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Comment by crop_rotation | Hacker News Reader

YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vimeo is one alternative for video hosting, and HN is surely not gonna like that model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578).

So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).

View on HN

No, it perfectly showcases that people do not want to pay 1000% more money for the privilege of paying a monthly subscription.

Youtube Premium costs $12/month [1]. Ads average something like $2 per 1000 views to the creators (in some of the most common categories) [2]. Youtube takes a ~45% cut, so Youtube makes ~$4 per 1000 views from ads. So, to reach $12/month, you would need to average 3000 views per month. At a average of 30 days per month, you would need to consume on average 100(!) videos a day for Youtube to come out behind.

Wikipedia says Youtube made ~$28.8B in 2021 and had ~2.5B MAU as of the beginning of 2022. So, the average MAU only brings in ~$10/year. You need to average over 10x the number of views as the average MAU for Youtube Premium to come out behind for Youtube.

The actual alternative is that you charge a comparable price to the advertising revenue instead of complaining that it does not work because your consumers are not dumb enough to pay a 1000% markup.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/premium

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzb54Upcink

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

I don't think you're taking everything into consideration here.

For one it's not only creators who make money. You also have to pay for hosting/development as well as Google's own profit. So the cost to buy ads is clearly greater than $2 per 1000.

I just looked and apparently the cost to buy 1000 views is about $20. So your off by 1000% yourself.

At that rate premium is priced equivalent to 600 views a month or 20 a day. Which doesn't sound absurd to me for someone who uses it as their main source of screen time.

Remember ad views /= video views. There may be 4 ads per video which mean we're talking about watching 5 videos per day.

How many ads would you see in a day watching cable?

If you only use it a few times a week to look up the odd tutorial or something then it's probably not worth it.

For anyone who watches hours everyday it seems a no brainer. I reckon the only reason people aren't buying is because of habit. They're used to ads so a subscription seems outrageous. With Netflix they're used to a subscription so an ad seems outrageous.

Or maybe the people being outraged are different people, I dunno.

I already accounted for all of those factors. The $2 per 1000 views was the estimated revenue from a video with 10 million views. That presumably accounts for the number of ads delivered over the average watch time of the video. The creator averages $2 per 1000 views which is their 55% cut of the ad revenue [1]. That averages out to around $4 per 1000 views in ad revenue paid to Youtube of which Youtube keeps 45% which is ~$2 and the creator keeps 55% which is also ~$2. Unless the "net revenue" they are mentioning is not actually the gross ad revenue from the ads, this logic is sound.

I have no idea where you are getting the $20 per 1000 views number from as no source is given. I have no private information on the topic as I do not run ads on Youtube or run a Youtube channel, but that does not seem to conform to any of the publicly disclosed information from Youtubers that I have ever seen in common entertainment categories. As seen in the video I showed, a channel targeting Finance does average ~$20 per 1000 views, but those are relatively narrow demographics and nowhere near the most common content. Do you have a advertising account on Youtube and the $20 is the number you are being quoted for a ad campaign? If so, is it targeting a high value, competitive demographic? Otherwise, what is the source of the $20 per 1000 views number?

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=...

I think you two are comparing different numbers.

You are discussing how much money content creators get paid for impressions.

The other person is discussing how much advertisers spend to for impressions.

In the middle is Google, which has it's own costs. If you are going to pay Google to not show you ads it makes more sense to base that off of the amount of revenue it would have generated from advertisers instead of the amount of revenue it pays to content creators on your behalf.

Again, Youtube splits ad revenue 55% to the creator and keeps 45% for themselves. The $4 per 1000 views number I am stating is the money advertisers are paying Youtube unless the term “net revenue” they are using in their revenue sharing FAQ does not mean the the incoming revenue from the ads. I am fairly certain that if they were deducting their cost of delivery from that number then net revenue would not be a correct term and they would need to disclose it as gross profit or some other non-revenue term. As a result, I believe my statement that Youtube is getting ~$4 per 1000 views from advertisers is a accurate representation of the information I have presented.

You've skipped paying additional rightsholders - subscription music rights are substantively more expensive than advertising funded ones. You've no processing fees.

In the US the avg cost of 1000 views to the advertiser is probably $15+. (I’ve spent millions(?) on YT ads)

You can’t average global numbers like that when the average in Indonesia is possibly sub a dollar.

So the premium YouTube subscription might just cost around double what is “fair”

Except those who are most likely to buy it are likely power users who watch twice as many videos.

Which would make the price perfectly fair.

So I’m not sure there’s really a problem here.

That is a good point. It is probably not fair to average globally.

Looking for some US only numbers [1]. It seems reasonable to estimate the US as having ~200M MAU. The revenue numbers reported there are ~$11B, ~$15B, ~$20B globally of which ~$2.5B, ~$3.5B, ~$4B were US only. So, the US was ~25% going down to ~20% globally.

If we extrapolate that forward at 20% (which likely overestimates the US share which was decreasing over the reported period) then the ~$28B in the current year would have ~$6B in US revenue over 200M users which is around $30 per year. This is 3x the number I originally calculated of $10 per year. This still results in 400% revenue for Youtube Premium over the average ad-supported user.

[1] https://spendmenot.com/blog/youtube-revenue-statistics/

What kind of person clicks on YouTube ads and what did you sell them?

That’s not how advertising work. Most of the time, the goal is to create/increase brand awareness, then when you have to buy something you will consider these brands, possibly in a more favorable way.

If I'm aware a brand is wasting money to make me waste my time, money that furthermore will affect their product prices, you can be sure I'm never buying anything from this brand unless there is no alternatives (in which case they don't need awareness)

The best examples are the subscriptions advertised on podcasts, which are invariably venture backed and remarkably shitty. How are the hosts so excited to get their memtal health records leaked!? (€£¥$)

That’s not how the average Joe’s brain is wired

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

only ad I ever clicked on was a Swedish guy selling human meat for consumption. "Eat a Swede" a company in the lab grown meat space.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE-z6DQv5yg

But yes Ads are more about brand awareness than to actually get you to buy stuff.

I would have expected the human meat seller to be German. But just the concept of human meat, even if lab grown, makes me queasy.

lol, just realised about my mistake.Woops.

On the one hand, it seems sensible that, if you want to grow your own human muscles, the best thing to eat would be human muscles. On the other hand, for purposes of maintaining and repairing the muscles you already have, the nutrient profile you want is probably pretty different from that, and likely there are animals whose meat matches that profile more closely.

> it seems sensible that, if you want to grow your own human muscles, the best thing to eat would be human muscles

and plants shouldn't pull nutrients from the ground, they should only eat other plants! incredible how plants are not sensible!

The vast vast majority of people, including most people who think they don’t. Keep in mind a typical CTR for YT would be 0.5-3% so if you clicked 1 in 100 ads out of curiosity, you’re a median clicker. The second half of your question would take a long time to answer, sorry.

Also, if you look at content creators who share their revenue, they actually make more money from Premium subscribers than they do from ads. So if people want to really support content creators, then subscribing to Premium is the best option.

But what’s my time worth, not sitting through ads each month? If I make $12/hr, and I have to watch 120 30sec ads in a month of watching YouTube, I’ve broken even.

I think most of us make a bit more than 12/hr… so it quickly becomes worth it.

Obviously, that is why I specifically framed it in terms of Youtube's revenue generation. Youtube provides a ad-supported option and a paid option, except they charge 10x the rate for the paid option. Yet for some reason, the argument is always that nobody likes paid options or "microtransaction" models when the obvious problem with almost every scheme that companies try is that they always try to markup by like 1000% at a minimum.

Only if the time you save not watching ad, you actually work. What if you would just watch more videos in the same time or go to 9gag?

What if I am watching more videos that teach me something that ultimately make me earn more?

ADS is money I'm leaving on the table.

IMO That's the wrong question. The question is rather is the premium 'enough' to make it worth it to buy it or just stay with ad blocking as we did years before that option.

Apart from the excellent points raised by u/12907835202 in a sibling comment, another important consideration is that YT premium consumers are disproportionately rich compared to the entire YT consumer base. So if you are taking averages, you have to multiply them by at least 3x (i.e. 300%) to account for higher CPMs due to higher conversion values expected from such demographics.

This is the trap Musk was trying to walk Twitter in to with pay to remove ads.

Advertisers are paying a lot more to show ads to exactly the people that might pay to remove ads, wealthy people, especially US people.

The break even price for the subscription has to be much higher than the average revenue per user (globally ~1/10th of US revenue per user), and has to be higher than the average revenue for US users because of much higher advertising spend per user on that demographic.

So in order to not see ads, I must outbid companies who want to show me ads against my wishes. And like any protection scheme, being willing to pay makes you a bigger target. This is why adblockers are the only moral choice.

I say the real moral choice is not to consume that content. Using adblockers is akin to stealing, just because you are not willing to pay the price providers want to charge you.

When youtube.com sends me an HTML file full of links to videos, I am stealing nothing by ignoring some of those links and only watching the videos I care about.

I have no moral obligation to waste my time according to Google's preference.

You are freeloading no matter how much sophistry you try to cloak it with. They haven’t yet started enforcing their terms of service as strictly as they could but what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus and claiming it’s okay because the bus was going to run either way.

> You are freeloading no matter how much sophistry you try to cloak it with.

I'm not trying to cloak anything - of course it's freeloading. So what? We're all freeloading, all the time, on all the millions of things millions people have made and given away over the internet. Google didn't make those videos they're sharing, after all - they got that stuff for free!

If Google decides they no longer want to participate in the sharing economy, that's their business.

> what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus

There is no fare gate on this subway. There are no toll collectors; there are no tolls. Everyone rides for free. This transit network is paid for by the vendors running shops inside the stations, who hope to profit from the foot traffic. They can hope all they want that I will make purchases in their stores on my way to and from the train - but maybe I'm just not going to.

> We're all freeloading, all the time, on all the millions of things millions people have made and given away over the internet. Google didn't make those videos they're sharing, after all - they got that stuff for free!

This just isn't true. You're not freeloading if you use the service as designed – ad-supported services became predominant because that was the easiest way to reliably get enough revenue to run a business. Google pays roughly half of the ad revenue to people who make YouTube content, which may or may not be what you consider fair but it's definitely not free.

> > what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus

> There is no fare gate on this subway.

That's the ads – the terms are that you either watch ads or pay directly. When you bypass the ads, you're breaking that arrangement and depriving everyone of the money they would otherwise have earned. Now, you can argue that they get enough anyway but that's exactly the logic that people use to hop a fare-gate trying to claim that all of the other passengers are taking care of the cost. If that's who you want to be, just admit it.

> the terms are that you either watch ads or pay directly. When you bypass the ads, you're breaking that arrangement

Well, that's where we differ: you think there's an arrangement, which obligates you to support Google's profit model, and I simply don't. I never agreed to any terms, and other people's businesses are not my responsibility.

Do you feel obligated to buy a block of cheese after you eat the free sample on the tray at the grocery store?

YouTube has terms of service which you agreed to by continuing to use it. This article is about stricter enforcement of those terms so the only change is that you might soon be unable to pretend otherwise.

The cheese sample analogy breaks down as soon as you think about it. Unlike watching ads on YouTube, the samples are offered without any willing agreement to make a purchase but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other terms. For example, if you try to show up to the store naked or drunk you’ll be asked to leave because, like YouTube, it’s private property and the business has no obligation to provide service to people who don’t follow their terms. Similarly, you’d be refused entry if you started taking all of the samples or standing around shouting about how bad the cheese is. That store probably has a bathroom, but if you’re not a customer you aren’t allowed to use it.

All of this is conceptually very similar to that YouTube offers videos to people who watch ads (or pay) but the difference is that most people understand that it costs money to make physical things. Digital content has been ad supported for so long that many people think of it as free and are unwilling to even consider other models.

If you an tell me a way to teleport to an alternate reality without YouTube, I will take it. In this reality, 90+% of videos are hosted on YouTube simply due to network effects.

And yes, public transit should ideally be free to the passengers too - fare collection and enforcement is a giant waste of money when the whole thing is already largely funded via grants.

In both cases, yes, there are arguably better models but you get those by working for them, not freeloading.

For example, it’s easy to avoid YouTube but you’re supporting YouTube’s continued dominance by using it – even with an ad blocker, you’re contributing to views and likely engaged social activity which drives more traffic to YouTube, and for that matter there are a surprising number of people here contributing PR to YouTube pro bono by claiming there’s no alternative, which isn’t true but certainly what they want advertisers and creators to think.

Similarly, I also agree that there is a lot of unhealthy history around transit fares but dodging them does not build support for lowering them. You get that by working in the political process first and riding for free after that isn’t actively harmful for the service.

Picture an alternative universe where all transit was ad supported and everyone has to watch an ad before you can get on a bus. That or pay $1000 a month for free no-ad transit anywhere in a city.

Except there are some people with ad-blockers who can get on their bus immediately and always get to their destination earlier because of that, being more productive and mentally healthy throughout their life as a consequence of not watching ads every day of their life. All without paying $1000 a month.

People who dutifully watch ads (let's call them ad-watchers) think the ad-blockers are freeloaders and that they - the ad-watchers - are doing the difficult right thing by watching obtrusive long useless braindead ads every day since it supports the finances of the entire transit system. And that the ad-blockers are essentially stealing and should pay the $1000 a month if they want the ad free version.

The ad-blockers believe they are fighting a system they believe is harmful and want changes and argue they are using ad-blockers in a sort of protest as is their civil right. The ad-blockers point out they would rather have a system where customers can each rapidly pay for transit at a reasonably low fare and that $1000 a month is outrageous. Moreover that the advetisement saturation to support the transit system is likewise harmful, useless and inefficient and that there is a better way that will make everyone happy. They further argue that due to monopolies and network effects ad-blocking is the only option for anyone to easily protest as there are no private transit companies that have been able to gain the capital and infrastructure necessary to compete with the ad-supported transit hegemony.

The ad-watchers scoff and tell the ad-blockers that no matter how much sophistry they try to cloak it with to falsely paint themselves as protestors - what they are doing is no different from stealing and they are just lucky the transit system hasn't started more rigidly enforcing its terms of service.

Not just rich, they likely consume YT significantly higher than normal crowd, thus higher cost for Google to serve them. If someone watches 1 video a day in YT, they likely won't think of getting a subscription.

You can still sell those users' more valuable usage data and they've even coughed up a bunch of personal information to setup payment and have signaled that they have money and are willing to pay for things. So in return for paying they get no ads on this particular platform while getting a target painted on their back.

And if you need more money later you can just convert youtube premium from a no ads platform to a less ads platform. You just have to do it slowly so not to many people bail at once because the pot got to hot to fast

You also get YouTube Music, which is not as great as Spotify, but nonetheless worth something.

In fact, that’s the primary reason everyone I know who has YouTube Premium subscribes: music steaming + ad-free YouTube.

That needs to be factored into your calculation, no?

No, a bundled second thing that I won't use is worth $0 and so does not have to be factored in.

It's even worse, as they actively degrade the features you use.

With movies and music in the mix, international licensing agreements needs to be respected.

In short, I paid for YouTube premium to avoid ads. Then I travelled to another country where YouTube didn't have licensing rights for all of their movies and music, so my premium account was just disabled completely and I got ads again.

You can fix that with a VPN service, or by creating your own VPN network. You could buy a Digital Ocean droplet in your location and connect to that like a VPN.

https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/vpn

1 - this is not a solution, it's a workaround. an adblocker solves the issue much better

2 - DO vpns are blocked (almost) everywhere

Are you asking people to pay additional money to a third party service so that they can continue to use a service they have already paid for and should be fixed by that service provider in the first place? Don't you think this is ridiculous?

Genuinely curious: if you bought YT premium mainly to block ads, why not just use Ublock Origin along with something like NextDNS?

I don't need youtube music and am lucky enough to have youtube premium lite available at 6€. That just eliminates ads for half the price.

being forced to pay for YouTube music is one of the reasons I ended my YouTube premium subscription years a while back

Great, then it shouldn't be a problem to offer a cheaper price for people who only want YouTube, right?

After you pay for the music rights for a subscription video service the cost base is identical. As you could use YouTube as a music streaming replacement service (and literally millions of people do) then the labels charge for the same license.

