If you come from a third world country I get it, but many of us here do not. $12 is less than half an hour of work for even middle class Americans and Europeans.
I guess if you don’t even watch YouTube I don’t understand why you are even in this thread.
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It is not just $12/month for YouTube that is the problem most people have to budget for all their content consumption between streaming services, sports subscriptions , music subs, newspapers you can easily spend upwards of $300/month , that is not including other productivity tools Saas you could end paying for like o365 , Dropbox and so on .
YT would be the one easiest to cut because you won’t loose access just have to put up with some ads unlike everything else .
For many not seeing ads is not worth $12 a month , for some like you the value is enormous so you see it as worth paying .
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I personally stopped paying for YT premium because I get most of the content from Nebula what I used YT for, at 1/10th the cost.
Also there is no way to disable Shorts and they won’t improve the by design poorer implementation on Firefox; both these make my experience using the platform poor even if I pay for it so I don’t bother.
I have only reasonably included couple of options in each category, you could mix and match preferences and use different providers or may get deals and it is part of combo with some other plan , however you will still be in this range.
- Streaming: ($121) (Prime, Apple have other uses bundled, Disney is undroppable if you have kids)
- Disney+ (ESPN, Hulu, Disney) - $20
- Netflix - $16
- Paramount+ - $12
- Max (HBO) - $20
- Peacock (NBC) - $10
- Apple Tv+ (via Apple One ) - $23
- Nebula - $5
- Amazon Prime $15
- MLS - $13
- NBA - $20
- Spotify(podcasts,list: $10
- YT music: $15
- Audible: 15
- NYTimes ( or main newspaper) : $16
- Bloomberg/FT ( or business daily): $25
- Economist/New Yorker (or other long form magazines): $20
On top you could be paying for
- any game network subscriptions like PlayStation Plus maybe $20-40
- one time purchases for movies/ games etc in addition to Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+ plans when they not included perhaps another $100 every month
- cable/internet/Mobile plans which are another ~ $200 easily
- Patreon/ podcasts or other creator specific subscriptions
- other personal productivity apps you may pay for (o365, Dropbox, email etc) maybe another $100
Is this really the middle class U.S family reality?
How could you not have Disney+ if you have kids ?
Netflix is at 75M Americans paying for it (and many others sharing), typical family definitely has more than just Apple Music and HBO
I would think my family having access to read good quality journals rather than get their news and analysis just from social media or click bait content farms is worth $50 / month ?
I know only 2 top quality newspapers not behind a paywall : Aljazeera and The Guardian, both while have decent American coverage or not amercian. Perhaps you can also include NPR, BBC and few other high quality news sources that are still free but are not newspapers.
Every high quality news source even news agencies like Reuters[1] are now behind paywalls.
[1] Associated Press is still free, given their non-profit status hopefully will remain so.
Anyway, what you say makes sense, but I just don’t think many people drop $50/month on that stuff. They don’t see the value, and continue to feed Facebook.
They came to prominence when Bin Laden used to give them recorded tapes and interviews post 9/11. They have comprehensive and deeper coverage on topics and geographies [1][2] where western news orgs won't focus.
Beware though, they have biases too like everyone, particularly on covering Qatar and Middle East. The government funds them as tool of geopolitical soft power by creating an honest dependable news, no different from UK with BBC but without the colonial undertones, on average with global topics they are a solid source.
[1] In particular areas with some Muslim population, i.e lots of Africa, East Asia etc
It's a strange argument anyway, nobody buys something simply because it's only an hour of work. The internet offers me a hundred subscriptions every day, if I buy them all because they're just 10 bucks I'm broke. Whatsapp cost 1$ once and they even dropped that because although it's great value, what matters is that none of it is exclusive.
More over, i'm constantly of the defensive with it. If i click on an impulse video -- aka one i watch guiltily but would rather not make a habit out of it -- Youtube disregards other videos i'd much rather watch and now gives me repeated videos of that one thing. I open a fair bit of stuff in Incognito just to avoid Youtube polluting my feed.
I think i'd happily pay $3/m for what i get. But generally it's not close to $12/m for me, especially when i don't feel like it's working for me.
I use YouTube far less than Netflix, Disney, Amazon, bbc, all of which are cheaper. Many YouTube videos come with burnt in adverts too.
