Paradoxically the target demographic willing to pay to be ad free is probably worth far more to advertisers than those who don’t— making it difficult to justify the product offering.
Though I’d certainly use YouTube significantly less if I had to sit through the ads.
I consume a fair amount of technical content, on YouTube. If I had to watch ads, I would probably stop rather than watch. I've seen some technical content with sponsored products etc., and as I understand in the broader pop-culture content sponsor ad reads are now quite common. So even with the Premium subscription, the L shortcut key to advanced in seconds is extremely useful... I assume it will be taken away next.
Yes. Nursery rhymes and other entertainment for toddlers is by far our largest use case for YouTube, and ads would frequently comprise things like the latest horror movie trailer. If we didn't have the option of YouTube Premium to make it so the ads didn't interject, we would've been done with YouTube a long time ago.
Kind of a non-issue for us now though -- since moving to an area serviced by Comcast and thus having a mandatory data cap, we just use youtube-dl to grab the video once and then stream them over the LAN through a Plex server.
Their language: "After using these 2 courtesy months, if you exceed the plan you will be charged $10.00 for each 50GB of additional data provided, but charges will not exceed $200 each month, no matter how much you use."
I hit 700G last month. If I had to do a full backup or restore I'd definitely go over 1T. Annoyingly, they count both ingress and egress traffic.
Source:
I live in a 'dense' suburb near Seattle (renting, but finally in a house that's not as noisy or otherwise hell as apartments can be).
I'm a Comcast customer (for lack of ANY OTHER actual high speed data competition; DSL is like 8M bit down and less than 1M bit up per second).
Their 1G bit plan gives me something like 25-30 M bit/sec upload, and comes with a VERY small 1T bytes cap. Not even /trying/, I easily come near to 700-800 M bytes per month.
I fully expect to exceed that during the holiday season when I have to liquidate my vacation time per my current employer's policy (or loose it) and have nothing better to do than binge on various legal video products.
Even Frontier is better than Comcast, at least in the data cap respect, and that’s saying something bad about Comcast...
Comcast is looking to recoup some of the income they've lost from cord-cutters by targeting users whose bandwidth consumption looks suspiciously like video. They seem committed to getting you to pay them for TV/video content one way or the other, while simultaneously discouraging further cord-cutting by raising the specter of potentially-unpredictable overages.
Fortunately, the national broadcasting company here do a kid's show with no advertising, and seem to also have filtered out the shows that are just selling toys. The only problem is, they insist on making their own programming as well as showing cartoons they've bought from elsewhere. I can tell when the in-house production starts even if I'm not watching at the moment, because my kid will start going "I don't want to watch this!"
I remember watching the same show, and having the same aversion to the local content, as a kid. Now, as a parent, I wonder if they intentionally put in some low-interest stuff in to make the show less addictive and teach the kids some kind of life lesson... If so, it probably worked better on TV than it does on their streaming service, where you can skip at will.
Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play!
Oh, Paw Patrol. I smelled something is weird when I started finding PP-branded toys & stuffs in our local Walmart equivalent. Reading your comment, now I realize this must be it. The show is in part a vehicle for selling merch.
> Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play!
Great idea. I'm planning to go full "youtube-dl -> home media server, no Internet on devices" way with my future kids. An artificially scheduled programming is something I might try out.
There are a small handful of channels we allow them to watch. Mostly we watch through something like the Roku, but when on the computer, I wrote a little Greasemonkey apparatus to scan the channel name and automatically rickroll the children if they wind up on a non-whitelisted channel / video.
It is definitely reckless to leave a kid, really of any age, with unrestricted access to YouTube. The internet is a very scary place.
It's much the same experience on the rest of the web, actually. I simply can't figure out how normal people manage to cope with the deluge of advertising that's plastered everywhere. And even with an adblocker, the various sponsored content and thinly-veiled promotional blogposts is still constantly spewing forth...
Instead, I support various people through Patreon, if I enjoy the content they make. That way, they get a much bigger cut, and aren't being screwed over by YouTube's over-eager demonetization policies.
> A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self.
At least I'd get my money back :(
But it's a great mental model.
That means someone can outbid you easily if it is predicted the ad will be clicked, and they have to pay a load of money if it's predicted the ad is very unlikely to be clicked.