At least in Sweden they are offering Youtube Premium lite which is just ad-free Youtube (no Youtube Music)for about $6/month.

That’s about the level I would pay for the service, a major bummer that lite isn’t available in the US.

No, if they introduced this tomorrow you still wouldn't pay. Don't kid yourself.

> That needs to be factored into your calculation, no?

Only if I get to pay for a lifetime of access with a hand-drawn picture of a seven-legged spider.

I remember that being hilarious. Do you have a link to it?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/paying-bills-with-spid...

and

https://youtu.be/2IivXENMiI8

This could easily be fixed by paying the creators a much larger per view fee whenever a premium user watched their content. 1cent per view is 10$/cpm, that is 3-6 times more than what ads pay and would strongly incentivise creators to encourage subscribers go premium and create premium-only content for them. Now you can't do that because premium is a ghost-town and you lose ad revenue, but if, say 25% of users are premium then it starts to make financial sense.

Your suggestion to cut the price is unlikely to strongly increase premium subscriptions, YouTube has probably already set it to a revenue maximizing value.

Giving them my card data feels more expensive than $12/month. The model of paying to remove ads always felt like hostage taking.

"Is this ad annoying enough for you? No? You think you're a tough guy? Here's an advert of me slicing off your toes. Now tell me your home address so I can mail them to you. Read me the CVV2 numbers from the back of the card to make it stop!"

You can choose to pay for convenient download functionality and background playback on mobile, and think of the ads as a bonus, if you prefer.

Let me guess: the download functionality doesn't actually give me access to the DRM-free video file and when YT deletes a video it's useless to me.

Sure. I wouldn't recommend it for archival. I would recommend it for downloading a few videos before a trip when you expect flaky/slow internet. Much more convenient than the youtube-dl dance I did before. Ymmv.

Of course it doesn't. It's just allowing Google to have a local cache.

I'm a premium subscriber but the background playback thing is a pretty insulting idea to me. They can save like 95% of the bandwidth if I'm listening to something audio-only. So why make it part of the more expensive option?

It's probably a licensing thing due to the large amount of music on Youtube.

Nah, come on. It's just a popular feature that they locked behind the paywall, so that more people subscribe.

Don't get me wrong, I really like my Premium. But this decision is a business one, not a technical one, and I was charitable.

Even if it's a business decision, so what? It makes perfect sense, Youtube cant charge advertisers for video ads played when the app is in the background.

Nah, come on. The price is well worth it just for the hosting and internet traffic costs.

Can you put those numbers in terms of exec salaries?

Like, Google Cloud's 2023Q1 profits being ~85% of Sundar's 2022 earnings [0].

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/google-employees-complain-ab...

You're assuming YouTube is not loosing money with non-paying customers...

Also there's the fact that once enough people get on board with the ad free subscription services, they usually just start adding ads anyway.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that’s true. I paid my Android TV $2000 and guess what? They added ads on the Home! Google sucks and there’s no way I’ll directly give them money, ever again.

I wasn't even thinking about Google specifically here, it seems like almost every ad free service eventually adds ads.

for eg. Netflix. Although they will try to convince that people will have to pay less.

I think a smart TV home screen showing you things you might consider watching on services you probably already subscribe to is in bounds. A bit like calling menu items at a restaurant advertising.

It's not, because it keeps suggesting stuff from Disney+, which I don't subscribe to. It's advertising.

It's also clearly not inspired from stuff I've watched, but from stuff announcers want me to watch.

This is just smart TV's in general. I have "The Frame" TV from Samsung and was super disappointed when I realized they put non-removable ads on the home page. Mostly from Disney+ which I don't even subscribe to. This is after I went through and spent an hour disabling their built-in autoplay cable-over-internet feature.

Advertisers aren't interested in buying only the eyeballs that are too poor to pay themselves out of the annoyance.

Youtube premium also includes other features, such as ability to download videos to view offline (e.g. flights).

But I also feel like you have an incorrect unstated assumption: People are not perfectly rational. The difference between paying $0 and paying $1 is ENORMOUSLY bigger than the difference between paying $1 and $12.

C.f. people will spend hours finding the perfect app that is also free, instead of just paying $2 for the perfect app they found after 2min. It doesn't make any sense.

Pirating YouTube videos with a third-party downloader also gives me the ability to download them for offline use, and see no ads.

I don't judge you, but when I actually can pay for a product that is as good as (or better) than pirated, then I don't mind paying.

For youtube I can. So I do. It's just a shame that so many industries give you a worse product than what you can pirate for free. I actually am willing to pay.

If I could pay the creators for what they make on YouTube, I would do so relatively cheerfully.

I have zero interest in giving money to a company that is actively trying to undermine everyone's privacy and security in the service of its own profit.

I guess that's what patreon is for.

It's not only about the markup imo. I share netflix and all with my girlfriend in the same household. But for YouTube we both need our own premium because of the weird limits. More than that I would likely need 2 for me alone because of the limits. Even more because I organized my abos in different accounts.

I would buy one, but I won't buy 3. And I won't buy even 1 when I still have ads every so often.

What weird limits ? What ads ? I'm sharing the yt premium with my whole family with no issues, and the only ads I see are the sponsoring from content creator directly in the video, but nothing from google

Only one device being able to hear music at once? Only 2 or so being able to watch movies at once? YouTube app and browser on the same device already being 2 devices. And yes with ads I mean sponsored ad blocks from the creators. Before I had these blocked I unsubbed more people than I subbed because of minute long VPN ads

Guess I'm dumb, because I've been subscribed to YouTube premium for quite a while now. I watch it on many devices that don't have any way of installing ad-blockers (like streaming devices to TVs). Not to mention, that an "ad" on YouTube has no time limit. I remember back when I didn't subscribe of seeing an ad for marble countertops that lasted over 45 minutes. Seriously. So if I just put on a bunch of videos to watch that may be like 10 minutes each, in between may be a 45 minute commercial that I have to go and physically hit the skip button. Sometimes I like to fall asleep listening to soothing videos, only to be hit with a fricken 45 minute commercial that's LOUD in between.

Sure, guess I'm dumb. But I don't care. Subscribing gets me what I need.

When looking at these numbers you have to remember that they are global numbers. Ads in rich countries like the US will make them way more money per user than the ads in poor countries. And YouTube Premium is also far cheaper in poor countries - it's like $2/mo in India, which probably pretty accurately reflects how much an average user draws in in each country.

Not to derail you but Premium costs $16/month when I view the option from the YouTube app on my phone. Not sure why this is the case.

EDIT: Never mind it’s just the apple tax. I had forgotten about it.

$12/mo is a ridiculously low amount compared to what value YouTube brings.

YouTube premium also includes a music service with near peer features to Spotify/Apple music. On its own that’s worth $5-$10 a month. There’s also other features like offline downloads and background audio for podcasts.

Ad removal is just one feature amongst many with YouTube premium. So it’s not fair to compare the subscription price entirely against the CPM of the adverts you don’t have to watch.

I've said it before and I've said it again: ad-based content and pay content are incompatible business models. YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for. The content is not worth paying for because it's been designed from the ground up to sell ads.

When a website designed to sell ads fails to sell content, that's not evidence that selling content doesn't work, it's evidence that selling content designed to sell ads doesn't work.

This is spot on. People assume Vimeo is the only competitor to YouTube, but that's wrong. Reddit is a perfectly fine competitor to YouTube in a sense that people don't really need the content to come in form of video.

No, just no. Reddits poor quality commentaries that are mostly bots and teen trollers, do not compare to millions of hours of content from verified experts amd amateurs alike showcasing or explaining something of interest to the viewer.

Thats like compairing backroom gossip to news. Sure both have their biases and inaccuracies, but at least one of them holds a resemblance of accountability as opposed to the other that can spew anonymous bogus crap at will. With zero consequence.

Reddit has very poor quality content. And it keeos on getting worse. Its just too riddled with bots. Imagine youtubes comment section without the videos. Reddit in a nutshell.

Reddit is enormously variable.

Yeah, stay far away from the most popular subs. The traffic is insane and there's no time to form any kind of community.

But you can find very good quality subreddits.

Small subs are often better, because the mods haven't burned out yet and people know each other.

And there's gems like /r/AskHistorians. Moderated with an iron fist, quality content is the only thing to be found there.

I think you're just not the audience. Most Millennials and early Gen Z/Zoomers grew up with YouTube and have long-term connections with tons of creators, communities, and groups of channels to watch it for hours a day if not >20 hours a week. For these users, paying for the privilege to access that content in an a-la-carte way without distractions is immensely valuable. Anecdotally, most of my friend groups pay for it in one way or another (e.g. splitting the cost of the subscription by using Google Families, or using the discounted student plan).

Ok, but one is far more likely to support a creator's patreon or personal website for exclusive content than pay for a heap of content that you are not enthusiastic about at best and is genuinely vile at worst.

No, I’m far more likely to just pay for the heap of content and watch/listen to the stuff I like than to pay for the Patreon of every single channel I watch and/or subscribe to. I’m at a point now where if I even slightly like a channel I’ll throw it in the subscription heap as a signal to YouTube to show me more of it. Conversely, there are two Patreons I support, one is on YouTube and the other is a webcomic.

In contrast with the sibling post, I do exactly this- support a wide variety of YouTube creators on Patreon.

I then use adblock and sponsorblock on YouTube. It seems like a good balance to me.

Sponsorblock is truly a godsend. I hear the word VPN 100x less a day than I used to.

I am a Millennial and I do feel connection to some creators. I am sad that I won't be able to watch the content anymore if Youtube blocks me. I will miss them and I will miss other cool content, like recorded conference talks and tutorial and stuff.

I did try Youtube without adblocker and it was unusable, and Google is horrible evil company that I am for sure not giving any money.

I'll miss it, but at the same time, Youtube is horrible time thief. It is bittersweet but it will make my life better to be without it. If I spent the time I have over the years wasted on Youtube instead reading books, hiking or working out, I'd be a much better person today.

YouTube is the most valuable and worth paying for video content I watch. And I subscribe to several streaming services in addition to YouTube premium. YT is the last one I’d give up. Not kidding.

YT premium is my only paid streaming and I'd simply stop watching youtube over going back to ads. I watch 2-3hrs of youtube a day and I'm glad that creators feel that YT premium revenue is a good source of revenue for them. Not their biggest, but a reasonable chunk.

I’m a full-time YouTuber. On a per-view basis, I earn slightly more from Premium views than from ad-watching views. (We’re talking tiny fractions of a cent, but they add up.)

Also, demonetized videos are still eligible for Premium revenue.

> demonetized videos are still eligible for Premium revenue.

Wow, TIL.

So you make more per view for a Premium subscriber. What about in total. What percent of your monthly profit is from Premium viewers vs Ad-watching viewers.

> What percent of your monthly profit is from Premium viewers vs Ad-watching viewers.

Around 5%

>YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for.

I beg to differ. As a hobbyist type, and also someone interested in semi trashy niche content (true crime), having access to a virtually unlimited catalogue of fresh content, a lot of it exceptionally good quality, makes it absolutely worth the money.

If I could have any one subscription, it would be YouTube 10 times out of 10. And as someone who abhors advertising, I'm happy to pay.

You sound like you don't subscribe to youtube premium.

This mirrors my sentiments.

I love YouTube and pay for it.

I have YouTube Premium, it comes with YouTube music; I am perfectly happy paying for that as I consolidate music streaming with ad-free watching in my bed.

It replaced apple music and spotify for me; plus it gives me access to all sorts of music that is only released there as videos.

If I ever have to watch youtube with ads, I am going to just not YT at all.

If Youtube Premium actually blocked all the ads (including sponsored content), then I would pay for it. But it doesn't, so I have to use Sponsor Block anyway. Why pay for something that won't get the job done?

Sponsored content isn't controlled by YouTube though, it's controlled by the creator

Yet third party YT apps skip these annoying video parts. Premium definitely feels like a huge step down if you suddenly see ads in every second video and you are not used to.

which I am paying for anyway if I go premium

thanks, but no thanks

Sponsored content is regulated by Youtube's content policy like everything else on the platform, so it is in fact controlled by Youtube. The same way, the Youtuber's speech itself is controlled by Youtube, as shown by the recent “demonetize all the videos where people curse” (which generated much drama in the French Youtuber community, for cultural reasons).

Because YouTube shouldn't censor their creators.

Yeah, I'm the same. I spend hours on youtube, in fact we don't have any streaming or cables subscription and I don't miss it. The content is fantastic IMHO. I would pay for this one service. I'm actually seriously contemplating subscribing to it now, after all those many years of consuming it for free.

If you spend hours, it's so worth it. Youtube is a whole different experience without the constant ads.

Source: Been subscribed for years and I watch hours a day on _average_. In fact I might be addicted to YouTube, but that's a different story.

I'll drop a contrarian take. I love youtube premium. The content I "comsume" (yech!) is well worth the 12ish dollars. I could skip ads with a blocker, I could join every creator's patreon, I could watch/listen in firefox on my phone, I could yt-dl the videos for offline play.. But none of that is as convenient*cheap as a premium subscription.

I agree with this. Subscriptions are one thing, but we are missing the obvious here: people don't want ads. No need to pay to remove them when you can just use an ad blocker.

tldr: the commons seems undervalued by individuals

You can just use an ad blocker, and don't get me wrong, I hate ads. But youtube ads don't load potentially malicious scripts (for now), and they provide the money that incentivizes this MASSIVE open self publisher friendly library of video data. So adblocker on youtube reminds me of leaving grocery carts in the middle of parking lots. Stores like Aldi solve this by requiring a quarter to use their carts, but that's incinvenient.

Also reminds me of the open source funding challenge. The commons requires individual buy in and conscientious support, something that seems to be on the decline because(?) no one wants to carry free riders.

I couldn't disagree more.

The majority of my usage, and the usage of _many_ others based on the view count for DIY stuff, is watching people fix or build stuff. Usually because I'm in the middle of a project trying to figure out how to do something, or because I'm thinking about a project and wanting to get an idea of how difficult it'll be. Youtube University basically.

I pay for premium because it saves so much time, and I hate ads when I'm under a car trying to remember what bolt goes where.

Also, from an economic model, Stratechery has a great article last week discussing this - worth a read. https://stratechery.com/2023/the-unified-content-business-mo...

The problem with this logic is whether or not your usage mirrors sustainable usage if you're selling content - and I'd argue it doesn't.

The useful uses of YouTube are basically a side-effect of the real usage which is "get eyeballs on the screen to watch the screen more" - which is what you want when you sell ads, whereas you kind of want the opposite when you sell subscriptions - subscribed users who use the service as little as possible are cost efficient users.

The content is not worth paying for because it's been designed from the ground up to sell ads.

Some of it is, but the vast bulk of it clearly was not. You knew that of course.

I'd strongly consider paying for YT if it were an independent company. But as a part of Google - fuck no.

> I'd strongly consider paying for YT if it were an independent company

YT wouldn't be YT if it was an independent company. Lack of competition in the field is a proof

YouTube was bought by Google after it was already massively popular.

YouTube was just 18 months old when Google bought it and it had just started to fend off very costly copyright claims. It was popular, but 2006 popular.

YouTube was also unprofitable at the time. With out google backing youtube it may have gone the way of Napster.

By this logic, Netflix shouldn't be Netflix (or in its current market position) either.

YouTube Premium is the best thing I pay for each month (I actually don't pay for it it's included with Pixel Pass). It a little more than Apple Music and Spotify and you get that included into YouTube premium. YouTube has the largest music library out of any music streaming service. If you watch YouTube on a TV, YouTube premium is a must.

I switch between paying for streaming services on a regular basis, but YouTube Premium is the one that I stick with all the time. Lots of high quality content.

"YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for."

Are you serious?

I've got youtube premium, nebula, curiositystream and I subscribe to various youtubers on floatplane.

And I've got to be honest – youtube premium is not really worth it. All the other services have high-quality content, because they're designed from the ground up for paying users.

Okay, so a lot of people are responding that they love YouTube content, and some of them pay for it.

Yes, obviously the largest crowdsourced video service in the world has some subscribers. But the fact is, they aren't enough subscribers to approach its ad revenue. If you don't address why that is, you're not really responding to my point.

> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay

There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium ads. Yes, I know it exist. No, I don't want it - the more you try to trick me into activating the trial, the less I want it.

