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Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

If "The alternative of paying $9.99/year for Youtube" was really an option - I would buy it for at least 4 kids I know, and two adults that need it, to remove the horrible ads, especially on mobile.

Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games".

however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year.

We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.

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My family pays for youtube premium (https://www.youtube.com/premium/family), it's $18/month for 5 people. They also get access to "youtube music premium", which is basically a spotify clone (so unlimited music with no ads). It's quite a good deal imo

Yeah, this option exists and most people don’t take it. Pretty clear argument against this model.

No it isn't, it means I pay to see those videos without ads, but I have to be logged in and they get to track me.

thanks for this info - I was not aware - it does not work for my six - as two are here and two west of town and two south of town.. some fosters.. so not same household.. but glad this is a thing.

The other day to prevent a young one from replaying the same soundtrack over and over via youtube - (bandwidth repeatedly counting against and lots of ads for the same repeated songs oh my) - I just popped over to amazon and bought the album and popped it onto a usb stick for them.

I picked up a couple of gift cards for their bday this week - one of them was a google play card - then I remembered G killed the music section of the play store, so I put it back and got an amazon card instead.

that premium would be a great deal if we had one more in the household here. we've got three chromecasts - two with the google tv - but not the gtv plan - sheesh the ads via youtube with that are a drain, and I wonder about the compression for music - but they still use them for convenience and the other things like discovery+ which is affordable.

Oh if only they would plex-like into a win7 box on the network and pull my collection of mp3s.

Maybe all this is going in a good direction. Fingers crossed.

A quick search (haha) shows that google pulls in $182/year per user and 90% of that is from advertising. So yes google makes a lot more than people think from ads. I also suspect that is heavily lopsided, with certain demographic being more sought after by advertisers. If they were to offer a flat opt out rate, would need to account for those people switching away and losing a very lucrative market. I would even imagine kids are unfortunately a target for advertisers because they can be very impressionable, and become lifelong customers if convinced early on.

In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user.

Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.

Well I wouldn't. To each their own.

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