is unreasonable for a service that I use for 2-4 hours every day.
Right.
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I support the sentiment, but today everything is a service that wants your money, this resource is finite. And when it comes to YouTube, it’s not even about whether you like it or not: YouTube is a monopolist.
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And that’s how things die due to no revenue. Running YouTube is expensive af and the more people who used things like revanced, the worse things will become for everyone else.
Maybe they shouldn’t operate in the first place if they cannot think of a sustainable business model without f*ing their users up.
Basically everything within capitalism fucks over someone that’s just business as usual 8n out society. Usually to a much worse degree, think the children who likely made your clothes for next to nothing. I’m all for tearing down the system, but there’s not a whole lot as an individual that I can do.
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You’ll care as more and more people have to quit YouTube or make progressively more shit content to appease the algorithm. It also makes it harder and harder for new people to start on YouTube.
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I’m a premium user so I’m not affected (for now)
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I’ll gladly pay for a service that doesn’t thrive on pushing propaganda down people’s throats to maximize watch time and that isn’t actively trying to make my user experience miserable by removing downvotes, forcing shorts and so on.
I’d rather pay someone to kick me in the nuts. Sounds like a better deal tbh.
I use SponsorBlock.
And you realize that YouTube will do everything in their hands to stop you from using these apps in the future right? That was kinda the point of the article.
Making people pay (with their time and attention) while they are already paying for subscription will not encourage more people to buy premium.
fuck YouTube premium. why would I pay £19.99 a month when literally the only defining feature for me is no ads. all this will do is allow for more complex ad blockers to be made to bypass this
The creators also get a good chunk of the money from premium as far as I’ve been able to verify (by asking some I follow directly).
Why not pay creators directly through Patreon PayPal or equivalent instead of Google as well?
If no one pays for YouTube how can they keep supporting their insanely costly infrastructure? Hosting all those videos is not free. Far from it.
I’m perfectly fine paying for YouTube if that means I can continue to have access to awesome creators under a easy to use platform. It would be a very sad day if Google decided to shut down YouTube due to not being able to cover it’s costs.
The only other company that could potentially take over would be meta. Which would probably be even worse. At least YouTube provides an option to pay to disable ads.
I just wish they kept the ads at the start and end. There is something off putting about watching some documentary about some horrible event only to have it pause for some perky Grammarly ad in the middle of it.
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I would be fine if YouTube crumbled and was put into second place by a better platform or two.
Yes it’s the best option currently which is why they can do such ridiculous practices.
But once they have actual competition, I expect them to bend over backwards for my attention. Because if they don’t change the current trajectory, they’ll go the way of the other digital giants of the past.
Do not worry about having a viable platform in a future without YouTube. I am 100% sure there will be one.
This is an extremely unlikely hypothetical. Google is one of the most profitable companies in the world and there is no sign of that changing, even considering all the people who block ads right now. There is no reason to squeeze everyone like this.
There’s a lite version that’s only for the ads.
It’s cheaper than the full 19.99.
While that might still be too much, I just wanted to point out that if you don’t want ads, it doesn’t cost the full 20quid.
This was news to me so I went looking and couldn’t find it on youtube. Reading articles seems to indicate it is only available in certain regions and at certain times. I finally found the link to the page (https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite) and confirmed it’s not available for me in the US at least.
I pay for youtube premium because I watch a lot of youtube and it is easily worth the price. I paid $12 to see oppenhimer and that was only 3 hours. I watch way more than 3 hours of youtube every week.
Ah YouTube, the site where I watch a video that tells me in ten minutes what I could read in one. And only 5 advertisements!
Oops, six. I forgot the ad the creator slipped in between minute 1 and 2.
Recommend hitting ‘4’ (40%) straight away on how to videos, its usually the start of showing you how to do the thing.
I used SponsorBlock for a while and it worked pretty well. It crowdsources where the ads are in a video and you can choose to skip them automatically.
How can you possibly forget the mid-video ad read that is actually a part of the video, thus unblockable?
“Modern problems require modern solutions” -> get sponsorblock
So I’m sure u wont have a problem avoiding it therefore this doesnt concern you
I just got my first 30 second UNSKIPPABLE ad on my TV the other day…I closed youtube, as watching a 1min video is NOT worth 30 seconds of ads
“While the duration of this timer isn’t revealed, we expect it to be somewhere around 30 to 60 seconds.”
Peak journalism.
The worst part of YouTube ads is super long ads (sometimes even multiple hours long). It has happened to me multiple times. And coincidentally it always happens when I’m feeling sleepy.
Here is a screenshot.
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In other words, taking advantage of their own users!
And advertising customers. Great company all around.
Man, all these companies just pushing me away from using their services. I don’t need it.
Next they will detect if you mute the tab and go to another one to wait the ad out.
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[Raises hand] I’ve been paying for a family music plan for years now. YouTube Premium was always just bundled with it. If they ever stopped the bundling I’d hop back over to Spotify.
I pay 6$ using a student discount for YouTube premium because I like watching YouTube on my android TV and I can’t use ad blocker there. In fact I’ve been using it for so long that it actually shocks me when I see someone open YouTube and an ad pops up it feels weird
This is one of these problem with multiple unsolvable issues:
- people are used to ad block and won’t change
- the price is too high for part of the population (-> ad block for part of them)
- $1/month, $10/year would attract new paid account but not that much
- people can’t afford/don’t want a subscription everything
- users don’t see any value in it
- a fraction of the paid will go ad block with the price increase
- people will circumvent the ad block block
- capitalism
- …
They already solved it. Premium was way cheaper before they started bundling it with Music which is just utter garbage. I’d pay like 5€ / month for YouTube Premium without Music IF the experience was actually good and they didn’t shove shorts in my face everywhere like that non-dismissable panel that breaks up my subscriptions now.
I think a lot of people would subscribe if they had a lower price tier where they have a reduced amount of ads (like an ad every few videos). Without ad blockers, youtube is unwatchable, you get more ads than you would on TV (where in many places ads are legally capped at around 15mins/hour).
I think they are likely to pull a Netflix and create a lower premium tier with ad support and missing other premium features like picture in picture
clicks on link
It looks like you are using an ad-blocker