Which in turn means, you'll effectively only be shown ads you're interested in, since the predictor thinks it's very likley you'll click (or watch the whole thing for a preroll ad).
Turns out, that predictor is mostly right - it did a good job of showing me ads that were funny enough to watch to the end, and correctly realised I would never watch an ad twice, so never showed me the same ad twice.
Side thing no one ever mentions about ads, they always play at 1x. I watch between 2-4x and ads seem so slow when they happen
I'm a Youtube Premium subscriber as well, and this is by far the #1 perk. However, it's technically wrong (you probably already know this) to call Youtube content ad-free just because we aren't seeing Youtube's ads. :) Almost all of the content creators I follow on YT simply advertise or product-place inside their videos.
Youtube Premium pays for the video hosting platform. Content producers advertise to support their content production.
(it's actually even more complex than that, since if you had been shown that ad, the advertisers daily budget would have been debited, meaning that advertiser might have reduced their bids on other users to have the same overall spend. The payment has a correction to take that into account).
So in France they took the most famous youtubers out there, and tasked them with creating 2 series.
Both were pretty uninspired derivative work. You could see that there was way more budget than on these people regular videos, but that the whole thing was mostly a paycheck, not a passion project.
I don't think Youtube even has to produce any content to be honest. No ads and Play Music ? That's already a great value proposal.
If on top of that you add a video streaming service which actually has a library that only grows (instead of a rolling one like netflix) and that actually contains different cuts of each films, bonuses, cut scenes, etc, I might be willing to just let go of Netflix and go with them.
Channels that insert their own ads into video are a step too far though, and I've started unsubscribing from them. Patreon is fine, affiliate links in the description are fine (if they're relevant, eg tools you used, items you showed in the video), and I actively participate in both to support channels I like. But sitting there talking about "random product dot com forward-slash channelnamehere" as though they're the most exciting thing since sliced bread, just cheapens the identity immensely, and is the modern day equivalent of seeing your favourite sports/hollywood star hawking off some random crap on the shopping channel.
For instance, Glenn Fricker (Spectre Sound) talks about music production on his channel, and he has a short "sponsored by" segment in most of his videos, about a music distribution service that gets your music onto just about every streaming service in one go. That's genuinely useful for his target audience, and there's a small signup fee rebate to be had. I usually skip over the 10 seconds or so now, but it's an example of appropriate sponsorship.
I don't remember a single marketing message mention that they'll remove ads, and in fact, your post is the first time I heard about it. I doubt I'd pay google for premium YouTube content, but I probably would do so to remove ads.
Maybe YourTube's problem is more about messaging than content/price.
1. No ads.
2. Backgrounding, for listening to audiobooks while I sleep.
3. Download tech lectures and audiobooks for the car.
As other have said, I would pay double too.
Do you feel like you get subconsciously smarter by hearing content during sleep? Is there a reason for listening to books while sleeping?
For me, lack of attention is a key reason why I don't listen to audiobooks. I can read and focus on the content, but when it's just played back to me I'll lose track of it.
I usually listen to the news for a country I have no connection to to avoid the problem of hearing names / events I know IRL. Easy to jump in and out, the content is always fresh, and the speakers are calm and collected.
Many people don't seem to realize just how lucrative advertising can be, and how little they would be able to compensate considering how much media they consume every day. A single youtube video could be 5 or 6 figures in production and you can flip through a dozen without issue. That's a serious amount of value in return for ads.
The actual "Youtube premium" is basically a non-factor in whether they would keep me, although I'll admit I did really enjoy season 1 of Cobra Kai.
It's not that higher production values wouldn't be accepted, but that those come with hired writers, actors, directors, high costs, and mass marketing to recoup those costs. The market can only support so much high-cost content, which means less variety than people want. Conversely, the market can support enormous variety in low-cost content.
It just says that the YT Original content is going to also be available via an ad supported model for non YT Premium subscribers.
Its central claim is that YT couldn't make compelling case for original scripted long form content to be a selling point for the premium subscription, mostly due to it being dominated by short form content.
BTW. that's literally the single dumbest thing about YouTube app, and I can't fathom why it's the case.