People do want a first-class mobile experience (see TikTok), they just don't want to pay a premium for it. If you charge people for something, you better make damn sure it's way better than the free alternative.
Biggest issue with Quibi was lack of app for TV. They cut their TAM by only focusing on Mobile. I don’t think YouTube premium would be as popular if it was only for 1 platform.
For Android, the other comment suggests uBlock Origin which I definitely recommend (even for other reasons beyond YouTube).
On phones... sometimes, but that's usually fixed within a day or two.
Before others crucify me for not paying for the content: I'm paying for a subscription service where most of the YouTube channels I follow mirror their content (https://watchnebula.com/). I just cut out Google as an unnecessary middleman.
Also is there anything wrong with offering a paid service which offers removing ads and getting some extra functionality?
If anything YouTube is the most open platform by far, because the vast majority of the content on there is owned by the creators, not YouTube, and thus it could be on other platforms, in a way that will never happen with the paid streaming services. Indeed this is even happening with CuriosityStream.
Ding, ding, ding! The accuracy of this statement is frightening.
I'm annoyed with YT pushing major media orgs' content out because the only reason I watch it is for the smaller creators. But the reality is the ads are annoying.
And it's worth paying for just to be able to listen to the app with the screen turned off. I've also warmed up quite a bit to YT Music even if the UI feels a bit rough around the edges (browser; mobile is OK).
But the ads? Yeah, that's a big reason.
No one wants to pay for something where they're still the product being sold. Youtube Premium still has all its trackers, still recommends videos not that it think you will find interesting but that it thinks will keep you watching (for better or worse), and still feeds all of your data into the Google ads network for companies to target you on other websites.
* 6 phone calls
* 4 voicemails
* 9 emails
all from what looks like companies from third-world countries offering business development services, website designs, app developers, logo design, etc, specifically asking about the new domain I purchased.
:(
Back when it was introduced on Android, it worked on YouTube just fine. Then it was intentially broken (hidden behind a paywall).
E.g.:
> Ancestor: [paraphrased] YouTube makes money by doing extra work to make a free service more painful to use and then charging to remove those annoyances.
> You: [paraphrased] What makes <ancestor> so entitled as to think that you deserve the free service without the annoyances?
> Me: [paraphrased] No, YouTube is definitely intentionally removing features from their free service and offering to add them back if you pay them. That's true whether or not anyone feels entitled to those features.
> You: [paraphrased] Well duh, it's they're right, and why should they offer those features for free in the first place?
You'll have to close the gap on why you think it's bad while still acknowledging that they aren't a charity instead of just leaving your point as an exercise for the reader.
So far it's like complaining that Netflix paywalls the "basic functionality" of being able to watch their videos. Or that a game demo only gives you part of a game when you actually want all of it for free.
No, I don't. Whether or not I think that's bad is entirely orthogonal to what I actually said.
Background video lowers the value of ads which subsidizes free playback so it makes monetary sense to disable it. It's also a trivial amount of work done once.
On the other hand, video is expensive to serve so the ad revenue per gigabyte should be higher, in addition to getting more hours of listening per user. So it makes monetary sense to enable it.
They're both valid options for making money. So it's fair game to analyze it as a matter of user preference, company preference, and level of rudeness.
Even if they did, the ad revenue without video playback is 0. Advertisers are paying for impressions and views, not sound only.
Youtube has separate audio and video streams available on almost everything. I'd be very surprised if it wasted that data, and a quick search suggests it doesn't waste that data.
> Even if they did, the ad revenue without video playback is 0.
Sounds like they're doing something wrong in the sales process.
You're vastly underestimating how 10s of billions of dollars in advertising transactions are conducted. It's far more involved than just a "sales process".
If you don’t deliver what the advertiser paid for then you can’t charge for the ad.
Changing the format for audio ads that would run in the limited scenario of background video involves way too much effort and tooling to make it worth it.
I can't even read Washington Post and New York Times articles without paying for a subscription. So what? They don't owe anything to me for free. Thus I have paid subscriptions with them, because I value their content enough to pay for it and that's the only compensation methodology they've found to be workable.
It generally doesn't even work in other media. CD sales were built on the back of free radio broadcasts. Pay cable and satellite subscriptions targeted an audience already exposed to television through free TV broadcasts. You have to offer a fundamentally better experience, on the order of "this new thing is the only way to experience non-live music" for people to pay for it sight-unseen.
> Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It's not a service it's a hostage negotiation.
To which my response was that it's a commonly accepted business practice to create free and premium tiers (it's so common it even has a name: "freemium"), and that this doesn't remotely constitute "gatekeeping" or "hostage negotiation". And it is common for companies to switch models over time, starting out with free in order to spur quick growth and then figuring out monetization later. Make no mistake, YouTube was originally losing catastrophic amounts of money, and what has happened to it is the only path that was even viable. You either need a lot of advertising or a substantial paid subscriber base in order to not suffer huge ongoing losses and be forced to shutter. Just ask every newspaper ever.
I just don't see what YouTube has uniquely done differently vs any other company that has a paid tier or that has grown over time and needed to find additional ways to make money because it turns out that you can't turn around a loss by scaling it.