> So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).

Proper ad blocker on the desktop. yt-dlp for archiving/off-line playing. NewPipe or some other alternative YouTube players for mobile.

Yes, I know you meant a non-free-riding alternative, but hey - I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available. But I'm not getting bullied into subscribing.

I've been a subscriber ever since Google Play Music bundled it in, and it's fine. Sorry to hear you're getting bullied, but the paid experience really is rather nice.

> I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available.

> I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it.

These two statements seem to be mutually incompatible unless you're trying to argue that a premium tier doesn't really exist unless you can write the terms of service and audit the company providing it. It's also somewhat hard to follow the logic here: if you don't trust YouTube, why are you watching them at all? It's not like Google tracks you less that way and if you're under the impression that your ad blocker is helping there you can certainly subscribe to Premium while leaving the same blocker enabled.

I like premium stake and would pay for it. I'm not eating premium stake at Cockroach Joe. His sandwiches are alright.

How are they incompatible?

People will make all sort of excuses to rationalize not paying for digital content that they can easily get for free.

Funny part is. I actually got YT premium from family member. It's indistinguishable from using adblock.

I don't make any excuses-- if the content is handed to me for free, I take it. They also hand me ads for free but I don't care for those, thanks.

It's really a strange concept that we're somehow cheating someone for not looking at an ad. And yet somehow it wouldn't be cheating if we poured over every ad but never bought anything in them.

But you are cheating someone. The creators of the videos you're watching don't get anything when you block the ads. That means you've cheated them of money, on top of cheating the company of money.

It's not handed to you for free, there's an implicit condition that you watch the content and the ads that are served with it. Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.

>It's not handed to you for free, there's an implicit condition that you watch the content and the ads that are served with it.

No, there isn't. The web was designed from the beginning to allow the end user to have control over what content is and is not displayed. It isn't television, radio or magazines, the platform owner doesn't have complete control over the layout and display of the content they serve. There is no condition, implicit or otherwise, that the end user will pretend they're consuming an old media product just because web platforms can't move beyond old media models of revenue.

None of which require viewing, reading or listening to the ads, either. Ads have always been a gentleman's agreement.

>Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.

No, Youtube is going to reap what it sowed, because no one is going to turn off their ad blockers. If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now. Google bought a free video service and tried and failed to monetize it to the point of nearly ruining it for content creators with their puritanical rules, arbitrary demonitization, opaque to nonexistent support and restrictive algorithm, but no matter how much they squeeze the turnip, it won't bleed enough for them.

That's not our problem. We'll gladly support content creators directly through Patreon or other means, but Google can get fucked.

Which brings us right back to the article: don't be surprised when your ad-blocker stops working.

Serving high bitrate video is not cheap and YouTube is notoriously breaking even at best. Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has. If that's what you want so long as it doesn't have Google's name in the corner, so be it, that's understandable.

>If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now.

I disagree. I think people are inherently cheap and will exhaust other options of getting the same content for free first. We shall see I guess.

> don't be surprised when your ad-blocker stops working

Yes, it's an arms race, always has been. But it's more expensive for them to break the ad blockers than it will be for the ad blockers to inevitably update, so if it's a war of attrition, they will still inevitably lose.

The problem isn't that people aren't watching the ads, the problem is Google's business model doesn't work, not for Google, not for the consumer and certainly not for content creators, and the only solution they can come up with is trying to force people to watch ads - which never works.

>Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has.

I mean, plenty of alternatives already exist, and content creators are starting to lead viewers to those alternatives, because of Youtube's arbitrary censorship and demonetization. Every social media platform hosts video now. There are decentralized platforms like Peertube. We're way past the point where "streaming video" is a hard problem that only Google-scale infrastructure can solve.

They're going to have to innovate or die like any other company, and disabuse themselves of the illusion that the web is a gravy train where the rules of supply and demand don't apply. This isn't innovation, this is desperation.

Which alternatives host and stream up to 4K@60 HDR videos for free/ads only?

I don't know, but given the choice of watching slightly lower quality videos (which probably look the same on their phones anyway) and paying for a free service, most people will prefer lower quality videos.

If I were to allow all ads but make it a rule to never actually watch them or heaven forbid, buy anything in them, would that be ok? I'm sure it would be ok with the content provider, because then they get their money and that's all that counts.

If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.

>If I were to allow all ads but make it a rule to never actually watch them or heaven forbid, buy anything in them, would that be ok?

Yes, you would be holding up your end of the agreement.

>If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.

Buy YouTube Premium and you won't get any ads and the content creators you watch will get more money than if an ad had played instead. Win-win.

I don't remember ever seeing an agreement. I'm not a subscriber.

But it's interesting that you'd have no problem with me never buying anything in the ads. What's the purpose of them again?

the purpose of an advertisement is to give advertisement companies something to sell to product makers, and to give product makers something to have media companies put in front of viewers in exchange for money.

it's a whole economy unto itself. money changing hands, jobs, all of it. almost no one buys something because they saw an ad for it.

Your use of the service is governed by the terms[0], which say "You are not allowed to:... alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content...". Even if you've never signed up for a Google account, it's implicit that YouTube doesn't actually serve anything for free, every video view and page load is a transaction for "youtube serves me content and I pay for it by having screen real estate taken up by ads". They do not have to serve the content if they think you aren't upholding your end of the bargain, which is this ad blocker block.

0: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8

I am sorry, but the internet right now is bloated with ads that slow down everything and create an absolute distraction when one tries to browse, I do not care if they have problem modifying the appearance and behaviour of a webpage that I have loaded on my browser, but this goes to anything in the internet basically. I am not gonna compromise myself before they all fix the internet of the mess they have created.

I pay for the content that I think it is worth supporting, and that's it. I do not think youtube is worth supporting, and if quite often the only reason I watch things there instead of somewhere else is due to laziness. Same for many creators I follow probably. If they set adblock restrictions I will just stop watching and that's it.

What about all the YouTube videos where ads are part of the program? If YT Premium could block those too, I might subscribe.

SponsorBlock to the rescue

This is the same argument people make about piracy. About potential revenue. The fact of the matter is, if I couldn't watch the video without either watching ads or paying for premium, I wouldn't watch it at all. So, the creator gets no money either way. Same thing when I pirate software or a movie or a game. I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so the amount of money the creator gets is the same, zero.

So don't watch it then. Serving video is not cheap and you're increasing costs for everyone else. I don't get to jump the fence at a music festival just because I wouldn't have gone if I had to pay.

yep. there's a word for a creature that consumes without contributing anything back, making things harder for everyone else: "parasite."

Alphabet has plenty of money. So long as I'm capable of watching Youtube for free with adblock on, I will continue to do so and feel no guilt.

And thus YouTube is experimenting with an ad-blocker detection mechanism.

And this is exactly why YouTube should block ad blockers, to force people like you to be honest.

I fail to see how I'm being dishonest. It's not like I'm lying about how I use it.

Today you get to learn that words can have multiple definitions!

That kinda sounds like lying.

I'd gladly watch the content somewhere else if Google wasn't holding a monopoly over it.

Good news, they aren’t. Tons of content is on multiple services - if you really have a principled objection to Google, you should show that by supporting those services rather than boosting YouTube’s popularity.

"Tons of content on multiple services" =/= "Tons of alternative services"

There is only one viable alternative to Youtube that I'm aware of. I use it whenever I can, but that doesn't change the fact that Youtube holds a monopoly.

The videos are usually sponsored with the ads pushed by the streamer themselves. They’re getting paid just fine. YouTube freely steals my data so they’re doing just fine. I’m just being gaslit into thinking I’m a thief.

How does YouTube steal your data? What do they do with it?

They track and sell it to undisclosed 3rd parties

Citation needed. No they don't.

Of course they do.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...

https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US

> Parties with whom information may be disclosed: Service providers, trusted businesses or persons that process information on Google’s behalf

If you were actually worried about YouTube stealing your data, why do you keep giving it to them by using their service? Wouldn’t the smart move be to stop visiting?

It's a simple value estimate. Some things, at least in the moment, appear to be worth having some of your data stolen. Also there are measures that can be taken, such as using adblockers, that minimize the cost.

How is data being “stolen”? All of the data they collect is data which you are freely giving them by using their service, and ad blockers really don't prevent any of that: you're connecting to a Google server telling them where you live, what type of device you use, and what you're interested in. An ad blocker prevents you from seeing ads but it doesn't do anything to prevent resale of the data you volunteer.

> How is data being “stolen”?

You tell me, I was responding to your hypothetical question: "If you were actually worried about YouTube stealing your data, why do you keep giving it to them by using their service?"

>An ad blocker prevents you from seeing ads but it doesn't do anything to prevent resale of the data you volunteer

True. That's why I still volunteer as little data as possible.

The creators wouldn't get anything either if I didn't block the ads, because I don't click on ads.

That's not how any of this works.

Anti-piracy folks love to use bullshit loaded terms (such as "piracy" itself) to justify some megacorporation taking over shit on my computer. Adblocking is now "cheating"?`

Speaking of loaded terms, what are they “taking over” by showing an ad along with the content? If you truly believed they posed the risk that incorrect terminology implies, why on earth would you continue using the site and giving them more opportunities to do so?

> His sandwiches are alright "when I don't have to pay for them"

fixed it for you.

That's a lazy rationalization which doesn't even make sense — either way you're getting the exact same sandwich, it's just a question of whether you pay for it directly or by watching ads.

This also doesn't make any sense from the negative way you're describing it: you're eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad. If you're using YouTube now, any negative which you can possibly imagine is already happening: they're tracking what you watch and where you watch it from, they're telling advertisers what kind of devices you use as a proxy for your likely spending habits, etc. There's a 0% chance they do that less when it's their only option to make money to cover your usage costs!

> That's a lazy rationalization which doesn't even make sense — either way you're getting the exact same sandwich, it's just a question of whether you pay for it directly or by watching ads.

It's an imperfect analogy. But point remains. Some places can offer bad and good experiences side by side, and have a long reputation of shitting up a few good products over time.

> eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad.

No. I know some X is bad, and some Y is good. It doesn't mean I hate X, I hate X that such and such makes.

It's like that scene in Spaceballs. Don't order the menu special.

If you think it’s a bad experience, why do you keep going? The fact that you’re concerned about avoiding ads means you must find the content interesting and that means you should pay for what you use, either directly or indirectly.

Because it is designed for addiction? Is that up for debate? YouTube is top result because it is owned by Google. This is a standard business model.

People bet into slot machines. Put an entry fee into a room full of slot machines and see for yourself how many people come to play.

The only way for a casino to make sure people pay to play a slot machines is to keep a free entry option that is gets annoying quickly. It is creation of a problem to justify a paid solution. Ad blockers solve that problem for free and have to be blocked.

And people who are addicted to slot machines have their own favorite games that they play all day long. They might pay at a chance to play. Youtube doesn't actually want to have a competitor at the same time.

If you actually believe that you should be blocking YouTube, not just the ads. The excuses in this thread are like arguing that it’s okay to sneak into a casino’s free buffet because the gambling industry has plenty of money and is bad for people.

Problem is, if you want videos Youtube is most likely your only option. TikTok hosts only 5min snippets, it's better (or worse) at addiction explotation. Vimeo doesn't host videos you probably want. Nebula (and other subsrcibe services) are great but what if I want a conference talks?

To torture the analogy. This isn't sneaking in the free buffet. It's the option of only free buffet in casino offering stuff you aren't allergic to. But then forcing you to play some strip poker to get in. Sure you can pay to get in, but what guarantees I have they won't force gambling on paying customers or further deterioration of the free experience?

In other words, YouTube is giving you something you value but you don’t to follow the terms of the agreement. Just be honest and say that rather than trying to invent these weird narratives to try to make it sound more noble than freeloading.

"In other words" why not address their actual words? Youtube is giving us something we value, but that does not justify any given demand Youtube comes up with. There's nothing noble about blindly accepting the terms of a monopoly.

YouTube is not a monopoly and you can easily live a perfectly happy, normal life not using it if you hate ads that intensely or, since you clearly like it quite a bit and are not willing to consider alternatives, pay 1-2 coffees per month.

Since you took the liberty to replace slot machines with "casino's free buffet" - an especially disingenuous misrepresentation - I mean do you want to say that people go to casino for food, and when I specifically avoided using the word casino... Can I go ahead and say that you all are acting like addicts being called out? I mean, did I use say we should block YouTube?

Talk about the "lengths" people go to defend their addiction. This is my general impression of the lot here on HN. You guys are so deep into cult of bullshitting that normal argument feels like an attack and invites downvotes.

Many things can cause you to go to same place. Lack of meaningful choice, not being able to afford anything better, etc.

But YT premium on itself is bad value. I can replicate most of its value with... An ad blocker.

Why should I pay Google to solve problems it creates for me? That's just incentives them making more problems. Maybe they will add a solve a captcha every 5 min if not on Premium.

And lastly YT isn't above ruining it as well (see premium ads). History (see cable) teaches us, ads on premium is a matter of time.

Hello my honey hello my ragtime gal.

This guy Spaceballs.

Would you pay for a $60 steak at McDonald's? Without reviews, seeing it, etc?

- You can try premium

- It is not $60 steak equivalent. More like it is the price of McDonalds burger itself.

- It is not an untested product. You are getting an option to pay for the burger and eat it, rather than watch a 30 min ad to eat it for free.

People will hate Google/FB ad model and at the same time also not pay for a paid tier that removes the ads.

YouTube Premium is my most loved subscription, for what it's worth. I don't even use the Music element, but if I did that would be another reason. While all other subscriptions I pause on and off waiting for content, YouTube has always had solid stuff -- from mindless good stuff, content reviews, learning household chores, to full-on lectures/talks from Universities/Conferences.

If you're getting served McDonalds at the world's largest buffet, it's because that is what you enjoy.

Where are you getting steak from? YouTube premium is the exact same content you like only paid for directly instead of by advertisers. You must already be watching stuff on YouTube and enjoying it because otherwise you wouldn’t care about whether it has ads.

> I'll eat at Cockroach Joe, but I won't pay. I also like to tell people I don't pay because it goes against my virtues. But I'll still go there to eat.

Fixed.

Even if I paid for YT premium, the money wouldn't go to the YT creator people I support.

It's really that simple. I can no longer trust PayPal, and Patreon doesn't accept my local credit card so that goes down the drain too.

They already harvest my data. I refuse to pay them money to exploit me further.

YT premium money does partially go to creators though??

Only to those that have a signed contract with YT, no?

Isn't that a really low bar though? If you're making any money off YouTube you've signed a contract. YT Premium just lets you make more.

To my understanding, the money primarily goes to large creators first. So the smaller creators get a smaller contribution out of my YT Premium.

So, if I really do want to support the creator, other external systems are better.

No, YTP money is paid to creators based on time YTP subscribers spend watching their content. So if you watch small channels that's who will benefit from your subscription.

The money mostly goes to large creators simply because those large creators have way more viewing hours.

The nice thing about YT Premium is that you have a single subscription to manage, and it then helps support a wide number of creators, even ones who you only see a single video of. It'll go to helping way more people in total than you would ever get around to signing up for individual Patreon subscriptions for.

See the replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896620

What data do they harvest and what do they do with it?

The fact that we have to ask questions like this is indicative of google being a bad actor in this exchange. How much are they paying me for the data they steal?

They’re not stealing any data. You’re voluntarily giving it to them and if you don’t like the terms of the deal it’s trivially easy to stop by not going to YouTube.

Looking at your posts here, to me it seems like you are actively searching for reasons not to pay. Like you’re trying to justify some sort of cognitive dissonance you have on the matter.

Either pay up or admit (to yourself, us, whatever) that you’re not willing to pay for services you can get in an ad-supported format instead.

Is that really so hard?

My "posts"? As in two?

I only started getting a proper income recently. How exactly was I supposed to pay when my YT Premium used to be 5% of my income?

I already pay for Spotify and Amazon Prime. I literally don't have more disposable income. (Unless I throw in the emergency cash reserve or investments) I still have to pay for dental surgery and an optometrist.

What is it with people like you telling us to "admit" some deep seated desire? Is it so hard to not assume things about my life and create your own fantasy?

