YouTube’s annoying Premium spam
theverge.com
theverge.com
And yet, it seems like the author of this piece still feels entitled to complain about being asked to pay the price of service and these comments are full of people advertising products that still use the service without paying the asking price. It's like demanding that music authors just send you MP3s for free without paying for it at all.
I personally hope that more companies allow me to pay for their services instead of being plagued by behavioural ad tracking.
edit: HN won't let me make any more replies.
I don't know why people are fine with someone accusing me of entitlement with no basis, while me calling them out on it with a level of civility they did not deserve is out of bounds.
I don't understand this place. This is ridiculous.
- I want to support creators.
- I want to watch #%!@X videos without distractions.
Youtube Red only helps me with the first point -- I can support creators, but it's even questionable there whether I'd be having a bigger impact by directly giving money on Patreon. In the meantime, I'm still paying money for Youtube Premium right now and I've gotten to the point where I don't use it, because the experience with an adblocker and proxies is better than the experience I pay for.
At some point, when someone is paying money for a service and then going out of their way to avoid signing into their account or using the thing they pay for, you have to question whether the service is designed well.
Every single damn video if it’s not the YouTube app telling me it’s the creator, or both.
I'm also there since Youtube Red and I'm not sure what you mean. I've never seen a nag screen so far. I wonder if it's some bug, or some kind of targeting failure?
And while you're at it, I bet you really miss watching CNN and Fox! Why not check out YouTube TV! For "only" $49.99 a month!
Don't forget to smash that subscribe bell so we can send you push notifications to consume even more of your attention!
I also saw a lot of advertisements for addons or benefits (here's a Youtube Red exclusive video from some random B-list celebrity that doesn't belong in your recommendations). And I got a lot of tutorials and tips, like popups for how to subscribe to channels. That always felt weird to me, because even if I didn't pay for Youtube Red, surely after a while Youtube would figure out that I knew how to subscribe to channels.
Maybe it's gotten better. Like I hinted at above, I rarely sign into Youtube (I hope they're still distributing the money I give them at least somewhat fairly to creators I like). I'm now paying for Youtube, and separately using a combination of Youtube-DL, NewPipe, Invidious, and proxies/adblockers to build an experience that I consider tolerable. So maybe the notifications have gotten better and I haven't noticed because I haven't checked back recently?
I hope it's clear I'm not defending them; just theorizing what sort of hamfisted reasoning might have gone into deciding to spam you.
That model seems appropriate for messengers and such, but not really for the site under discussion here.
Many creators, AvE springs to mind, are pretty candid about how useless YouTube monetization is to anyone who isn't a PewDiePie with multimillions of subscribers.
Content more generally marketable, such as comedy, or content targeting a different demo (such a Makeup/Beauty) have a very different make up, but are still heavily ad driven, and this is the type of content that broadly makes up YouTube. AvE, and his type of content, is relatively niche, and it's unsurprising he makes most of his money from Patreon. Patreon, in general, skews heavily to audiences that have discretionary income and can afford to pay peicemeal to their favorite creators.
What's your endgoal with the breakup?
That being said it's a step in the right direction and that's the reason I decided to switch.
Except that's not what it is. They've bundled Ad Free with YouTube Music and YouTube Originals, which I personally have no interest in. How much of that ridiculous price is going to the production of that original content and music licensing fees?
$15 a month is a big ask when I see zero value in 2/3 of the offer.
Bundling is what is driving cord cutting and piracy. People don't want to subsidize crap they don't want and didn't ask for.
\* I would probably think differently if I was a YouTube Red or Music subscriber and they gave me access to Ad Free and Originals as bonus for my subscription fee but I'm not and don't want to be.
Amazon Prime did something similar but by bundling Video and Music but I was already paying for Prime just for the free shipping so it was just extra.
This is an interesting statement. Users are paying for Amazon Prime Video and Music one way or the other. I'd happily pay $79.00 instead of the current $120.00 a year for Amazon Prime without the Video and Music.
Because I want to ensure the content creators I watch are supported, not just Youtube and the content creators it wants to support.
> You should care if you are getting a fair value for your fare.
As I said, I don't think it's a fair value for how I use it.
Do your preferred channels have Patreon? If so, then perhaps it would be a better use of your money to cancel YouTube premium and instead give the money directly to those creators.
however I refuse to reward that sort of dark pattern, and yesterday created a new google account for youtube and installed youtube vanced on my phone
That's exactly what should happen. Creators need to figure out how to get paid before the work is created. They need to get paid for the work of creating, not for the end result which should be public domain.
They should also publish a lossless FLAC instead of an MP3.
> I personally hope that more companies allow me to pay for their services instead of being plagued by behavioural ad tracking.
You are still being tracked. Also, the service isn't likely to remain free of ads. Cable TV was once ad-free but the opportunity to milk even more money out the audience was just too irresistible to pass up:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
This has downsides too. After all, what are those paying for the creation getting in return?