I don't live advertising either. But I accept that it pays for the vast majority of the content that I consume online.
"Premium" doesn't mean "fancy" or "hard to implement", it just means "We aren't making money giving this away for free, so you have to pay for it".
And someone with the screen off is using far less bandwidth. I doubt it's hard to make money off them, even with reduced ad revenue.
Then they should not advertise it as such. I have not looked at youtube ads for a while, but earlier it was definitely advertising "host your videos free, let your friends watch them free from anywhere in the world, yada yada".
If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.
> They could lock the entire site behind a paywall to paid subscribers only tomorrow
Sure they can. But that would likely drive most customers away and be a very bad business decision. My 2c.
> If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.
Show me a single freemium service anywhere that advertises itself using such exaggerated language.
I don't understand why people complain about free services like this. You can't eat your cake and have it too. Choose if you want the ad-supported free service or the paid service and then quit complaining about the choice you've made. You're not ever gonna get an ad-free free service that offers all the same features as the paid service. That would be corporate malpractice of the highest order; they'd have $0 revenue!
Nobody has suggested otherwise, so why do you keep hammering on this point?
> I don't understand why people complain about free services like this.
Free services are not immune to criticism.
If someone is suggesting an unrealistic business model, that's one thing. If they just say a feature is bad, there's no need to argue with them. They are not obligated to "quit complaining"!
It seems you're unaware of what marketing actually is and are just personally against ads yourself. That's fine, but it doesn't mean there are any absolutes.
I think most of the downsides would be in second-order effects (like the paywall bit you pointed out) and in effective enforcement (advertising dollars might just shift to realistic-looking review sites for example). I'm hopeful that free content would still be produced, especially given that for my own personal use I've noticed that ads correlate negatively with quality, and with a few exceptions like academic publishing all the best content is free and without ads even in today's world where it's easy to ad ads to a site.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).
And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.
Slightly stronger still -- all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly sought it out (e.g. searching for things to buy on Amazon, searching for product recommendations, etc....).
> It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).
It might not be legally feasible. I know there are places (in the US, since we're invoking the first amendment) which ban billboards, ban specific kinds of ads (e.g. excessively misleading), ban certain ad-location pairings (e.g. no cigarettes targeting children), and so on, so I'm not totally convinced a motivated party couldn't push it through, but that's not my area of expertise.
> And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.
Haha, that system doesn't define how those services would work at all -- the idea is that from some kind of first principle (the hypothetical assertion is that push-based ads offer little societal value and large detriments above and beyond the effects of pull-based ads, so they're worth removing) we decide that push-based ads ought to be removed, and any second-order consequences are justified as a response. That's definitely the point I'd attack if I wanted to shoot this idea down, because even with seemingly clear-cut behaviors like killing people we still have to carve out exceptions in the law for all the unforeseen consequences of simply making killing illegal.
I hesitate to speculate too far as to how the market might react if such a law were enacted (and not easily circumvented), but some possible options include:
1. Some of those services (e.g., Snapchat seems vulnerable to that change) would cease to exist, and the companies involved would die or regroup around their other offerings. Not all products are viable in all market conditions.
2. Some others would probably be largely unaffected. Google might double down on "shopping" and other kinds of searches that are legally classified as pull-based and still offer a breadth of services to collect data on you (to offer better results for when you do make pull-based ad queries) and to keep you trapped in their ecosystem so that you can't go to a competitor. Their fee structure for results in those subsystems might change drastically.
3. Some businesses that have an ad-supported free tier _might_ keep that free tier as a way to entice users into paid offerings. E.g., YouTube would drop their ads due to the legal requirement but potentially also limit some other product features to try to convert more people to premium, above and beyond the pay-walling they already do.
4. Many smaller free services already only exist as a charity, a hobby, or some other kind of not-my-primary-source-of-income venture. At first glance I don't think those would be much affected, but if free tiers in AWS and GCP or github actions or whatnot are reduced then that could have downstream consequences.
5. If push-based advertising were banned cold-turkey then it's not totally implausible that we'd finally get mass acceptance around some workable micropayment solution. That _might_ even be integrated with a credit system from some pull-based ad behemoth.
6. Those services might well convert to subscription or pay-per-use. That's prohibitive now in many scenarios because somebody will produce an ad-based competitor, but if that's illegal then you only have to worry about competitors who are actually producing services for free somehow, not those who are producing services for <wink> "free" <wink>. If enough people actually want to produce free services then the ability to monetize goes away, but the need to monetize also goes away since the whole argument about monetization is that we need it to entice people to create stuff. Otherwise, there's still a monetization opportunity, and we can actually charge for the services we build.
And so on. It's really hard to speculate as to what might happen because we're talking about disrupting a $200B-$300B/yr industry. That'll have a sizable impact and quite a few ripples as we reach a new equilibrium.
And, interestingly, the biggest exodus I've seen hasn't been to another free platform, it's been to a subscription-only platform (CuriosityStream). The documentary-style YouTubers didn't think they were making enough money on YouTube because of how hard it is to make their content vs your typical vlogging stuff, and they know their viewers are willing to pay more to access it, so they made a pay-only streaming site to earn more money from their product.
But I'd say 90% of my youtube consumption is on TV.