When I heard how much more a YouTube Red view was worth to a creator than an ad impression, I was convinced that it's a reasonable compromise.

I don't necessarily trust Google, but creators are vetting that Google is holding up their end of the bargain. So why shouldn't I?

In terms of Google holding up their end of the bargain, the reason you shouldn't trust them is simple: it is the CEO and board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make the most of Google's immense market power. The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary

So you shouldn't pay at a grocery store also? At any other big company shop? Because as you said so eloquently:

"The reason you shouldn't trust them is simple: it is the CEO and board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make the most of any company's immense market power. The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often."

Dunno about you but the (only) local grocery store in the small W.Australian town where I live is owned in majority by the local community who hold shares and see the books - the employees and store manager (all locals) get paid well and money is set aside for growth and infrastructure investment after which everything goes back to keeping prices low and supporting local farmers | business.

That sounds lovely and idyllic - things like that rock and there should be more of them.

There's a lot of that here, it's a large state (3x size of Texas) with a low population (not much over 2 million) so a great deal of infrastructure is "socialised" from pooled money.

Grain pools for farmers, state electricity, education structured to reach all, etc.

It's a hybrid economy with elected representatives expected to represent those that elected them - and hasn't quite broken with scale yet.

We've also pooled a lot of the CDN mirrors that serve an isolated state with enough local oversight to be sure many internet services ride over any disconnects from cables being ripped up.

I'm in favour of locally robust networks - internet, food, reources, etc.

Grocery stores don't have a monopoly on selling food, so they can't arbitrarily raise prices.

When Alphabet stops holding up their end of the bargain, I'll stop paying them money. A pretty standard business/customer relationship.

> The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often.

This always makes me laugh. They may be the minority, but public companies like Costco and Target who prioritize employees and company longevity do exist.

>public companies like Costco and Target who prioritize employees and company longevity do exist.

I spent a few years working at Target and a few at a Walmart. I'd take the Walmart every day of the week, though of course some of this is the particular people in charge at the store level, etc. I found Target to treat its employees pretty terribly in comparison.

Respectfully, this anecdote does nothing to refute the point.

There are an uncountable number of variables which could have resulted in your experience that have nothing to do with Target's (or Walmart's) high level corporate strategies.

That said, I am sorry that it was your experience. Working for bad bosses sucks big time.

There’s also a bit of a big fish in a small pond that can happen - a normal target employee may very well be an absolutely top tier Walmart employee - and being too tier is always nice.

They don't have to short term maximize. They can totally decide that they want to maximize their position 100 years from now by making less money crowding out competitors and all shareholders can do is sell the stock.

Heck, just yesterday, the Delaware courts ruled that it was okay for Jack Dorsey to spend $306MM of shareholder money so he could drink with Jay-Z. (It was to buy Tidal, but Tidal was obviously a bad purchase).

This is a very naive take on that duty. Executives have enormous leeway in deciding what is best for their shareholders. The idea that they are bound to every lousy "makes a penny today damn the consequences" decision put in front of them is absurd.

Do business lie for money? Sure. But fiduciary duties don't compel that behavior.

Dang. Could've fooled me!

It is a myth that fiduciary duty means maximising profit above all else. Let's see what that wiki page says:

    > A fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances which give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence.

Under Delaware law, fiduciary duty splits into 3 parts: the duty of care, the duty of loyalty and the duty of good faith. Fiduciary duty to shareholders means being a faithful representative of their interests, not putting your own personal interests first, exercising care and good judgement. It absolutely does not mean maximising profits above ethics.

FWIW, I've had it for years and it's great. I've basically forgotten YouTube has ads.

So have I because of invidious[1].

[1]: https://docs.invidious.io/instances/

That’s a shame that they’re apparently a bit pushy (I have Premium so don’t see any of that), because it’s been 100% worth it in my experience. I feel I get more than enough value from YouTube Premium to have it for myself, whereas Netflix I would cancel if I didn’t share it with my parents and two siblings. If they crack down on password sharing, it will go and YT will stay…

I pay exactly $0 and see no YT ads, and I am a pretty heavy YT viewer. I just don't think it's right to have to pay.

Advertisers use their dollars to influence and make statements, also forcing stupid age restrictions just because someone swears.

It's 1984 in 2023.

> I just don't think it's right to have to pay.

What makes you think it's right to be entitled to a free service?

You don't want to pay.

You don't want ads.

So ... then what?

Who said anything about "entitled"? Folks are ALL OVER this thread using emotionally-loaded language, because it's hard to argue for ads any other way.

I'm not argueing "for ads". The previous poster doesn't want ads, doesn't want to pay, okay, so then what? Offer an alternative please.

The people who want the content most could pay the content creators. These creators would pay for video hosting in the same way they already pay for their hardware and software.

This way, you wouldn't have to pay (which is what the parent comment wants). But you would still have an incentive to pay, because if not enough people did, the content you liked might might not get made.

So in essence, someone else should pay. Just not me. Real solid plan

I don't know if you knew YT around 2011 but the content was so much better.

People posted out of passion, because there was no money. It was an intrinsic filtering to weed out profit seeking.

I don't like the idea of creators getting paid, generally speaking. Information should be free.

I don't see any difference between rent seeking and YT click bait regurgitating existing knowledge that's easily accessible

Really?

Something has to pay for the infra costs.

Either tax money, ads or subscription fees. Choose one

Donations would also work, but being a publicly-traded for-profit company sort of precludes that, practically.

Youtube Premium is effectively a donation, frankly.

It's not in the legal sense, you do get a "product" for it. But it didn't take me long to realize that even paying for Youtube Premium, I was better off not logging into my account and just using NewPipe.

I really think the only reason to pay for Premium is if you want to donate money to Youtube.

I'll choose piracy, adblocking and freeloading.

It saves me money for actual physical goods.

So... Which do YOU want to pay? I'll choose to escalate the ad-adblocker-block adblocker war. Winning so far.

I think what people want is for the old system to continue (similarly to the Netflix password sharing crackdown saga) - youtube pushes ads for people who don't adblock, some pay for premium, and the others are free from ads due to their exceptional skills of browser addon installation.

There are always people in the comments taking the side of the company with arguments like "they need to make money" - sure, i'm all for capitalism, free markets and profits, but I use my right to whine when a company changes the status quo for the worse (from my POV). Public outcry is a way to pressure them to either keep the current situation, or think of something else.

Indeed. The idealized market is supposed to be a feedback-based system. Publicly wining about what a company is doing is a form of consumer feedback just as much as "voting with your wallet" is, and arguably more effective.

For companies, it's Marketing 101 that if you can't or don't want to sell what people want, you can always brainwash or beat[0] people into "wanting" the thing you want to sell. But we do not have to take such treatment silently, or without a fight. By resisting, we raise the costs of anti-consumer moves ever so slightly. Maybe, sometimes, just enough to make the company - or the next one to follow - rethink if the change is really worth doing after all.

[0] - Metaphorically, of course. But when a company cancels the very product people like the most, in order to force them to use an inferior product, and knowing full well none of the competitors will come up with a replacement (because they're all in lock step, what isn't profitable for one won't be for another, etc.) - being on a receiving end of that does feel like being beaten into submission.

> I just don't think it's right to have to pay.

So you don't want to watch ads and don't want to pay for premium. What do you propose Youtube should do to make money to run the platform?

Why is that my problem?

Because at some point YouTube doesn’t run the platform anymore?

I would rather see YT shut down and spark creative alternatives than continue its race to the bottom.

Google is rich. Their products have stagnated. They have no user support to reconcile mistaken flags or strikes.

It's anti user, the platform should be pro user. I'd like to see dark patterns pay their price and become deincentivized.

I share the sentiments — I happily pay for all kinds of digital subs, but YouTube really rubs me the wrong way. Yes, it feels like they’re trying to trick me into a sub, and yes I realize if I do it, the tricks will go away. I just don’t feel good about giving money to a company like this.

It’s the same reason I eventually got rid of my Pixel — it felt like a box just for Google to push ads at me, even though it was a premium product at a premium price.

I'm tempted to get a Pixel phone just because it seems well-supported by LineageOS, which should eliminate the ad-pushing issue.

I actually was a Play Music subscriber before it got rolled into YouTube premium (rip). So I never saw the popups except (ironically?) on my @google.com work account.

And that's super annoying even then.

I watch so much YouTube on my TV that Premium just makes sense. I can't block ads on my TV. It's really worth it in that case. The experience of watching brain rotting ads is such an undesirable prospect I will gladly pay them to avoid it.

Same for me. I don't think I've ever watched any of the Premium content, I just subscribed to hide ads.

So YT is too greedy and shows you a lot of ads and loses trust, but if they were to play it cool and stop showing ads you’d sign up for premium?

I think it's more nuanced than that. Personally I love/hate YouTube:

Love:

* Most of my favorite creators are there

* Ahh, that's it.

Hate:

* Seems to have no actual humans working there, or no way to reach them in the event of disputes. If someone posting to HN about their business locked out of their account is the best way to get support, there's a problem.

* Keeps getting better and better at..... pushing extremist content and crypto scams.

* Removes tools (like dislike counts) that helped users spot bad content.

* Charges $23/mo for premium which bundles a bunch of stuff I don't give a rat's ass about (youtube music? no thank you!), in addition to just removing ads. (That's only $2 less than I pay for my cable modem, like, seriously ridiculous territory.)

* Doesn't disclose how much of that subscription actually ends up in creators' pockets.

If they solved those last two issues, would I sign up? Ahh, no. They're still a net negative.

I'd much rather try to drag my favorite creators into posting elsewhere. I've signed up for Nebula and I support roughly two dozen creators on Patreon and similar tipjar/support systems. I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is, because IMO YouTube is circling the drain and getting desperate, and the sooner we develop viable alternatives, the better.

So, no, there's nothing YouTube (and their parent corporation DoubleClick wearing a Google mask) can do at this point would make me cut them a check. I'm working as hard as I reasonably can to make them obsolete.

>Most of my favorite creators are there

>Doesn't disclose how much of that subscription actually ends up in creators' pockets.

Enough for your favorite creators to be there.

>Charges $23/mo for premium

It's $23/mo because people like you block ads. The ad blocker-blockers can't roll out soon enough. Fingers crossed.

Cool. I'll just use my "block adblock-blocker scripts".

They already exist. But some will be inconvenienced. Us pierats won't be :D

http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/#filterlist

It's $11.99 per month and $6.99 for students.

Where are you all getting $23 from?

You think Google wouldn't increase prices the moment they manage to defy all attempts to block ads?

* They fuck over music creators and don’t give a hoot (probably because there are no humans working for Google anyway)

YouTube premium was probably the best decision I did. Amount of time saved on ads alone makes it worth it. Other bonus feature - downloading videos. If you make enough money it is a no brainer together with things like extra cloud storage from google, Apple and now ChatGPT

These days, I'll happily not use a service/ product/ whatever if I have to pay for it.

But YouTube Premium, ad free, is wonderful. I bought it for my parents because they watch a lot of niche stuff. But now that I have it, it's worth even the crazy price increase (to like, $22/mo or something).

I like it better than Netflix/ Disney+/ HBO Max, as it's half entertainment, half educational (whereas the other streaming services are more entertainment and often doesn't keep me interested in spite of their catalogues).

the Family sharing of YouTube Premium is worth every penny I pay for it times 5. easily.

You can save even more time by using SponsorBlock. I believe premium only gives you fake downloading -- you can't take it out of their app (correct me if I'm wrong). In contrast yt-dlp gives you direct access to the files.

YouTube premium downloading does store the video in the browser data store I think, yes.

I use yt-dlp for videos I want to keep a copy of, which are few and far between, and I use YT premium's download feature to queue up stuff I want to watch on my phone later when I know I'm going to a poor coverage area.

there's room for both solutions in my world.

True - With RIAA and such making YT implement something that looks like DRM just to say they have DRM on songs, I don't think YT is ready to actually offer downloading other peoples' videos from their official UI. For those that don't want to mess with yt-dlp, it's easy enough to search "youtube downloader" on Google.

I'm a heavy YouTube user (by my own standards... 2-3 hours a day) and a happy premium subscriber, and I totally agree that sponsorblock is a must-have.

>YouTube premium was probably the best decision I did. Amount of time saved on ads alone makes it worth it.

Why do you get ads? I don't understand how there are people on Hacker News that don't use content blockers. Is is because of principle?

Uses the app on iPhone maybe? There's probably an app that bypasses ads though.

Ah. I was forgetting people use locked down devices where content blocking isn't possible, or a hassle.

Yeah. I use iPhone. There is 1block but I am not sure if it blocks YouTube ads since I haven’t tested.

It blocks them in safari (since it's a safari extension) but not in any other app

I just watch from the Brave browser, built in ad-blocker

I think that's biggest issue in this thread. People locked down into their devices not even realizing there's relatively free-er world outside their locked-device bubble.

Blocking ads on the youtube mobile app (or even a mobile browser) is much more difficult than on desktop.

Ads can be blocked on mobile devices with NewPipe[1], or Invidious[2], alternatively Firefox which supports uBlock[3] on Android.

[1]: https://newpipe.net/ [2]: https://invidious.io/ [3]: https://ublockorigin.com/

It's not, FireFox or ReVanced does the trick

Use Brave Browser. It blocks ads for YouTube. You can even lock the screen and it’ll still play in the background (iOS).

I barely visit sites with ads. And on my phone I have 1Blocker that blocks all the sites. I used to be very tech savvy and solved a lot of problems with coding/software etc, no I grew up and switched to Mac and iPhone and if there is a problem (aka YouTube ads) that can be solved with money then I buy it. I used to torrent movies but now I value my time more than money and happily pay or overpay to save any time that is wasted.

I don't use a blocker because the arms race leads to bad outcomes. I'm doing my part to postpone that as much as possible.

I've lived my whole life, just about, with an ad blocker in my browser, and I have yet to see the prophesised arms race. Maybe a dozen sites have refused to load the actual content, and of those only a couple asked me to subscribe (pay) for an ad-free experience (they were newspapers IIRC).

Not sure what you don’t trust about it. I love Premium. I’ve had it for years, and YouTube is the best streaming platform there is in my book. It honestly just seems like something you are being stubborn over for no good reason. Stop hitting yourself sort of thing. No one is bullying you. Oh, they are advertising a service in their app that dramatically improves the experience and supports the channels you watch. But no, they are bullying you. Please.

You're not missing anything. The really weird thing about Youtube Premium is that even if you do pay for it, you're better off not signing into your account and still using uBlock Origin and NewPipe.

I paid for Youtube Premium for a pretty long while, and the only reason to pay for it is because you want to support Youtube. The official app for Android was awful the last time I used it, I've never been tempted to go back to it from NewPipe. You'd download videos and sometimes Youtube would just decide, "no, that's not downloaded anymore." It was way more battery hungry than NewPipe. I had less control over mobile data. It was glitchier and I couldn't turn off distracting features like comments or recommendations.

There was also this weird problem where signing in on both desktop and mobile would occasionally mess with playback and Google would tell me that I needed to only have a video on one device at a time. NewPipe doesn't have that problem.

And there's the privacy angle: Youtube Premium necessarily requires you to be logged in and to have your videos tracked, that's part of how the funds get distributed to creators.

---

So for a while I just gave Youtube money and literally didn't use the service at all, because adblocking was better in every way. But I gave them money because I wanted to pay for the service. And eventually I realized I couldn't figure out what I was paying for. I wasn't paying for content, because I wasn't logged in, so the people I was watching weren't getting subscription revenue from me. I was giving Google money, but it wasn't clear to me that giving them money was proving anything or making Youtube better or encouraging them to do anything -- whenever I looked at Youtube Premium it seemed like the service was actively getting worse and that a lot of the annoyances I was supposedly paying to avoid were creeping back into the service.

And I eventually realized that Youtube does provide Google value even if I'm not paying for it. It allows them to effectively hold a near-monopoly on independent video hosting online. And so I stopped paying for it because the only reason to pay for it was for an idealistic reason, and I realized that I'm actually be fine with Youtube failing and more independent sites popping up, and I don't actually want to encourage Youtube and if anything I'm happy for it to be a loss-leader for Google. For the creators themselves, direct donations turn out to be a lot more valuable, and I try to do that now when I can.