I imagine creators, such as musicians, already get paid for the work of creating... In the form of embedded advertising.
Listen to any top song and you'll be barraged by the names of luxury brands.
Is this really the ideal world of music?
Anyway, for the standard 10$ a month price, I get Play Music + Youtube without ads (while supporting creators and paying the platform for its infrastructure, unlike adblock).
Play Music is an ok music streaming solution. It has all the features I expect from such a service + I can import (and export) my own albums. This is the killer feature for me.
Getting Youtube without ads was just a cherry on top for me. At the time I was living in Europe where there were anyway not that many ads on Youtube.
It is very valuable now that I live in the USA where there are ads everywhere.
Now, all I want is :
- for Google not to fuck this up. I fear that Youtube Music will be a disaster and that I will lose some of the features I care about in Play Music. The very long transition is giving me some hope that they have enough time to carry things over.. but I am not too optimistic.
- I was going to write to remove tracking but I don't know how I feel about it. All the streaming services I know do track what you listen to in order to give you good suggestions and automixes. So that's pretty much a feature at this point and a way to discover new artists, although there is a tunnel effect in place. So as long as that info does not leave Youtube, I guess I am relatively fine with it until proven otherwise.
Protip for big multinationals trying to get international customers for their service: Not everyone has a credit card, or a desire to get one specifically to pay you. Provide alternative payment methods.
Any form asking for a credit card accepts debit cards. Same format anyway.
It’s not very profitable to be a content maker (outside the top .01%), and many content creators are paying a team to help them produce regular, high quality videos.
For a while, people managed with ad-blockers until they became too easy to use and too popular so now... Netflix had a brief moment where there were no ads. Now they advertise (their own content, but still).
So from what I gather, people have spent decades running away from advertisement.
Doesn't work 100% of the time but seems to do the trick for most popular videos.
As a consumer, I find it pretty easy to distinguish between a "wanted" ad and an "annoying" ad, but I don't think there's a way to enforce rules based on user value systems if for no other reason than every user's value system is going to be distinct.
* YouTube (Google) should be enforcing that ads aren't intentionally embedded in videos (intentionally so that videos with a logo on someone's shirt or some such contentious type of "advertising" isn't subject to videos getting taken down or demonitised).
* Content Creators should be handing together to unionise (which I think they're already doing) or band together to move to a different platform. Without its content YouTube is just a video uploading platform.
Tech companies are an oligopoly with a few actors. Competitions do not offer enough pressure to make them change. Regulation is the only way forward if we do not want to end in a dystopia.
I’m optimistic that regulations will come, sooner or later.
Can someone explain where the boundary here is for antitrust?
That's of course assuming there's sufficient competition, and the power doesn't just shift over to Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft or some other anti-competitive giants.
Disclaimer in bio.
The number of ads isn't proportional to bandwidth cost, it's about what their research shows they can get away with.
Lower bandwidth prices would both increase service provider competition and decrease costs. The provider competition would then push the cost savings away from providers and toward either paying creators more or attracting viewers by showing fewer ads (or both).
It might not solve the entire problem but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.
I’m no expert though, so I’m more curious than in disagreement.
1 tb bandwidth cost of aws is 236 usd a month.
[1]: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#s=CloudFront&...
That will serve your 49MB video roughly 2 million times a day.
Let’s go with 50% average utilization, and say that means we need to monetize roughly 0.0065 cents per view to cover the bandwidth cost.
I think YouTube charges something like 10 cents per ad view, but won’t charge if the user clicks Skip in that 5 second window. I’m not sure what percent of views result in a billable ad, but anecdotally I’ve heard it’s surprisingly high.
I would assume storage is a much bigger cost factor, to say nothing of paying the engineers to develop and support the infrastructure.
Plus technologies like PeerTube can significantly reduce bandwidth expenses if that's really an issue. Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly, but a competitor with a different business model definitely could make it work for them.
They don't need to, they have caching servers on most ISP's internal networks. Popular stuff (that consumes most bandwidth) just needs to be sent once from the mothership.
A fresh new competitor to YouTube would face a combination of a lack of advertisers, and a lack of content seeking ad-funding.
On the other hand, when it comes to pay-to-watch content, there's space in the market for new competitors to arise, as the network effects are less significant there.
https://rakuten.tv/ and https://chili.com/ for instance, are far smaller than Amazon and Google.
I guess bandwidth costs are, in a sense, the problem. If if were easy to run a very-large-scale video-hosting site, that would help, sure. Ads wouldn't have to be worth much to make the business work.
Honest question: why not just write "I work for Google" instead of asking people to click through first? It's not significantly longer if that's what you're trying to avoid.
It’s not hard to serve your own video streams. But good luck getting enough eyeballs to make it worthwhile.
but what kind of regulation? The Access Act?[0]
But now I have entire blocks of totally unrelated traditional-style ads for nothing YouTube or video related (like women's shoes) in the suggestions section.
