Is it weird that this makes me want to subscribe to YouTube premium less than before? Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while, since so many people seem to like the service. Now I feel like they're challenging me to a duel.
If doing something as simple as asking you to hold up your end of the deal of using their website (letting ads load for the ad-supported content) is too much to ask but paying for the website is also too much to ask, you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
I don’t buy the argument that you were going to pay them in the future but you decided against it because they wouldn’t let you have it for free.
No, I want an experience that commits to showing the ad(s) up front and not interrupting the video with more ads in the middle.
I use YT primarily for music. I don't mind letting ads play at the beginning. It's when they inject them into the middle of a song and, suddenly, when I'm jamming out, RIGHT at the peak of the track when I'm having the most fun, two more ads suddenly start blaring, and I'm forced to let the first one ride for 30 seconds.
There is some music that you just can't easily access anywhere but on YT for a variety of reasons. It's what keeps me using YT, but that approach of ad injection is bullshit.
Edit: Concert videos, too. Their algorithm will slap ads in the middle of a song, rather than in between them. I absolutely would not mind an ad here and there between songs, but noooooo.
Of course you would, and of course YT and its creators earns significantly more if they show ad in the middle. Not 100% sure, but AFAIK content creator could disable ad in the middle if they want to.
Most of what I'm talking about are concerts and music uploaded to YT by fans.
YouTube, I'm watching your pre-roll and mid-roll ads like you want me to, so leave me the fuck alone with this premium shit, I'm not interested.
So it's not an "either-or" scenario.. If you are using the ad-supported experience, they still disrupt it (many times a session for me) with UI-interfering elements to try to convert you. And that sucks.
So while you are correct, such investment would be irresponsible (in my case). In other words, responsibility is what’s stopping me.
If they advertised it with regular in-video ads like the rest of the ads, sure no problem, I am used to sitting through those and I accept ads as part of a good free viewing experience..
But they constantly interfere with the standard UI layout and experience to push these repetitive intrusive ads on me, that I have closed probably hundreds of times.
They should know by now that I am not going to sign up for it, so why continue to degrade the experience for me, when I am watching their ads as a free user?
They don't do this on the website so don't tell me "that's part of the trade" because it's only in the app they do this so aggressively and repeatedly.
Every minute someone watches them is a minute that they aren't watching a potential competitor
In this sense, having a free tier at all is effective to suffocate competition, even if most users enable adblock
Actually, they would prefer if all of the ad-blocking, refuse-to-pay customers would spend a lot of time on their competitor's websites.
If they go to a competitor and block ads and consume bandwidth, then they are actively costing the competitor rather than costing Youtube for hosting.
Youtube allowing competitors to host would just consume youtube's bandwidth but with the 'views' also going to the competitor's domain (so the competitor could then potentially get additional sponsor support for having 'eyeballs' on their domain).
The vast majority of the playerbase (70~80%?) are Free2Players (F2Pers), while the rest are whales (paying players) and an even smaller subset of them are space whales who spend enough in a month to buy a luxury car or two.
The games go to great lengths to retain those F2Pers because they are the ones the whales and space whales play together with and/or against. No F2Pers, no whales, no game, no business.
Considering this with the recent price increase, and some trouble with my family plan, my initial reaction was quite negative towards YouTube. They are setting a very clear trend against what I want in their service with recent changes (Removing downvote, removing android shortcuts and other features, aggressive copyright stiking policies, aggressive promotion of shorts, terrible recommendations).
I am considering cancelling. However, a more optimistic view would be that their ad block policy could result in lower subscription fees with more ad and subscription revenue.
See [1]:
> In 2013, the boss of Time-Warner (which owns HBO), Jeff Bewkes, declared that piracy was: “Better than an Emmy” because more people watching the show inevitably led to more people deciding to pay for subscriptions.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...
The only reason we are talking about it is because shareholders want the money printer to go brrrrrr. YouTube IS profitable. Can we stop pretending one of the richest companies in the world needs me to stop blocking their ads for any reason other than greed?
And that principle is what most people balking here have a problem with.
I used to be fine with the ads. But two breaks for a five minute video is unacceptable. I hope they fail if this is what they think is okay.
They also advertise fraudulent stuff all the time now. They don’t care. They’re just desperate for money.
It would be silly to assign some sort of morality argument to the other half of it when they behave so poorly with the ads.
If Google wants me off their service because I don’t watch enough ads, that’s their call. I’m not going to make a hufflepuff about it. But their ad game is garbage.
Supposedly they have over 80 million subscribers so they're definitely not hurting[0].
I am interested in seeing what happens if/when over 50% of users in the US subscribe to it. Advertisers are losing out on probably their biggest consumer market: people with enough money to handle a $12/mo subscription. Perhaps advertising income will start to shrink $12 for each user that subs to Premium?
0: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/youtube-music-and-premium-...
It helps yt achieve their mission /s
Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.
We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.
yes.
I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.
I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.
I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.
I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).
Tracking has long moved way beyond cookies and Google is absolutely tracking what you do in incognito mode and doing their best (which is highly effective) to associate the tracking data with you.
If you want better recommendations though you may have to tolerate some things that you may consider "spying".
I personally don't care for better recommendations. I just need a functional subscription/notification system and much much better search.
If you really don't want to be tracked by Google, you should probably consider not using their services.
If you are not going to pay for THAT, you aren't going to pay for ANYTHING. Just admit you want free stuff. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that Youtube is somehow responsible for hosting all these for free.
What I don't understand is why you feel entitled to benefit from this resource without supporting it in any way.
i know some other folks are complaining about still getting tracked or whatever, but i think the simple truth is that youtube without ads is a vastly superior experience.
I watch enough YouTube for it to be a no-brainer for me, and I run an ad-blocker pretty much everywhere. Supporting the video creators I watch is worth it.
I wish I got a discount for ALSO subscribing to YTTV and Google One... that'd be nice, but I'm not parting with YT Premium any time soon. It shows I've had > 790 hours of ad-free videos.
Pay for it or don't, but what is this nonsense about being poised (for a while) to maybe someday possibly consider thinking about purchasing the service?
It's $13. (In inflation-adjusted terms that's $7.12 the year I graduated high school.) What in the world are we talking about here? Buy it or don't. What is there to think about?
Edit: Just realized I was viewing through the app with the Apple tax markup. However $13 is still more then ideal when I'll never use YouTube Music
That gives you an annual individual plan for $15usd p.a.
I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.
It also pays the content creators I watch more money. So imho it’s a win win. No ads for me more money for the peoples content I enjoy
Minus smart TVs, this seems like the point of the policy change. (And even on the TVs, if they're watching without paying while blocking ads, that's purely a cost centre.)
Your comment reads as if you feel that YT has some sort of obligation to continue letting 3rd parties make money from the work of YT without any compensation.
All device manufacturers do have agreements with Google about support for their devices and such agreements can very well be for 10+ years or even for lifetime of the devices.
PS: Actually 10 years ago when Windows Phone was a thing Microsoft has tried to make their own YouTube client without agreement with Google and it was killed by Google almost immediately.
They offered services for free without providing the disclaimer.
The attention economy is a toxic poison, I think more people than you realise are now aware of this and are less likely to pay for something Google offers because of it.
I don’t hate Google, but they’ve eroded a lot of trust.