But every once and a while it comes up as an example of "people won't pay for anything" and like... I just don't think that's true. The reality is you are paying for less than nothing when you use Youtube Premium. You are paying for a worse experience than you would get from an adblocker, and in some cases you're paying for even more annoyance when Google starts getting snippy about how you use your accounts between computers. Idealism is one thing, but is it actually surprising to anyone that people don't feel motivated to donate money to Google?

Because that's what Youtube Premium is. There is no reason to use it unless you want to donate money to Google. The price isn't even the main issue -- even if Youtube Premium was free, I wouldn't use it. It's a worse experience than 3rd-party clients and adblockers. It exists so that Google can try to tie it into existing services or make a case to the public that they need ads, but this is not a serious effort by a company that actually wants to offer a real service for money.

> the only reason to pay for it is because you want to support Youtube

Or, and stick with me here, you want to support the creators. Because the creators get most of the money from premium subscriptions.

As per the creators, who see how much they get for premium views and ad views (they already know how much they’re getting from everyone else).

> Or, and stick with me here, you want to support the creators. Because the creators get most of the money from premium subscriptions.

I already brought this up above. The creators won't get money unless you sign into Youtube Premium and watch videos using that account, and that is a straightforwardly, almost universally worse experience than just using NewPipe and uBlock Origin anonymously.

Youtube Premium is more valuable to creators than ads, but part of the reason for that is because ads pay basically nothing to creators. The payout structure for Youtube Premium is weird and not really healthy for an ecosystem (since it works off of view percentages which discourages more professional projects in favor of spam). It's still not a lot of money, and it's ultimately a kind of bad system for funding creators. If you do want to support creators (and you should), donate to them directly when possible.

It doesn't make sense to purposefully make your viewing experience worse so that creators can get a fraction of that subscription revenue. You're supporting Youtube with Premium; but you'll help actual creators much more by using Patreon, Twitch subscriptions/donations, buying merchandise, or just donating directly if they support it.

Even if Youtube Premium was giving a comparable payout to direct support (which it's not), most creators on Youtube don't want to be reliant on Youtube for their revenue. Direct donations allow them to have more agency over the stuff they make, and subscriptions/purchases outside of Youtube allow them to stress out less about the fact that Google controls their entire livelihood.

So, since you want to watch with an account incompatible setup, premium is incapable of compensating creators. Ok. I get that.

I still disagree with your conclusion, since it’s a self imposed restriction that results in creators not being compensated. That’s on you, not YouTube.

> that results in creators not being compensated

I make a point to donate to creators I watch. I'm not compensating Youtube (although I did pay for Premium for quite a while), but I am compensating creators.

And yeah, that's easy for me rationalize, because I'm honestly not particularly happy with Youtube as it exists today, I think it has close to a monopoly on indie video online, and I think it would be good for other services to pop up around it. If it was possible for me to avoid Youtube entirely, I would, but... see the monopoly bit again. I don't think anyone saying "just walk away from Youtube" is making a serious suggestion.

But even given the above situation, if I thought paying for Youtube Premium would encourage Google in a positive direction, I would do it. I did do it. I just don't believe it will anymore. My experience with Youtube Premium was that it got weirder and weirder the longer I used it, and I didn't see any evidence it was helping Youtube as a platform.

If I can get out of that relationship while still supporting creators, I'm happy to do so.

Same here but I skipped the Premium step. I pay creators directly, through Patreon and similar.

When the "how to replace the thermal cutout in a Kenmore dryer" video helped me (and did so with a minimum of fluff), I bought the parts from the company that posted the video. (A whole set of spares, because why not? Pay shipping once, put 'em on the shelf, and have a zero-minute response time next time something fails.)

When I realize I'm 3 videos deep into someone's channel and I'm wishing the clock wasn't staring at me so judgmentally, I head for their Patreon straight away. Or their merch store. Or whatever lets me tuck some money directly from my pocket into theirs.

The next step is to find hosting elsewhere. I should make another attempt with PeerTube or something, or see if someone's building a video frontend for IPFS or whatever. And then start pestering my favorite creators into double-posting their content. Yes it's more work, and they won't do it unless there's a base of users who likewise feel good about paying creators. But I can be the start of that.

I tried to self-host Peertube at least for my own content but it was too much work to keep up to date for me and I eventually ended up letting my private instance die.

I haven't looked around recently to see if there's managed hosting somewhere that I can link to my own domain, but I'd be very tempted to sign up for a service like that. I like the idea of Peertube quite a bit, particularly around how it manages bandwidth -- I think that's very clever. I just realized that I don't take an active enough IT role in my infrastructure to handle setting it up myself and to trust myself to keep it patched and secure.

----

But yeah, aside from hosting direct donations/purchases are the way to go. Sometimes that can be very difficult to do. Patreon has a lot of problems but has honestly been huge for enabling easier payments. We're in desperate need of better private micropayment systems for the web. Cryptocurrency was a disaster, and not everyone is always on sites like Patreon, which I get because it's work to maintain a presence on those sites.

YouTube Premium means you are paying YouTube for content made by someone else than YouTube, while YouTube generates lots of ad revenue from non-Premium users. Makes me feel I’m compensating the wrong person. I wish a higher percentage of my fees go directly to video makers and that they indicate clearly how much I gave each creator.

According to many creators, YT premium views are extremely lucrative for them.

Youtube is my living, Premium pays out a LOT more than ads do per view. It might be nearly 3X for me. So a Premium subscription definitely helps out the creators, a lot more than even watching ads.

If you don't mind sharing, how does Premium income compare to say Patreon?

Going from 1-10 cents per view to 3-30 cents per view (and this is generous, some estimates put the low end at 2/10 cents per view) doesn't seem that big of a deal. Encourage your subscribers to buy a single $5 superchat/superthanks/1 month membership instead (of which you get $3.50) every so often instead and continue to enjoy a life of improved sanity from no ads via adblock without paying an egregiously large monthly fee for Premium.

But viewers don't want to have to be constantly bombarded with "encouragement" for superchats. It's a bad experience no different than an in-video sponsored read, or any other YouTube ad.

I don't disagree, and I wouldn't suggest a creator constantly bombard it. (However, that might be most effective, as constantly bombarding with "like and subscribe" seems to be, though personally for me I don't tend to watch channels that do that and for the random videos I do see where they do, it's often skipped by sponsorblock.) However I think if a creator wants to be honest with their viewers that they will stop creating unless they can receive $X across ads/premium/superchats/patreon/as many options as they can, rather than trying to bully them into thinking the only choices of support are an absurd premium fee to the platform or psychological self-harm by enabling ads, that is a good thing. As would be their decision to actually stop spending their time doing something that isn't worthwhile to them if they can't make it. Meanwhile other creators will happily go on creating high quality stuff for free because they don't care about making money that way, and youtube itself will be fine as even adblocking users, who also never directly monetize another way, contribute enough indirect revenue (user profiling, algorithm shaping, user growth, recommending...) to the rest of google's empire that it doesn't matter. (And if they do monetize ever with e.g. a single $5 superchat once in a blue moon, google's $1.50 cut of that, even after their expenses of payment processing, can make up for quite a lot of missed ad impressions.)

Premium views pay out a lot more according to LinusTechTips [0,1], and early on it was paying out based on watch time, so hugely disproportionate payouts happened[2].

0: https://linustechtips.com/topic/928915-does-ltt-actually-mak...

1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...

2: https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=434

YouTube Premium is my #1 favorite subscription. YouTube is unusable without it. I also get immense value from YouTube. It's really a win-win in my book.

Nah, Vanced (now ReVanced) is the way to go for mobile

Part of the problem for me is that sponsor spots in videos are so common now that I feel forced to run SponsorBlock. If I'm already having to run one extension just to enjoy the experience, then I may as well also use Adblock and not even bother with Premium. But since premium doesn't give that full ad-free experience (referring to sponsors), I just don't see as much benefit.

The amount of my life I save by using adblock + sponsorblock when watching YouTube is such a huge amount of time. Maybe I am just cheap, but I also feel it's a bit on the expensive side of things for what you get.

I do however still like to support creators that I watch a lot, so I'll use things like Patron, or in the case of Linus Tech Tips, Floatplane. I feel like directly supporting the creators I spend a lot more time watching makes more of an impact on supporting the content I enjoy. Creators don't seem to get much out of YouTube Premium viewers.

YT kind of started a soft assault on sponsor spots, with mobile users getting two-tap fast-forward, and encouraging creators to use chapters, making them choose to either fake their audience out with inaccurate chapters, or to include a sponsor chapter and assume x% of viewers are not going to see the sponsor spot.

I hate ads, but I'm largely ok with sponsor reads. They are by far the least evil and least annoying.

They are not targeted (everybody watching the video sees the same ad... for now). They don't invade my privacy. They are usually fairly short. They're usually somewhat relevant to the creator, and therefore my interests. Of course, it depends on the creator. Some have more integrity, others less.

If between Youtube Premium, Patreon, and sponsored segments or episodes creators can make a living, that sounds great to me. Better than TV, radio, or the increasingly expensive and ad-ified streaming services. I'll take it.

Yeah, I'm pretty okay with sponsored segments. By and large, the people I watch only accept sponsors that appear to be legitimate, and the read is generally "here's this service and what it does, give it a try and thank them for feeding me this week!" Or "I've been using this service since they started and I think it's pretty cool"

They're generally not low quality scammy products or designed to extract money or spy (with the exception of VPN ads, but that's a different issue).

I'm alright with them. I tend to skip them more these days because I can only hear about Brilliant and Squarespace so many times in a day

>people do not want to pay

People don't want to pay for subscriptions because everything has become a bait and switch with infinite tiers!

Whether it's the local newspaper, or a mega-tech company's corporate offerings.

I tried subscribing (online) to my hometown newspaper within the last year. And a major national news publication.

You know how people say (or used to) that the garbage on the internet is the fault of the public for not being willing to pay for good journalism.

Well, guess what? You pay, you're just a sucker, probably senile and out of touch, so every third thing you click on is still behind a pay wall in the hopes you'll upgrade.

And, you know, it's being done to big dumb corporations with all the software-as-a-service offerings, and they're sucking up your tax dollars from government the same way. I don't want to name names, but the entire game seems to be slicing up features randomly and making up excuses to charge more for almost every one.

YouTube premium has just one tier.

And before you raise the hypothetical question of additional tiers in future, by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.

If there's just one tier, but it doesn't include what I'd expect, then I'd be even less happy than if there are more tiers - but they probably will get around to adding them.

What you are describing is just wishful thinking. There is no business model which has just one tier with the perfect specs and the perfect price for millions of people, let alone hundreds of millions.

For now.

It's just like cable TV. They promised that a subscription to cable TV would mean no ads. They lied, and went back on their promise within a very short time.

They'll do the same here.

But if you apply this line of reasoning, you will never make a single recurring purchase. Sure, if they introduce ads to premium I will be the among the first to cancel.

I would be happy to never make another recurring purchase ever again. Bill me for actual usage, like a utility, but subscriptions for everything sucks.

Then unsubscribe if or when they do. It’s not a contract with your soul on the line, it’s a monthly payment.

> by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.

20 years ago, you'd be right. This argument would be paranoid nonsense. But that's not the world we live in.

We live in a world where your car manufacturer wants you to pay monthly for heated seats. Today it's normal for hardware you bought outright only works if you pay rent to someone else, and services like Netflix reduce features and increase the price. Amazon can, at any moment, delete books from your kindle that you already paid for. Digital rent extraction is a huge part of how the tech industry operates today.

Yes, you should avoid subscriptions where you can, because there is a real risk that they'll change the rules to take away what you paid for down the line.

And especially don't trust the advertising company to not put ads in their paid tiers down the line.

there are at least 2 tiers: "Youtube Premium" and "Youtube Premium Lite"

I don't want to pay YouTube

I'm happy subscribing to creators' patreons or Kofi or whatever because almost all of my money goes to them.

Whereas on YouTube, most of my money or ad-generated money goes to Google. YouTube pays creators very little and treats them very poorly. There's a new adpocalypse every few months where YouTube will randomly change the rules, retroactively demonetize and delist videos, while offering no chance to appeal or even have videos reviewed by a person.

Without even considering Google's generally evil and monopolistic behavior, why would I ever willingly give them money?

YouTube's shitty treatment of creators is why every video now has a sponsored segment in the middle. They aren't paying enough and creators need additional income sources. YouTube can decide at any moment without notice to nuke your entire business and give you no option to recover. They keep shittifying the website with shorts and aggressive ads and dark patterns to drive up ad exposure, but this doesn't translate to higher pay for creators. In no circumstance is giving google more money going to fix any of the problems.

All a YouTube plus subscription gets you is YouTube will turn off the ads and dark patterns designed to force you to pay for the subscription. As well, I have exactly zero faith that YouTube won't also start showing subscribed users ads in a year or two.

You and your creators use yt as a service. Their servers and network. Payment and others. That services don't come for free. If you don't give them any money, why Google need to provide the services?

If you don't like that, you can build your own server and steam from that.

My state has given Google a truckload of tax breaks to build data centers here while raising my tax rate consistently over the past half decade.

Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for their hosting costs.

Unless the tax breaks are so high that the taxes actually go negative, they won't pay for hosting costs.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.

doesn't change the fact that they're receiving tax breaks. this creates an unfair advantage and nullifies any "build your own alternative" arguments.

Theyve also dominated the market with anti-consumer practices.

They should take responsibility for being the Internets video archive because they've faught so hard to become it and pushed everyone else out the market.

And I'd rather not use YouTube! I want nothing at all to do with google. They quite simply do not deserve my money.

How much money has google made on selling my data? What do I get in return? More ads. If I pay google to remove the ads, they still sell my data and they take my money directly. By playing the game at all, you can only lose. So to the extent that is possible, I don't play. I also feel exactly zero remorse for taking advantage of a company like google. Their practices are deeply unethical and harmful, being a monopoly is inherently bad, and stealing from them is an ethical net positive.

Don't be reductive, it makes you look uninformed. This is a much more complex issue than simply paying for bandwidth.

Paying to skip ads just raises the value of your attention even further because now they know you've got enough disposable income to pay for such frivolous things. The truth is that not advertising to everyone at all times is leaving money on the table and it's only a matter of time before some bonus-seeking executive turns that into his payday opportunity. Besides, even if you pay for premium you'll still get ads hardcoded into videos as sponsored segments and you'll still be tracked and profiled by Google.

Ads are immoral and should not be a valid business model to begin with. What YouTube is doing is exactly what should be done: pay us, or we won't actually send you the video. The network is the boundary: I'm not gonna try to hack into their servers to get a video they don't want to send me. If they send me the video for free though, that's their decision. They can send me ads too hoping I'll look at then but I make no such promise. They don't get to complain at all if I block them just like magazines don't get to complain if I rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash.

Many channels are successfully backed by patrons via patreon. That seems to be the most ethical way in my understanding.

> Ads are immoral

How do you justify this claim? How can advertising your product to attract customers be morally wrong?

I think the commenter meant "targeted advertising" which is the norm on the Internet.

I meant all forms of advertising but surveillance capitalism backed targeted advertising is certainly one of its worst forms.

I'll argue the case here though I go back and forth how strongly I hold this view.

Ads are immoral because modern advertising is carefully engineered brainwashing, often filled with factually incorrect claims (which are legally permitted as "hyperbole"). Beyond creating demand for products that the viewer would be better off without the brainwashing component in many often damages the viewers level of personal satisfaction or feelings of self worth by playing to their insecurities or creating unrealistic comparisons (which by implication or claim the purchase will cure). Because of this advertising can be negative sum -- anytime the benefit of introducing someone to the product is outweighed by the harm created by the effort to convince the user they need it. For example, ads for things you can't afford can create longing that can't be answered, yet don't provide you the benefit of the good (or the seller the benefit of the sale!).

One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum.

Even where the ad can't be describe as brainwashing unless its in a catalogue of goods or similar, the user wasn't looking for it right now and so by forcing them to watch it you're taking their time. Because copyright creates a monopoly for goods, the user often doesn't have the opportunity to choose instead "similar to X but with less time wasting ads". Since the user is denied a practical alternative (other than a costly 'go without entirely') you cannot say that their consent to view the advertisement was freely given -- and consent not freely given isn't valid. As such, even a brainwashing free advertisement is ethically dubious because its stealing the user's time.

