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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Googler here, but speaking as a consumer

YouTube Premium + YouTube Music is a great deal. Ad-free videos and a music app that's basically identical to Spotify as far as I can tell.

Hacks like this one are really fun but we all know that YT needs to get paid somehow. The creators deserve the money and unlike many sites everyone on HN knows the infra cost to run it is monstrous.

I'm sure I sound like the biggest shill ever right now so I anticipate downvotes but I was just shocked at how many people here are mad at Google for fixing a bug to protect ad revenue. Wouldn't your company do it too?

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This is painting a false picture. I don’t see people being mad this was fixed. What I do see are people pointing out how quickly Google fixes this while other long term issues, not just on YouTube but in Google’s entire ecosystem, appear to be ignored. Only the issues that impact revenue are ever promptly addressed by YouTube.

For example, to add to the growing list in this thread, here’s my pet peeve: it’s been 4+ years since YouTube removed subscription collections and publicly promised a better replacement.[1] What’s the progress on that?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954740

> we all know that YT needs to get paid somehow

Nope. I don't have any interest at all in YT getting paid. In fact, I think the internet might be a better place if YT is less successful.

I'm with you. In the nascent days of the internet none of these media businesses were around. And it was good - great even. If we had an issue, we'd solve it with technology and not by throwing money at a centralized corporation.

I used Google Music for years and switched to Spotify about a year ago. The difference in music discovery is like night and day. Every week, Spotify gives me a new list of music I've never heard where I tend to favorite ~30% of them. Google Music just played the same songs over and over. It was work for me to actually find new music.

That said I still pay for it to get rid of YouTube ads.

YT music is hot garbage, just awful. Discovery is a joke compared to Spotify. I've given it a few chances recently and have been sorely disappointed each time.

Nice of them to offer a 3 month YT premium trial, now I know it's only good for removing ads.

Please, for the love of whichever god you believe in, stop asking me to buy your premium service Every Single Time I open the app. No means no. Such a bad experience.

You're just using the wrong app. You wanted Vanced instead: https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-yout...

NewPipe's better.

I don't think you have any entitlement to whine if you refuse to pay the asking price for a service.

Any other service would show you the door.

I think this thread is a living confirmation of the old marketing rule which says: "Freeloaders are the most entitled customers."

So many people are demanding that a company provides a completely free service, for free and without any monetisation while catering to all their whims.

You mean creators make money from Premium?

They make peanuts from it!

Do you have a source for that? This seems like the kind of thing that should be widely discussed among creators, but it's hard to find numbers. (Maybe due to NDAs?). The best I could find the last time this was discussed was this, but it's not a lot of data points and the numbers vary widely: https://old.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/9mj13u/sh...

The numbers posted show premium viewers making more money for the creators per viewer. How much more depends on exactly which of the datapoints you pick, but it's ranging from 35% more to a rather implausible 3600%.

As an anecdote, LinusTechTips, which has a huge Youtube channel, recently commented on WAN Show about Youtube Premium and Ad Revenue.

The takeaway was that, if you are a youtube premium user, you are contributing way more than someone just watching ads, and if you buy merch, you had contributed way, way more than someone who watched the entire channel library with ads turned on.

"60x More": https://youtu.be/rXz0veV1AuU?t=1950 "Merch": https://youtu.be/E4ikRN5-W18?t=1180

Thanks! But I think you might have misheard? To me it sounds like Linus saying "six to ten X", not "sixty X".

BTW YouTube Music Web gives me terrible experience. Any Google employee dogfooding it? (Android App is fine)

Tell me how Google has made back the $1B it spent on buying Youtube.

Subtract Youtube Ad revenue.

Now tell me how much Google makes off of Youtube.

>YT needs to get paid somehow YT is used by basically the whole world and run by the biggest ad network in the world and yet it is a money sink. You can't be the sole provider of the world's video.

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