I never understand HN Crowd complaining about ads on YouTube. It literally costs(1 month sub) less than typing a comment like this for most people on HN (At least in opportunity cost).
Spotify = Streaming music $12/month YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.
- No ads
- Minor usability improvements to the app
- “premium” content
- YouTube Music
The “premium” content is trash and YouTube Music is the worst music app with any significant effort put behind it, in addition to being a significant step down from Google‘s previous offering.
Most people would rather deal with the ads.
Being able to pay for a service without ads is worth it.
Users complaining about a free ad subsidized service come across as unreasonable to me (and maybe a little entitled).
The ads turn the whole watching experience into a remote-searching minigame. I'd much rather have unskippable, but reasonably long ads.
The revenue generation focus and incentive alignment is with paying users not advertisers. If the ads don't make as much money or have a more limited audience that's fine.
Obviously the entirety of Google is structured so this isn't the case, but in products I like better than Google products (Substack, Spotify, Apple) the focus is on paying customers. Ads, if they exist at all, are only on freemium versions of the product.
I wish Google Contributor could live up to the same promise, but Google killed it and replaced it with a different version. It made you a participant in the bidding process for your own ad views. So unless an advertiser was bidding a crazy amount of money, you would win the bid and an empty ad (or no ad at all) would load instead. Like YouTube Premium, this took advantage of the existing ad payment infrastructure while removing almost all the ads from your pages and videos.
Youtube premium is utter trash due to the way the money is split.