> One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum.

I think there exists a solution, but it is a hard sell.

Ads by themselves are not inherently immoral. On the contrary, paid promotions performed by the person who is doing the show are part of the show, and, if done in good faith by a well-known and trusted person, can be considered a credible endorsement of the products being promoted. A relevant and creative promotion will not be skipped over even when there is such choice.

There are people who make mediocre/misleading/fraudulent/infected/immoral ads - this is one root of the evil, and the second root lies in creators willingly giving up part of the screen time to the content that they have no control over and that, realistically, no human other than the potentially-malicious advertisement author has approved for airing.

You are right that good ads are generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum. So, it's bidding on ads that were not reviewed by relevant humans that's the problem.

Idea of a solution: make creators that want to profit from ads watch these ads and approve the best ones for their audience. Don't run unapproved ads no matter how high they bid.

The place where this fails is the extra amount of work shifted onto creators: it's too much work to watch let's say 50 ads that the algorithm thinks are relevant, in order to select the best 5, so that only they are rotated.

There's also the issue of the ad using a different language to the one that the creator knows about or an ad talking about a product they're not familiar with.

I guess they could just not approve of any of those ads but if their income plummets they might be tempted to start approving them

I justify it by stating that my attention belongs to me. No one is entitled to it. My attention is not a currency that can be used to pay for products. It doesn't belong to the corporation and it absolutely isn't something they can sell off to the highest bidder.

I choose what to pay attention to. Anyone and anything that grabs my attention without my consent is violating my boundaries. Advertising's entire business model consists of mind raping people for profit. Forcibly injecting their little brands, slogans, ideas into people's minds whether they want it or not. It increases revenue so everyone is heavily incentivized to consider it legitimate. Well I don't consider that activity to be legitimate at all.

Ad blocker? It's just self defense. I don't lose any sleep over it and neither should anyone else.

If someone taps you on the shoulder, they are performing an immoral action by grabbing your attention?

I think you have an irrationally radical take on this. I can understand disdain for targeted or excessive and intrusive ads -- I use an ad blocker too. But to say that advertising as a whole is immoral seems overblown.

What constitutes an ad? Can I put a yellow label on my can of beans I sell, or is that too vibrant and might catch your eye in the supermarket? Should all products and signage be black/white to protect your delicate attention span?

> If someone taps you on the shoulder, they are performing an immoral action by grabbing your attention?

My boundaries aren't so strict when it comes to my personal space. People usually have good reasons to call my attention when they tap my shoulders. I just don't get advertised to when I turn around to greet them. Usually they want to ask me a question or simply socialize.

People don't like to be rude. They don't like to bother others without good reason. They want the social activity to be a positive experience so that they will be accepted by others. That's the social norm and it protects me from abuses such as random people tapping me on the shoulder for idiotic reasons such as advertising. You'd have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's okay to tap someone on the shoulders and start pushing products at them the second they turn around. Mercifully, people that bold just don't seem to exist in my social circles.

> you have an irrationally radical take on this

Radical? OK. Nothing wrong with being radical. Compromise is the root of all evil.

Irrational? No. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. If you want to claim I'm irrational, you need to refute everything I've said to the point it looks like I'm babbling incoherently.

> But to say that advertising as a whole is immoral seems overblown.

Not at all. Advertising is by definition information people didn't ask for. It's noise, to be filtered. It's audiovisual pollution.

> What constitutes an ad?

Information I did not seek out. For example, when I open this web site, it's because I want to read and post comments. I don't come here to look at products. If HN starts sending me ads for products I'll block them.

> Can I put a yellow label on my can of beans I sell, or is that too vibrant and might catch your eye in the supermarket?

If I go to the supermarket, it's because I want to buy products. If I open an app store, it's because I want to see apps. It's okay to show me the stuff.

The key point here is I asked for it. I don't even consider it advertising in that case. It's just the information I wanted.

> Show Should all products and signage be black/white to protect your delicate attention span?

In my country there's laws in certain cities to that effect. I think it's pretty great.

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

>If you want to claim I'm irrational, you need to refute everything I've said to the point it looks like I'm babbling incoherently.

Your claim that advertising is immoral is what I see as irrational. Not that you hate ads. You've provided no grounds for why its actually inherently wrong to advertise. If anything, you've contradicted yourself. There are times where you think it is okay for something to grab your attention, like when you go to the supermarket.

Perhaps we are disagreeing on what an ad is. "Information I did not seek out" is not a good definition of an advertisement. Just because you are looking for it, doesn't mean it isn't an ad. I'd claim an ad is anything that promotes a product, service, or event. Given that definition, would you still consider all advertising immoral?

Ads are kinda a waste of time, and in case you didn't know, humans have very limited time.

I have YT premium and it is easily the best money I spend most months. I'll just play devil's advocate. Maybe people are imagining a pay per view type of experience?

completely agree. ESPECIALLY if you have children. they can piggyback of your subscription and they wont get fed those horrendous adverts while they're searching for tutorial videos.

Its how the kids learn faster these days.. tutorial videos in small bites about specific subjects.

Agreed - YouTube Family, and all child accounts are covered.

Some of those ads were truly atrocious for a child to watch, especially - if you're in Australia - those for WorkSafe.

I don't like paying for premium, but at the same time I have been able to do things I never could have on my own, save tens of thousands of dollars in DIY projects, etc. My fear is they will raise the pricing and boil the frog.

Yep, of all my subscriptions, YTP will be the last to go. The experience truly is a premium one, only marred by the inability to disable YouTube shorts.

(I recently made near exactly the same comment in a recent, related story thread - but it's worth repeating).

Yes I too would love an option to disable shorts. Like hide it behind 50 buttons for all I care but please let me disable shorts.

Agreed. Also stop shoving news channels in my face. Every few weeks/months they come back, usually after some horrific event.

“Welcome to YouTube! Would you like to watch 40 videos on todays slaughter of innocent people?”

No. The answer is always no.

Every time a news channel comes up in recommendations, click the three dots menu on it and choose "do not recommend videos from this channel" (or w/e).

After a short while of doing this the supply of news channels starts drying up, though the algo occasionally attempts to push increasingly unlikely ones on you; just continue mopping them up.

Shorts is the digital content equivalent of cigarettes. I'd love an option to hide shorts forever.

YouTube is the digital content equivalent of cigarettes. Shorts is just a stronger form.

I disagree. There is a lot of good and information dense content on YouTube. Shorts as a format though mostly tends to be dopamine rich garbage.

For desktop there is a chrome extension, but no options for the app.

Ironically I'm removing shorts using u-Block origin.

Yes, I would happily pay more for the ability to remove shorts.

On Android, I disabled the YouTube app and use Firefox for YouTube, entirely because of the shorts. It lets you remove the shorts for 30 days in the browser. I did have to switch text messaging apps because the default option wouldn't work without YouTube enabled whenever someone sent a YouTube link.

It's indeed infuriating how these services try to cram TikTok style crap down our throats.

The stupid thing is: they try to get more popular than TikTok. How the hell do they expect to become popular with users that don't want this stuff? I'm not on TikTok, I hate YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. Just allow me to turn that shit off and I'll be a lot happier and use the service more because it's not pushing me away.

How do they think forcing it on unwilling users is in any way beneficial??

Thanks, I'll have a look into that!

My biggest beef with Shorts is that it's the equivalent of having the shelves full of lollies and junk food if you're trying to be healthy; it's far better not to have any available if you want to stay lean.

I love long form YouTube videos as much as I loathe the short form, whose promotional algorithms are skewed towards content that's rubbish for the brain - and society.

Edit: On Samsung Internet, could browse to the mobile app and indeed hide the shorts for 30 days (little X in top right of Shorts content panel, not a setting). Furthermore, if I disable "open links in apps" under settings/useful features, I now get the YouTube icon to open the current video in the app - this lets me browse for videos without being bugged by Shorts, and I can then open in the app if I want some of its features such as play in background etc. Thanks again, great tip.

The one thing I don’t like is incognito mode in the YT app disables YT Premium.

From time to time I turn it in to look something up quick. Maybe a recipe or something. A topic I don’t want recommended to me constantly for the next few weeks.

But it also turns all ads back on. Instead you can watch it normally and remove it from your history, but I’m not sure that works.

Ok, work with me here… It’s incognito mode, the mode created such that it explicitly doesn’t carry over cookies from regular mode, or between sessions.

What exactly are folks expecting here? Google to break out of the explicitly requested sandbox?

You don’t have to be snarky.

I want the app to keep a single boolean flag in memory: user is authorized to not see ads.

They don’t need to know who I am, just that I don’t need to see ads.

That seems imminently doable.

Yes, they do. YouTube distributes your premium funds to creators by watch time. If they can’t associate your views with your subscription, they can’t compensate creators fairly.

Not to mention, it’s imminently not possible. Not without poking holes in what is and is not shared between regular and incognito mode (across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less). And breaking this barrier would earn Google a ton of backlash, and rightfully so.

> across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less

I don’t care about that. I agree this would be impossible in the browser.

I’m talking about the official app specifically, they should be able to do it there.

Premium funds is a good point I hadn’t thought of. I’d be fine if that didn’t happen while in incognito. Treat me like incognito mode for any other random user, just without ads.

I don’t run it all the time. And I wouldn’t if they did this. It’s extremely rare I want to do this.

But if I look up a recipe I’m likely to be bombarded with cooking channels. Home DIY fix? Similar. God forbid I look up a news video on a current event.

Huh? How will they know whether to set that bit if they don't know who you are?

They knew before I turned on incognito in the YT app. I just don’t want that one bit erased.

I dislike YouTube as much as the next person, but do you understand how unreasonable of an ask this is when you are explicitly going into incognito mode? I echo everyone else's sentiment here.

I don't know why everyone is fixated on the term incognito. I believe what GP wants (and me too) is to pause watching history or to at least exclude a viewing session from the recommendation algorithm.

Let's discuss this feature some more?

The reason users such as yourself want this feature is because you don't have faith in the recommendation algorithm, right? If you watched a video and Google started pushing related videos that you don't want to constantly see, and you clicked on the "do not recommend this kind of video" option, and it actually worked, would you be satifised without this "exclude from recommendation algorithm" mode?

If yes, the better solution here would be to have a recommendation system that isn't garbage. I admit I kind of fancy this described mode, but the only reason is I don't currently trust Google to actually respect my expressed discontent. And if we don't trust Google to have a faithful recommendation system, why would we be willing to trust YouTube Premium?

If that bit is a literal bit, there will be an extension that just sets that bit, thereby bypassing ads when you didn't actually pay a subscription.

If that bit is some sort of encoded identifier that an extension couldn't generate, then they will know who you are.

Same here, live YouTube premium but hate shorts. I’ve even reached out to Google to have an option to disable (which I know won’t go anywhere but )

+1 on this. YT premium is easily worth 4x its price, it's an amazing deal. It's the largest media catalog in the world, and unlimited ad-free access for $12 is a steal. There is no digital subscription that comes close in value.

Question, how do content creators get paid if the platform has no ads? I thought they get paid when I watch an ad, and even more if I engage with those ads? In fact, I maliciously (is this the right word) clicked on scam ads (youtube sends me lots of those).

And is it really worth 4x its price? I mean its just ads getting removed. I can tolerate ads easily.

YouTube Premium pays content creators based on the amount of time that Premium subscribers watch their content.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zipp...

From what I've seen creators say, they get more revenue from a Premium user than they would have if the user had just watched some ads.

I’m curious about the potential for adverse effects. Let’s say I pay YT $12/mo and Google keeps $3 for their costs. If I watch 1 video that month does that creator get $9? Does the creator get 5c per view from me regardless and some subscribers subsidize others?

I wish there was more transparency around what my money is actually buying.

Google shares a portion of their YT premium revenue with creators. In general a view from a YT premium user will earn a creator more money than a view from someone using YT for free and viewing ads.

(But any info I can find seems anecdotal, I don't think youtube publishes any numbers -- and earnings will depend on where in the world those viewers are, etc...)

They're paid with the subscription money based on how many members watch! If you only watch a small number of videos or don't mind ads then it might not be worth 4x for you. However I personally find advertising deeply disturbing and am willing to do whatever it takes to be free of it.

I agree. I love YT Premium and I think it’s worth it for the amount I watch YT.

But almost everyone I ask thinks it’s a “scam”. The more technical the user, the more likely they are say something like “why should I have to pay when I have an add blocker”.

Like so many thing, there is almost a sense of entitlement to free content with clickable ads, which doesn’t bode well for the future.

The others either are willing to put up with the ads or think the price is much too high for the value of not seeing ads even if they watch tons of content.

I pay because I want to support the channels I watch and at this point the YT ads are just infuriating to me.

I also pay for YT Premium, but I have a gigantic complaint that it doesn't actually make YouTube completely ad-free. There are still the ads that the content produces insert themselves.

I'm not blaming the creators. I get it. They aren't making enough money from YouTube to avoid having to do their own promotions. But that means that YouTube is not giving me what I'm paying for. I'm paying for an ad-free experience and--because YouTube doesn't use my money to compensate creators well--I'm not getting and ad-free experience.

You can use sponsorblock. But yeah you shouldn't have to.

This could be fixed. Some creators have already split their sponsor blocks out into video chapters, making it very easy to skip. YouTube could mandate that content creators mark their sponsor pitches and both A) automatically skip it for paying users, and B) prevent skipping it for free users.

True, but I doubt they will do this because it evades their 30% take on ad revenue.

Yeah, YouTube premium is one of those rare subscriptions that as soon as it lapses I immediately resubscribe. The value for the money is just too good.

Yes, me too. YouTube leads in my unregretted minutes, and I don’t want to watch ads when deciding what to watch.

I'd be ok woth paying for their service, as we use youtube a lot. But youtube forces you to create a google account and stay logged in. This way they can easily track almost everything you do on the web, and I'm definitely not ok with paying for being tracked. If this was a youtube-only account (as it was in the past) then I'll immediately start paying for their service.

This is a fair point. I too would appreciate some way to have an isolated YouTube account.

Firefox containers, set one up for youtube.

For Chrome you can setup up different profiles. It's not as nice as containers since separate profiles force you to have different Chrome windows, but it gets the job done.

I have a Facebook-only Chrome profile that keeps Facebook from tracking me all over the web.

That's my beef too. I already pay for twitch turbo which I find to be less valuable, so it's not the cost. I just don't want to be logged into youtube all the time. And I'll never log into my google account from a work computer.

> because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay

People don't want to pay for half-baked products:

- Workspace accounts don't work

- Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid

- As Google regularly kills people's account, it also means most of us have multiple Youtube accounts that we check in different contexts, and paying for premium on all of them is way more of a commitment that you make it sound like.

nonsense. these are not anywhere in the top hundred issues with the service.

workspace accounts are irrelevant to 99.99% of normal users. google hasn't encouraged using workspace accounts for consumer use for like ten years. the only place people care is on hacker news.

it works across almost all devices.

> People don't want to pay for half-baked products:

This is disingenuous, to be blunt. People do not block youtube ads because workspace accounts don't work or because Google kills off niche products or that people lose youtube accounts when switching devices. Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience, due to the way the algorithms tailor so well, regardless of how often you may engage in it.

The ad blocker problem is less people explicitely blocking ads on Youtube, than people blanket blocking ads everywhere. They'd need to white list Youtube to disable it for that specific case.

So the question is whether they really _want_ to pay for Premium or not, the ad-blocker will probably stay on either way.

> Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience

I'm not following. For instance I have a work profile, my main profile on my phone (mostly due to paying for Google One + apps + a bunch of services on that specific account), and other profiles on my other devices (home laptop + ipad)

I absolutely do not want my work account to share my personal algorithmic recommendations, or my main account getting killed because of anything happening on other devices, including facturation issues.

Funnily enough, even as those accounts are separate, there's still cross-contamination of the algorithmic recomendations, probably because they share the same IP or geoloc.

> due to the way the algorithms tailor so well

People on HN seem to have very different experiences on Youtube than I do. Do people here actually like Youtube's video recommendations? Youtube is my go-to example I give when I need to explain to people why algorithmic recommendations generally don't work well.

> People do not block youtube ads because [...]

