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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is known to be awful/non-existent. All they do is in essence provide the platform.

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> All they do is in essence provide the platform.

That’s not quite correct. YouTube pays out creators who monetize their channels using YouTube ads (separate from any sponsors in the video itself). The amount paid out varies but is around $3-5 per 1000 views.

With YouTube Premium, among other features you get to avoid seeing ads. But Google still pays out creators a share of the YouTube Premium fee. See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276

His point still stands - Google only pays a share despite having much less overheads than let's say Netflix who in addition to providing the infrastructure also create the content itself (and the production costs of it are much higher than a typical YouTube video).

Google shows you content they have licenced just like everyone else. It isn't like Netflix made all the content they host etc, Netflix also licence content from third party creators so they can host it, Google just doesn't have a filter and instead accept everyone who wants to put stuff there, and then by paying you support those smaller content creators rather than just Hollywood or other big studious like you do when you pay for Disney.

So from my perspective paying for YouTube is more important than paying for Netflix, since with YouTube you help support smaller creators, while with Netflix money gets consolidated into big names and brands. The platform takes a cut at both, but it is still better to have some go to small creators instead of everything going into giant corporations.

And even if you pay for YouTube, you'll still get ads, despite YouTube detecting and tracking advertisements in videos.

YouTube itself doesn't serve ads if you're paying for premium. Outside of that, sure, content creators can do their own "sponsored by" ad segments within their videos.

It's worth it in my opinion:

you can listen to any video on mobile in the background, also no ads on mobile (so you don't need some hacky 3rd party app)

And you get YouTube music, which is comparable to Spotify (I prefer it in fact)

There's more content on YouTube then any other video platform, so in my opinion 15 per month is worth it

Keep in mind that Youtube premium is effectively a music platform as well, although you can make the same argument about Prime. Ultimately it depends on what content you consume, I spend a lot of hours on youtube and consider the advertising avoidance worthwhile for myself.

I bought prime youtube, it's basically a pay-to-get-rid-of-my-ads, fine with me but yes lower price will be better. maybe that's what they earn from a visitor per month via selling ads?

But you might as well just install an adblocker instead? It is free and there are no ads.

They can block people who are using adblocker from watching, as long as they don't do that I can't really see any moral grey area here.

I ran ads blockers but they seems not blocking Youtube's embedded ads shown up randomly every a few minutes, which is annoying. But you might be correct, just found out: Adblock for Youtube at chrome store, will try it. Thanks.

I initially balked at the price until I realised that I probably watch 2-3x as much YouTube per month as I do Netflix, which I was already happily paying for.

It’s nice to know I’m directly supporting the channels I watch too, as I can’t feasibly sign up to dozens of Patreons.

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