YouTube Premium price increased by nearly 30% | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Premium price increased by nearly 30%

9to5google.com

41 pointslow_tech_punk29 comments

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Don't worry, this is fortunately a solved problem. [0][1][2][3]

[0] https://ublockorigin.com/

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

[2] https://newpipe.net/

[3] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Is there any way to download the highest quality audio track (format 141) in yt-dlp without using my cookies from my YT premium account? If that's possible then I'll consider dropping my subscription

Not sure sorry, curious as to why you're looking for that format? I'd be very surprised if you could tell the difference in a double blind in a "normal" listening situation between 141 and 251. I may be judging you a little bit if you're using youtube as the source for your fancy music listening setup. That difference is the sort of thing where I'll notice on some nice cans in a song that's not particularly compressible, but even then probably only when ABXing or actively listening for artifacts. It's definitely not going to impact my vibe.

I'm genuinely curious about your usecase.

Yep. Just got the email. Still worth it not to see ads on youtube at work. You never know what will pop in there.

Have to admit, ad-free is worth it but I also hate the feeling of being locked in.

Ad blockers work for me on youtube, though with hiccups. I figure that when that stops working I’ll use youtube less, it’s already a time sink. And will also dust off torrent clients.

I definitely stopped watching Twitch when the adblockers stopped working, not sure I can do it for youtube, but I hope I'd quit.

There are adblockers that work for twitch without issue.

I created a separate work YouTube account, and now all of the ads are just pitches for various kinds of enterprise SaaS products.

I'm kicking myself for declining the 7.99/month lifetime price when Google Music initially launched (sometime in 2010-2014).

don't kick yourself. Many such "lifetime" prices just get shut down... so much for the "lifetime" promise, it's all about the small print

Don't kick yourself. I had a locked in family price of $14.99 and it is going up to $22.99 (more than a 50% hike). My consolation mail started with

"Thank you for being a loyal member throughout our journey. "

Thankfully this new price hike seems to be only for family plans, and I can still keep my $7.99 grandfathered individual plan. Though the day that gets increased I'm jumping ship to something else.

I will never pay for YouTube until I'm guaranteed a way to opt out of the recommendation algorithm. It's not so much a recommendation algorithm as much as it is an adversarial search on my behavior to see what cheap content I'll actually engage. Every so often I'll notice a video from a clickbait-ey channel in my sidebar about a topic I care little for, like expensive luxury items or epic pop star moments.

So, I can't trust YouTube to be objective in its recommendations. It's very likely attempting to train me to seek deeper pools within their content graph so that I use YouTube more. Which is fine if it were a free model ("freemium", really), as I would implicitly agree to be mined in exchange for a hosted service with plenty of content. That I would PAY for that, however, is not something I would feel happy about. It would feel like paying for the privilege of receiving a slap in the face.

So that's a 15% raise for content creators?

No? It should be a 30% raise for them (for the YT Premium family plan slice of viewers). As long as the revenue split percentage stays constant, an x% increase in the total cost will obviously translate to the same x% increase for each split.

You're right; percentages trip me up.

Assuming 50% split. Revenue is $10, Youtube gets $5, Creator get $5.

Revenue increases 30% (not what happened but for simplicity).

Revenue is $13, Creator gets $6.50. Increase is ($6.50 - $5.00) = $1.50. $1.50 is what % of $5.00? => 10% of $5.00 = $0.50, therefore 30% of $5.00 = $1.50.

Thus Creators receive an increase of 30%.

May be related to not being able to monetize 4k (https://9to5google.com/2022/10/17/youtube-premium-4k-test/), so they just charge more.

YouTube is a constant strain for Google and its been that way for the past few years. YouTube itself is very expensive to maintain (https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...) and has had times when they operated at a loss. Alphabet has blamed YouTube repeatedly for years when they make losses in revenue. Feels like someone crunched up some numbers recently and got angry at what they saw. Almost like this time around someone set a strict revenue goal and are determined to find more ways to profit off YouTube.

seems to be for Family plans only... Still waiting for the plan without Youtube Music... I have Spotify already, so dont want Youtube Music...

If you were ethically inclined toward such things, I've read posts online of people using VPNs to sign up for Youtube Premium from Argentina to pay a reduced rate.

I can't vouch for the effectiveness, but googling does show some people report having tried it successfully.

So I’m going to slow down my gigabit symmetric internet and route my traffic through a third party to hypothetically save $5.00/month? Wouldn’t the VPN be more expensive?

I assume this would need to happen just once during signup?

For a normal subscription, I think so, though their entitlement seems very random.

But for a family plan you may have issues adding people to the plan. I couldn’t add my girlfriend to my US family plan in Mexico for example, and it eventually booted her because it didn’t think we live together.

You don't need a VPN. The account will work without one.

This is a TOS breach for sure. One day you'll find yourself banned from all Google properties. Is it worth a few monies per month?

It's a separate account but them banning all related accounts is definitely a risk.

I use a Thai account. It works but the Google account needs to have the country set to the same one used for billing.

I share my US family plan with friends in the UK. Their account would be banned occasionally. So, Google is probably aware of this hack, it's just they are not enforcing it too seriously.

EDIT: they only banned the added family member, not the account owner. My workaround is to just recreate family member account.

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