I'll take a hardline position on this -- if Youtube Premium was free, it would not be worth using it to watch Youtube videos. The cost is not actually the main issue. The product itself is inferior to using 3rd-party tools.

I spent a decently long time paying for Youtube Premium because I wanted to pay for content, and deliberately not using it anyway because I also wanted to have a decent viewing experience. I can't speak for other people, but for me at least when I talk about the quality of the service, it's not an excuse. I deliberately paid for a product and I still didn't use it; that's how much I disliked it.

> Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience, due to the way the algorithms tailor so well, regardless of how often you may engage in it.

The dealbreaker for me with YouTube Premium is that I'd have to sign into YouTube. And I'd need uBlock Origin anyway to block all the suggested video divs...

>People do not block youtube ads because workspace accounts don't work

Ohh me! Me! I do!

I was one of those people stupid enough to go along with Google Plus when it was still a thing. I had no problem with my account for that but didn't want my real name associated with my YouTube browsing habits. So I used the option that allowed me to keep my username in YouTube. Fast forward a few years and Google Plus goes away and somehow my YouTube account is some kind of brand account and Google needs me to verify that I am of age somehow. (As if they don't have this information already) But no matter what I do now somehow I need my administrator's account to approve my ability to watch YouTube uncensored.

So to make a long story short, after trying things constantly and getting no where I created an account for just YouTube videos and spam emails. I have absolutely no interest in giving Google any more than I absolutely have to in order to keep watching and will never give them money for YouTube. The whole thing is broken with no way to loop in an actual human being. Hell I even had people blaming me saying it was my own fault for using G+ (as if it was truly optional at the point this happened.)

>Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid

I really don't think this is true. I can't think of any official YouTube app where this won't work - across mobile devices, smart TVs, streaming boxes/sticks, games consoles.

I assume it got better with time, the main issue being that it needs to be dealt with client by client.

I tried a year ago and it was a miserable experience outside of the phone/computer browser landscape. I actually hope what you're saying is true, while also fearing that the next platform adding a youtube client will hit the same issues for the first X months until someone does something about it.

What? YT Premium doesn’t block ads on the TV apps? Really? If that’s true, they will never see a cent from me. I was on the fence, mainly since my usage varies a lot month to month in rather unpredictable ways. If YT Premium means I still see ads on the 65” screen, then no way no how.

It works fine on my tv, could be something specific to their setup

It's not true.

If I was given some assurances of what I was paying for, sure, I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks a month to get access to YouTube. Right now, I'm not willing to pay for a platform that is operated so poorly:

* Content is prioritized and screwed with too often. Videos that have no business anywhere near front-page or that are overall not well received are promoted because of shady backdoor deals with media companies. This is why late night talk show content is on the front page. I do not want to pay to support this.

* Content I have opted into seeing is suppressed, censored, etc. Creators that I enjoy have to modify how they make videos because of obscure and virtually unexplained reasons that YouTube mostly hand waves away as "the AI does a thing". They do not properly staff any kind of human review. The only way creators get their accounts back after the system goes completely haywire is by complaining on Twitter or other platforms and those without a megaphone get lost to the broken system. I am not interested in paying to support this.

* Basic features like comments have serious problems with them. The community has to attempt to hodge-podge together solutions while a multi-billion dollar company fails to do anything or provide the tools to stop rampant scams of a few basic types from ruining the comment section. I do not want to pay to support this.

* Features are randomly removed or subject to strange choices like the dislike button because a few people at YouTube think they know what the massive billions of people on the platform is best for them. I don't want to pay to support this.

Give me the option to pay and be free from these terrible choices YouTube makes and you can have my entire wallet.

> Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops.

Peer to peer streaming of the PeerTube type seems to work reasonably well. Unlike Mastodon, etc., you don't have to sign up to receive content. You just click on a URL and it works. What it doesn't offer is discovery. Nobody will find your stuff on PeerTube. They might follow links there.

I put metaverse tech demos on PeerTube.[1] Works fine, few views. No ads.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/tp9mLAQoHaFR32YAVKVDrz

> doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at *any scale*

Sure it works fine at trivial scale. But can it work at 1% of YouTube scale? How many nodes are needed for that to happen? Is that number viable?

No. 1% of YouTube is absolutely massive.

The way PeerTube works, if you're watching it, you're also sharing it. So it should scale for popular videos.

From user side Youtube discovery is almost completely broken anyway. I ended up removing both home feed and recommended videos block via extension because they didn't contribute anything besides frustration and page load time for a couple years now.

I learn about creators elsewhere and then look up and subscribe to their channel on YT. This flow will work just fine with p2p as long as creators have a video list and an rss feed anywhere on the internet and a single functioning search engine continues to exist.

Reasons for not going Youtube Premium -

1) Don't want Youtube to connect me to my real identity. I browse incognito, or using alt IDs.

2) Many creators I follow are demonetized.

Why should I reward Youtube ?

If I want to pay, I would rather pay them directly. It's their content that I watch.

3) I have seen a Ton of financial scams for targeting poor people using the names of Credible Top Brands in the country . The fact that Youtube approves such shady Ads doesn't feel right to me.

What's the alternative ? Instagram Reels and TikTok already rule short form videos.

If they can introduce a better Search Experience and a Long Form Video product, there will be a credible competitor to Youtube.

If I didn't have to tie my identity to my browsing/watching history (through credit card) then I would pay... but I guess that would imply them supporting alternative payment methods and also them not being able to sell this data (i.e. the subscription would be more expensive).

Unlikely to happen, so I will keep ad-blocking or eventually stop watching if they make ad-blocking too difficult (happened with Twitch for me)

I feel the same way. It's not just about the privacy aspects, too. It's also about the convenience. I don't want to have to create and use an account just to pay for video content. I want something more along the lines of dropping coins/bills into the instrument case of a street musician.

The trouble with YouTube premium is that there are still ads. Every YouTuber I watch does paid promotions, submarine marketing or self-promotion. That happened when YT ad revenue was reduced but even if ad rev went back up, it will continue. The marketing relationships are there now and who would turn down exrtra cash.

No, it's because we users no longer trust BigTech like Google to not be greedy and know that it is all about bait and switch.

They made "free" the norm on the internet as it increased the barriers for their competitors. Then started to show ads as nothing can be free for ever. And we users accepted that as a reasonable compromise with the belief that the ads will be limited. What happened? Bait and switch - from one to two to three banners in a page, from text ads to display ads to video ads, there was suddenly more ads than content on a web page. And the ads used more bandwidth than the content. Next came the assurance that our privacy wouldn't be compromised. Google pledged to "Do No Evil". What happened? Bait and switch - suddenly Google (or other BigTech) claimed that they just can't survive without personalised ads that need to be very privacy invasive. Now we are the products.

The bait and switch in Youtube (or any other streaming platform) is quite obvious - get us to pay for "ads free" video, and then suddenly introduce ads in the paid tier. Then offer another "ad free" tier for a higher price. No thanks, Google. We are not going to be fooled. Go ahead and introduce the anti-ad blockers - there is no way you are going to get me to pay to watch videos full of ads. Google's greed also needs limit. Especially when the user experience of most Google products have become worse.

This is exactly why I won't pay The Google a single nickel ever again. It would not surprise me in the least that, after all of this, they begin showing ads for Premium users and justifying it as being fewer ads than for free users. And I can't wait for their sycophants to come to their defense, shaming me for wanting "everything for free."

It's not about paid or free. It's about not trusting The Google, who I believe to be a bastard of a corporation. I pay for plenty of content creators on other platforms. But ads from The Google are the only way for anyone to make money? I don't buy it.

This exactly, but even one step further - it’s time consuming and expensive to produce the videos themselves! Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?! This is the major value YouTube provides. They bridge the gap between consumers who don’t want to pay with producers that NEED to get paid.

Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.

Yes correct, for most streamers that I watch, YouTube seems to be an important part of their income. PeerTube will not magically create incentives for people to create content.

20 years ago there was no such job as “YouTube Creator”. If 20 years or less from now there once again isn’t, oh well.

The problem is that YouTube consists of two fundamentally different services.

One is a content hosting service like Imgur. The people hosting the content are the users. If there are any expenses involved, it's a matter between them and the service provider. The audience doesn't use the service deliberately. They just go there because someone wants to show them something.

The other is a platform where people try to make money with the content they produce. The audience are the users, and it's fair to expect them to pay one way or another. I'm not personally interested in using that YouTube, because I seem to be incompatible with videos as a content format. Pretty much every YouTube video like that I've seen would have been better as a written article.

The comparison to imgur is interesting, as imgur is itself trying hard to make money now by removing lots of content. The history of image hosting websites is a history filled with image hosts failing for the exact same reason.

This post should be an interesting read:

https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...

The thing is, there is no way to provide a free content hosting service in the long run (whether image or video)

> Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?!

Many Youtube creators are Demonetized. They make money from other sources.

Also, not all creators making money are creating Quality Content. In fact a lot of content is recycled.

I subscribe to YTP, but still use incognito tabs plenty for stuff that I don't want recommendations from.

Fucking with adblockers there wouldn't exactly encourage me to keep the main subscription…

YouTube has caching like that too, see:

https://peering.google.com/#/

And

https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/faq

And specifically the section on: "What content can Google serve from an edge node?"

This is not comparable to Netflix et al. YouTube catalog is effectively infinite, and people watch all kinds of random content. Storing 10k movies and 20k TV episodes is a cakewalk compared to this.

I don't disagree that YouTube has a much longer (and fatter) tail, but that doesn't mean they can't benefit from edge caching.

They can benefit for sure, my point is that serving a YouTube type catalog is just far more expensive.

There's undoubtably more data being served but I'd be very curious how the edge caching efficiencies differ given how many people watch the same things (recommended by the algorithm) and since YouTube's content is so much shorter on average that larger catalog is somewhat balanced by any given cache node being able to hold more videos.

The cache hit rate is actually pretty high. Also, google already has setups at pops for other reasons and can cache fill at lower qos for free much of the time.

"YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases)."

If this is true, and I have long believed it is, then the following, from the article, is a lie:

"It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide," the message adds.

If YouTube does not "stay free" then it shrinks to a small fraction of its current size.

So-called "tech" companies know users will not pay. This is not surprising since so much of the "content", none of which the "tech" company produces, is garbage. The stuff that goes "viral", that generates the most ad revenue, is not stuff people are going to pay for.

Either the "tech" company's website/app is free and a Trojan Horse by which its users can be spied on, or the "tech" business model isn't worth much of anything. Like someone said, "You are the product." Not the stuff uploaded by so-called "creators", YouTube's unpaid workforce.

"Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide."

YouTube has to be free or it won't be able to continue operation. It's wonderful experiment, all this uploaded video, if we ignore all the surveillance Google is conducting and all propaganda and worse videos Google is forcibly putting in front of people, but this is not something many people with pay for. YouTube cannot convert "billions of users wordlwide" into paying subscribers.

Google might gain my favour if they become human again. Google is literally the most robotic company out there. There is so much they could do to make YT a better experience. But it suffers from developeritis, where it’s just a fancy tech stack (bravo!) but it wasn’t build for actual humans.

I think you make a good point but I think part of the problem is that it is difficult to get people to pay for something that they have gotten used to getting for free.

That is correct, and sometimes such free services go away if they don't make money in the long term. I don't want the same to happen to YouTube.

It makes no sense to pay for YouTube premium when you can use ad blockers. Which is why google is removing that option.

Unless you want to compensate the creators of the videos. Both Youtube itself and video creators need to be paid for them to keep going.

One thing I haven't seen discussed here is: how exactly are they going to remove that option? Are they going to embed the ads into the video stream on-the-fly somehow?

One way would be to require logins and then timeout accounts that behave abnormally wrt ads. Given that WASM will be mainstream soon, it will be hard to monkey patch the code to prevent all this.

Youtube can tell if an ad is blocked. They can then refuse to serve the video. Instead replacing it with an image that says "please turn off your adblocker" or the like.

I imagine they’d prevent the page from rendering and display a warning when an Adblocker is detected. Similar to what some publishers currently do.

people are paying for the content with patreon, bypassing YouTube entirely. Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with?

Why blame the users for YouTube failure?

Patreon is also Pay-what-you-want, so whales can subsidize lower tiers, and folks can often pay less than $15 per month.

Because people get real mad if YouTube tries to collect the patron money themselves and obviously takes a cut. Aka memberships.

So? Patreon's taking a cut (but YouTube takes a bigger cut; a quick search indicates 30% vs 8%-12%). I'm fine with YouTube memberships in principle; if a creator that I support said "consider switching your support from Patreon to YouTube", I would. But there's no way I'm signing up for YouTube Premium.

The parent said youtube should be able to take money directly... and I pointed out they can. That's what's So. And I didn't say youtube premium, I said memberships. Tho if you have enough memberships premium makes more sense fiscally even tho it doesn't give the money to the creators as much.

I was responding to your assertion that people get mad because YouTube takes a cut. The alternative (Patreon) also takes a cut.

People are also mad at that but sometimes less so. It seems those indirections launder the grumpy since there's not one focused place to complain. YouTube takes more because they're doing more work. It's funny cause no one seems to think YouTube deserves any munny for their technological marve of long tail content sometimes.

Isn't YouTube already doing that with channel memberships? I think people can also pay to comment on live streams or something.. They're definitely already letting you support creators directly, while taking their cut of course.

Yup. The livestream version is a "super chat" (or "super sticker" is an option), but even regular videos can turn on "super thanks" which let viewers donate and leave a comment. In any case, youtube takes 30%, so many streamers try to push to a third party option that takes a much lower fee. And the "and leave a comment" turns people off that option I'm sure, it'd be nice if they made it optional and just let you pseudo-anonymously support someone's video. Most people won't realize you can delete the comment right after making it and the channel still gets your money (not sure if the channel can still see the comment contents if any/account that did it). There's also "gifted memberships" which like memberships themselves is another feature lifted directly from Twitch. Given youtube's catch-up stance (Twitch also makes it difficult to use adblock) it's not hard to call them "failing" at monetizing; there are many interesting A/B experiments that could be done that they are not doing. (I think gifted memberships is no longer an A/B test feature but standard by now... so they do them sometimes, but not enough.) Part of it is also probably just Google culture; if something is "only" going to net them a few million in profit, it's not worth doing.

The amount of people paying with patreon is just so so tiny compared to people watching YouTube in any country or city that I am not even sure what your point is.

> Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with?

What does this even mean? I hope you are not suggesting in good faith that YouTube should grab money from other companies somehow? Money that was given to that company by people with specific expectations in mind.

What exactly is YouTube failure here? The patreon citation is just so irrelevant because of scale. Taking all of Patreon revenue would not cover YouTube hosting costs.

People on HN love to talk about patreon as an alternative to youtube premium because it is an easy way out. But if it was representative of real world actions, Patreon would be processing a lot lot more money.

> The amount of people paying with patreon is just so so ...

Interesting. What are your sources for that info? :)

Many Patreon creators allow you to see how many patrons they have.

The most popular Patreon creators have something like ~50,000 patrons.

Anyone able to pull in that many patrons is likely to have millions of viewers on YouTube.

The proportion of viewers that pay is tiny.

> Many Patreon creators allow you to see how many patrons they have.

Ahhh.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that being optional either.

Many Patreon creators don't though, so it's kind of hard to tell. :/

That being said, I kind of wonder if the % of people paying creators is much different to the average % of people who pay for online services.

From (probably dodgy?) rough memory, that's something like 4% of users.

No idea how that works out when compared to $ from Youtube viewers though. :)

I think people are more willing to pay via Patreon because it directly funds the creators. The more YouTube takes, the less willing people are to pay.

I want a paid for video streaming service with the following:

* No attachment to Google

* Enough network effect / traction to be interesting

* No predatory data collection and recommendation algorithms

YouTube premium isn't that. So for now I use Newpipe and ad blockers. If they lock it down, hopefully there will be enough traction somewhere else to pick up where they left off.

What you want kinda exists in other hosting providers like Vimeo, but the economics is not pretty and most people don't want such a service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578). What you missed in your requirement list is how much will you be willing to pay for the service you desire.

What’s really required is a much greater proportion of people like them.

It could be a public service, but people don't like these either.

YouTube premium is the definition of paying to watch ads.