Its happening on other sites in other ways as well (either dark patterns or vast amounts of ads) and it has gotten me to the point where I actively take pleasure in extracting the maximum value for me as customer (so blocking ads, using VPN to pay in rubles or rupees, etc) as most companies these days see you as nothing but entities to suck as much profit out of as possible, with no regard for a reasonable middle ground. Sucks for them, that's a two-way street.
Basically I tolerated Youtube ads up to a point, but now that I'm using Newpipe instead, neither Youtube nor the creators get anything.
I wish there was a better way, since it's not pracitcal to contribute to all channel's patreons.
I don't think it is possible to get no ads by banning all the categories this way, it will just become random at that point I guess.
What I would like to see instead is a return of self-hosted videos from creators’ own websites plus a site like YouTube that is really just an aggregator of those videos. That way you can also have smaller businesses that provide YouTube-like services for those that don’t want to self-host, but those videos still get included in that aggregator. I think that would be the best ecosystem for competition.
However, I have no idea how feasible that is. It’s just an idea that came to mind.
"What I would like to see instead is a return of self-hosted videos from creators’ own websites plus a site like Peertube that is really just an aggregator of those videos. That way you can also have smaller businesses that provide Peertube-like services for those that don’t want to self-host, but those videos still get included in that aggregator. I think that would be the best ecosystem for competition."
I wish there was a YouTube alternative. I dislike their Apple TV YouTube app enough that I loathe to explore videos. Yet the content creators I watch only distribute on YouTube. I won’t pay for YouTube Premium because I know the quality of the app is still the poor same.
RSS is IMO waaay better than the sub-box because they are in the same place as all my other news.
Invidio.us doesn't have the best interface, but it offers all the necessary features and let's me do picture-in-picture on iPad.
BTW ads are an almost unmitigated nuisance: when France banned ads after 8PM on its public channels, their audience numbers soared (so the project which was an obvious gift from Sarkozy to his media mogul friends, badly backfired).
Also, public television in the US doesn't have the same level of ads as other channels.
Related, a few weeks ago they cracked down on Yalp (a Play Store front-end: basically an open source implementation of their internal APIs). I'm not sure if/when they're going to ease up on that, but until then, it looks like I'm stuck with whatever selection of apps (and versions) I've got at the moment.
It's now fashionable to shit on google on HN, but Youtube premium is one of the best investments I've made, and I'm glad google is giving that choice. How many times have I not read comments like 'give me an option to pay instead of showing me ads' on HN.
There are tons of videos on youtube that I listen to as podcasts while commuting (and there aren't enough good podcasts in that sector).
I will complain to high heaven about misuse of personal data, but it is perfectly within their right to show pop up ads for their own premium product on the free version. I would be a lifelong subscriber if I didn't think they were abusing my data in the first place.
If there's anything I would complain about, is that the ads don't have enough variety. I see the same damn advertisements over and over. This is part of why I can't stand TV advertising either. Yes, it's patronizing and intrusive in my show, but but it's also repetitive. At least keep it interesting and tell me about some different products...
Both on my Pi-hole-powered internal network and my nextdns.io based mobile setup the experience is so. much. calmer. I recommend giving it a shot. If pi-hole is not an option for you, check out NextDNS. Solid tracker & ad blocking either way.
If I can't block ads then I'll stop using YouTube. Did for half a year when I was on ios where adblock in the app didn't work.
Source is here: https://github.com/omarroth/invidious
But I also think the shrill tone of the article diminishes the message.
If you did, why aren't you now grandfathered into YouTube Premium at that old price?
If you didn't, why not? It was after all exactly the product you now claim to have wanted.
Not the poster you asked the question to originally, but YouTube Red was never available in Canada.
Are you shitting me? I get background play with Firefox...
Also, I value my mobile transfer limits so... youtuble-dl it is.
It’s the easiest, and most sanity-proof way to get money to most content creators I watch.
It's sad that a basic element of computing is now considered a privilege people need to pay for.
Just like it's sad that being asked to pay the creator and service provider is now something we need to write whole articles to whine about.
How do you thing we'll get rid of personal data tracking and collection if you don't even want to pay a pittance for service you're using?
Also, it's very naive to think Google will suddenly stop tracking you just because you're paying for Premium... quite the opposite actually, as you've now given them a valid credit card and billing address.
When I open a browser tab with audio in it I expect to be able to switch to a different app and the audio keeps playing. YouTube explicitly uses hacks to break that on mobile. I consider it very nasty to get out of your way and interfere with browser & OS features like that.
For instance, I use text-to-speech to read aloud the subtitles of foreign language content. With mpv that's straight forward, but I wouldn't even know where to start with getting that to work using any of the official frontends of youtube.
I understand the complaints some folks have but this isn't the solution.