I didn't say I was entitled to it. I said they keep basic functions behind the paywall. They're equally within their rights to make non-Premium viewers watch all the videos in black and white or stop non-Premium viewers from using fullscreen.
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.