If you want to skip ads your option is to block ads, not to buy premium

For me, text is fine. I'm a minority but I just avoid videos altogether.

Paying youtube for an infinite catalogue of shit? No thanks. And the rare gems that do interest me are invariably... overly expanded and filled with sponsor bullshit, so, ads.

Paying for YT premium to give Google their pound of flesh, only to be stuck in same horrorshow of well-meaning content creators having to whore themselves out to their sponsors... To me that means that the only winning move is not to play.

It’s a recurring pattern on the Internet: people unashamedly claiming they’re getting X for free, and will gladly pay if Y condition is met. Then Y condition is met, and people (possibly the same, possibly different) unashamedly come up with new excuses of why they’re still getting it for free and won’t pay.

Never believe “I’ll pay if …” if you’re running a business.

Or this could be evidence that YouTube is coming up with new ways to be bad faster than they're fixing their problems. Shorts, removal of the Dislike button, repeatedly and retroactively changing the rules on 'advertiser friendliness' without warning, degrading their own search feature in favour of algorithmic content, spurious bans, a guilty-until-proven-innocent copyright strike system that's easily and openly exploited by bad actors and the inability of even million-subscriber channels to reach a human in support should any of those problems suddenly destroy their livelihood. Fixing any one of those things won't make YouTube good, nor does it inspire confidence that by the time any of them are fixed they won't have some up with some new form of awfulness.

Isn't it Youtube's problem to make their business profitable? It's not a binary - they could offer a different deal with Premium, market it differently. Customers aren't rational - just like humans. They are a massive multinational - if anyone can figure it out, it's them.

Maybe the ad model doesn't work, and people are not clear on what they are actually paying for, since it's effortless to get the same service for free.

Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible. Having a way to remaing somewhat anonymous would make me consider premium, but it's a not go for me at this time

It is YouTube's problem to make their business profitable. And hence they will make efforts like what the article says. If things don't work they might require login and enforce ads somehow (YouTube will survive that I think, even if there is some viewership drop). There is no magic wand here that they can figure out (look at competing video services like Vimeo for an example). In the long run in 20 years if YouTube is deemed unprofitable as a whole for the company, it might even be shut down, and nobody might be willing to host another YouTube like service as is without significant changes to monetisation.

I guess I'm fine with that! Or maybe some billionaire will make it it's gift to humanity. Crazy that we have public libraries but no public youtube/wiki government supported

YouTube costs a lot, and even that because it can rely on Google's amazing infrastructure which is optimised to the core. There is no billionaire who can even cover 10 years of YouTube costs.

Was looking for numbers on it, heres one :https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

I think they're doing pretty great!

YouTube is very profitable

Source?

Please don’t ask for sources on publicly available information, as if it’s my responsibility to personally convince you of it.

It's not public. We only know revenues. So you should back up your claims with sources.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

Record proofits!

Revenue != profits

I'm sorry, in two years they upped their revenue by over 10b - from 19 to 28b - I'm fairly certain they are having record profits. (Google doesn't release numbers for youtube's revenue, so that's the best number you're getting)

You don't spend the kind of money staffing a product like YouTube unless there are lots of profits too.

Everyone seems to have read an article from 10+ years ago and haven't updated their opinion since. The internet is wildly different now. Tech makes huge profits.

Absolutely! I find it nuts to see so many people defending giant corporations - it's so backwards.

>Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible.

This is an important point. How much money is Google making by being able to track and spy on YouTube viewers?

YouTube’s unit economics are fairly unique in that monetisation rates put a ceiling on video quality.

Even with the best networks and infrastructure in the world, they would struggle to break even on 4K video with say $2 CPM. Obviously they exceed that threshold at the moment for 4K, but maybe not for 8K or 16k.

On the hand, people have been abused by Google (by way of stealing our attention) and Google has trained us not to pay for services.

So I can’t see how you expect me to trust the company that has tried to game me, and never disclosed that I was the product.

Why should I pay now ?

Does youtube premium:

- Make the TV app be useful and not utter trash

- Allow me to globally disable/remove 'shorts'

- Stop promoting the front-page trash that is 'trending'

- Allow me to permanently filter music by genre or remove sports entirely

- Fix the recommendations engine to actually work

- Allow grouping/filtering subscriptions

Unless it does all of the above, there's no way I'm paying. Ads are an annoyance (and as others have said, most videos now run their own sponsorships/ads inside the video as well), but not having a well functioning 'application' in the first place means there's nothing worth paying for.

I used to have Youtube Red or whatever it was, along with Google Music. Then they got rid of Google Music, replacing it with Youtube Music that I didn't want. And then they ruined Youtube by intentionally nerfing it on Firefox, ruining my subscription feed, changing the algorithm to reinforce short form clickbait, and adding things like Shorts and autoplay that, no matter how many times I turn them off, they always come back.

So I switched to Floatplane (3 subscriptions) and Spotify. I have no problem paying for content. I have a HUGE problem paying Google.

Google does cache YouTube content in ISP data centers using GGC (Google Global Cache) servers. Their docs says the majority of GGC traffic is cacheable YouTube content.

https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en

https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/7658599?hl=en

It's not that I wouldn't want to pay. I can just (so far) watch the stuff with an adblocker and have effectively no additional value by giving YouTube money for premium.

I'd disable my adblocker and revanced youtube if they stopped randomly terminating channels unreasonably and gave them proper means to contest wrongful terminations. If Google respects the people making a living off of them (mainly off superchats and memberships, not ads) so little, they don't deserve my respect either.

I'll just keep up with the inevitable cat and mouse game with adblockers.

> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay

I'd argue exactly the opposite, since over 25 million people pay for YouTube Premium.

At least for me, YouTube premium does not work because I do not want Google to save everyting I watch, that's why I use it as unlogged. I already have a gmail account, I use Google search, therefore Google has already quite amount of data about me, let's just not have it my Youtube history also.

When Youtube arrived first, I had an account with some playlists, then Google decided to merge account and asked me to switch a google account in order to keep my youtube account, that was the time I decided not to have an account on Youtube and subscribtion requires an account.

Also for subscriptions generally, thing are getting wild. There are several paid video / streaming services. Just to be able to watch 3 or 4 shows requires almost being subscribed to all streaming services, which is both expensive (at least for some part of the world) and ridicilous.

While I still use Youtube (for now, while adblockers work), the alternative is Rumble (or something Rumble like). The censorship/narrative control from Youtube(Google), along with the removal of the ability to "dislike" videos has resulted in site where it is difficult to sift through spam when it comes to non-controversial topics, and difficult to find what you are looking for if you are looking for information that may conflict with the current "official narrative" on disputed topics. It is very similar to the way Substack has become (for the most part) my alternative to magazine and "news" journals. Legacy platforms owned by corporate conglomerates still have a leg up when it comes to audience size and archival library size, but as far as content goes, they are rapidly falling behind.

It can't be the perfect showcase because the service isn't even great, let alone if you compare it to "any" alternative, for example, it doesn't even have proper offline downloads, which is available for free with an alternative

Even great compared to what? You need to cite services similar to YouTube (like Vimeo, whose pricing model will just not be acceptable to anyone at HN), not frontends to YouTube, who don't do any of the expensive backend work.

Compared to the your own bar - perfection

(also, how is HN audience relevant in the conversation about the whole internet?)

If Google removed the useless YouTube Music + exclusives and lowered the price it would be a lot more popular.

I pay for YouTube premium and for me it's worth it to remove the ads with the family plan. But paying for extra stuff you don't want sucks.

+1, I will pay for the removal of the adds but I couldn't care about YouTube TV or music. The price already feels too high but it's the one I don't rotate through compared to Netflix/Disney/Hulu/HBO which I watch a show then cancel.

The issue with YouTube is that it’s not a cheaper alternative. I think a lot of people are like me and find it mostly of little value which is why they don’t pay and will probably just stop using it if they have to go through a ton of ads.

Probably the alternative is to simply not watch any video on YouTube at all. I'd love YouTube to do that for me because that's probably going to beneficial to me in general. I wish I could do that by myself.

I pay for premium.

On one of my google accounts, and only if I am logged in.

For about 80% of my youtube watching experience this works.

But there are times I am logged in with my work account as (at the least) the primary account and I dont bother switching.

Or a random tutorial video I am looking at from a new laptop or untrusted device.

The pain of logging in outweighs looking at a couple of ads in the moment. So dont think that premium is a failed model based on usage. I certain I am not alone in engaging with youtube in a non-premium capacity despite having a subscription.

What if they charged based on use up to $15 per month?

That would be a lot more tempting.

Peer to peer and microtransactions might work. So some people with computers can keep one tab open and earn some crypto cents.

I'm not sure if it's possible to build P2P network with zero trust that could work like that.

One issue could be that participating person might technically be involved with distribution of forbidden content like child porn or disney cartoon. So even if they didn't know that and everything was encrypted, they might still be accountable for it, especially because they made money doing it.

People don't like micro transactions. Please try to think of one micro transaction product that ever got any traction.

The number of desktops is tiny compared to phone and laptop users, so I don't see how this can be scaled. (And it's not even clear the cents people would earn would even cover their electricity/data costs)

What many people specifically don’t like about subscriptions are the transactions, IMO. Transaction costs aren’t zero, and microtransactions just introduce more of them.

Not necessarily pure peer-to-peer, but I'm pretty sure some federated thing could absolutely work.

We just need this country/world to collectively remember what a library is.

I would pay, but I refuse to pay for YouTube music. I used the much superior Google Play Music until they killed it, and I refused to eat the new dogfood.

>people do not want to pay

We don't REALLY know that. If adblockers are effectively blocked, we might see an increase in people paying. The big value add of Premium was something people here were taking for granted because that "feature" was available for free.

Anecdotal but I knew a few people who are paying for it because of Apple TVs and iPhones where it's less trivial to block the ads on the apps.

My problem with youtube premium is that it doesn't remove ads. Most of the videos I watch on the platform have multiple in-video segments with advertisements directly from the video author. Youtube can easily solve this, considering the community-driven plugin SponsorBlock does it so effectively. But they are happy to charge you the premium fee and let you sit thru intrusive ads.

A model where the uploader pays. Vimeo pro plans have something like that.

This idea that uploading is free artificially created by big data and somehow we think that's the way it should be. But really it's just their strategy, get as much data in then tax those who want to access it, even forgetting about the whole ML angle it's very simple to understand.

That model doesn't work, see the link I included about Vimeo.

The model would work, it just needs to be properly implemented. I guess it's hard when YouTube etc. keeps people accustomed to not even rock bottom prices but completely free stuff.

> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay

Absolutly wrong. I pay for spotify to not have ads, I pay for netflix despite the fact I can download torrents because of the benefit of the service. Hell, I pay for Telegram premium and chatgpt, both of which have very good free offer without ads!

But GAFAMS have exhausted our trust, so they don't get the same treatment.

I will never pay for a Google service, because that would mean having a google account tie to a payment system. And Google spies, collect data, close accounts and services on a whim and has terrible support.

It doesn't respect their customers, and so they lost our will to give them money.

Plus, even if you pay, you have no way to know if they are going to respect their own contract anymore because they don't care and have no consequence for messing up.

You pay for an amazon product? Can be a scam and amazon will not prevent that. You pay for twitter blue to see less ads? We just learned this month tweeter blue users say exactly as many ads as regular users.

> So what is the alternative?

We don't want an alternative. Those companies made billions with their short term abusing policies, now they finally pay some price.

Good.

For once the market is behaving as a regulating force as it should, which is not often nowadays.

I don't like that paid subscription services usually changes to be worse the day they get high enough market share. And content providers are severely fragmented that it become expensive to enjoy them all. Sure we can switch subscriptions for some months to enjoy different content provider for same expense, but it's such a hassle to do it imo.

Peer to peer using automated torrenting for video distribution of copyrighted media libraries has been reinvented and worked 3 separate times over the last decade (popcorntime, etc). It just doesn't work in the sense that as soon as it works and becomes popular it's attacked legally until it stops existing.

The problem is legal not technical.

Popcorn time is again like Netflix, not YouTube. Serving 10k movies is a vastly easier problem than YouTube (The few gaming channels I watch have more video content length than the movies on Netflix)

Some site off X free articles per month. Can't YT do the same? Along the same lines, if there are heavy TY users, can't they be ad'ed more than average?

The point being, it's hard to want to pay for the no-ads experience when you rarely if ever get to experience it and/or your YT usage is not that often.

What I don't understand (speaking of Vimeo) is why doesn't YouTube offer a plan where individual content creators can choose to pay a monthly fee to keep ads off of their own videos for all viewers. Speaking for myself I would happily pay for that.

You can read the Vimeo thread for why it can not work. If people pay a monthly fee, and their views skyrocket, you either have to force them to pay much more, or to restrict their views somehow, both of which are just so so bad compared to the current scenario (this is exactly what Vimeo did).

Same cost model as any hosting service.

Uh, go to peering.google.net. See their “GGC” google global cache nodes. Those are all in-ISP. YouTube arguably has a larger in isp cache network than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, …etc combined.

Id argue a large amount of YouTube’s traffic is cacheable.

I strongly disagree Netflix isn’t a comparable alternative as it enables me to watch moving pictures to occupy my time. Worse YouTube gets their movies for free.

I understand that they are in a bind. Not my problem, however.

YouTube premium costs in Germany €15,99, which is more than Disney+ and AppleTV+ combined. I personally just don’t see the value in paying so much for it, considering all the other subscriptions that we have.

I pay for Nebula, which has far less content, but would never dream of paying YouTube.

I like Nebula and I like its creators and their values. I loath Google and I can't stand by much of the content.

The problem with YouTube premium is that it’s a music subscription service bundled with a video service. I have no interest in subsidizing the former to get the latter.

Surely there must be limits, though. I have recently witnessed a couple of 1 hour+ long “adverts”. I can bear adverts when watching youtube videos. But not 1h+ long…

> Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources

How much would they save if "free" users only got 480p videos?

I'd be fine with 480p resolution.

don't be so modest.

720p is an acceptable low bar

For me, 480p is not even modest, it's close to the height I get for a landscape video when holding my phone in portrait.

I also don't usually need the extra pixels, as there is seldom important content in the fine details — a few years ago, when I was prepping to leave the UK but not everything lined up to the same dates, I was using PAYG mobile for home internet and therefore set the videos to 240p; the only reason that didn't really work was that not all videos had such low resolution, and when they didn't the site defaulted to 720p.

yea, 480p is ok for phones.

720p brings a noticeable improvement for watching on something 40"+ (tv).

going further to 1080p is only a marginal improvement over 720p so i usually "keep it simple/small"

> And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs

Why can't Google do this? They already have presence at ISPs

Youtube has ~500 hours of video uploaded every minute. Netflix only has content from the past few months/years, and probably only a few thousand hours _total_.

Most of that content will hardly get any views though. Caching the top 10.000 on a daily basis will avoid most traffic.

I guess the reasoning is that Youtube has a way larger catalog while Netflix's catalog is comparatively small. I don't really think this really a legitimate reason though, given that most social media has huge power laws, that is it's likely that 99% of each day's views are for a very tiny number of videos comparable to the size of Netflix's catalog.

Yes, for the remaining 1% youtube has to provide some central service, but that's just a small fraction of their traffic, and if they run into cost problems there they just increase the size of the caches at the ISPs, or introduce layered caching (one for each continent, then one for each ISP, etc). They probably do all of that already.

Storing those huge amount of videos that get maybe 1 view per decade each, that's a different challenge, but I wouldn't say the traffic is. But I don't know youtube's data maybe there is no power law in effect for them, idk.

They do. The key phrase is “highly leverage.”

The problem at the core is subscription fatigue. Netflix, Prime, Disney, HBO, newspapers, cable TV, sports... that shit adds up.

People would buy two cups of boba tea, other than paying 12 per month.

Ain't nothing wrong with this, once it went free, it is hard to go back.

Except in other-than-first-world countries it's equivalent to tens of cups of tea.

YouTube has cache boxes at ISPs like Netflix.

YouTube Premium Family is worth every penny.

I used to pay for it when it came with Google Play Music

Can you see dislikes with YouTube Premium?

I would pay if they stopped censoring creators.

> So what is the alternative?

Most of the people and channels I follow are on Rumble. And no, most of them are not "right-wing" and fairly apolitical.

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