I'm not sure how you drew that conclusion. Of course Floatplane subscribers get the sponsorships edited out, that's the benefit of being a sponsor.
LTT was worried about their Youtube dependence, so created Floatplane. The fact of the matter is they wouldn't be in existence without Youtube and would probably die, even with Floatplane now existing.
There's no evidence anywhere that Youtube is dying.
I’m not sure how you can say “YouTube isn’t dying” and “LTT is worried about relying on YouTube” in the same breath. Linus was always complaining about YouTube from a creator’s POV.
The local farmer sells to 10 shops. Each shop buys from 10 farmers.
Sure you can hitch your wagon. It’s a massive risk, sometimes unavoidable. It makes perfect sense to diversify your supply chain.
~15€/mo and my family doesn't have to watch ads, we get YouTube music (not missing Spotify at all TBH) - that's well worth the money.
If you're a student or working low paid job I can understand - but on a site mostly for software professionals and startups ?
I currently pay for premium to avoid ads myself, so you don't get to call me any freeloader names while I complain that despite paying I still have to suffer shorts and utter shit suggestions and embedded sponsor ads and having to answer a ridiculous 2fa prompt on my phone every single time just because I use firefox in medium private mode , and annoying things like hiding downvotes, and serious things like censoring and invalid dmca takedowns and algorithmic promiting/hiding, etc.
Now, if Youtube was an independent company, that'd be a different story. But it isn't, so µBlock it is.
I suppose ultimately I am arguing that $12/month isn't "cheap" because it's really "$12/month and whatever time you spend on it". I used to dump so much free time into things like TikTok, YouTube and Reddit, and I am grateful their leadership answers to greedy millionaire/billionaire venture capitalists who can barely tell a mouse and keyboard apart.
Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other people I can convince to vote for someone.
Youtube is one of the few platforms where people making content can actually survive off of it. It's not everything but it's more than ~anything else.
It would be nice for there to be more platforms but personally I'm exhausted of platforms trying to race to the bottom and ultimiately squeezing people who are actually doing the "hard work".
(My one big complaint is that youtube doesn't charge people for bandwidth, meaning that services like Vimeo are ... kind of DOA. I don't know how you do that and have viral stuff for normal people, but it does feel like something should be in place)
But at some point it got into the ballpark of two 10-15 second ads every 5 minutes even on the channels of people who explicitly asked not to turn on monetization because they're making educational content, often for kids and schools. The mobile app nags me with a "try premium" / "skip trial" popup 5 times per week. There are consistently small bugs in the user experience of the app.
Oh, and they're rich as God because they're also the people who own the operating system, browser, app store, and search engine I used to find all this stuff -- plus my email and my productivity software, all of which they will leverage to _squeeze_ every last bit the juice out of me as a user. They own all my data already. They own everything.
So, what is the "principled stand"? Enough is a goddamned enough! If they were just going to show some ads, it would be fine, but like every single parasitic horror show out there, they promised they'd be good and they cannot stop getting worse.
At the very least, I can choose not to pay them $12/month for the privilege.
Pay money, get no ads. It's not that complicated. It's totally reasonable to whine about the increased ads and not wanting to pay ofc. But at least we can pay to not have ads!
I understand that YouTube costs money to run, but the monetization situation does not reflect that, and is thus totally backwards. The current model is that users pay for a “service” (YouTube) which has an expense for “content” (video creators). The content is what the users actually want; the situation should be that users pay the content creators, who pay YouTube something akin to rent. It is not fair that YouTube profits off of the value that content creators bring rather than just their infrastructure. It is akin to paying the owner of a building for access to the store.
It's been about a while, and so far hasn't gained a large userbase of viewers - at least in part because content creators don't want to pay for random non-paying people to watch their videos.
I bet the economics don't add up for running a video hosting site, yet only getting revenue from audio ads.
Even spotify hasn't managed to survive on audio-only with ads - they have to put in other arbitrary restrictions like 'you can't play the song you want to play' to dissuade people from using the lossmaking plan.
Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.
If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit and engineer time).
Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...
What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking equipment, which is cheap but not free.
But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.
The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and given their size I can't convince myself if they are or are not being shafted financially by big ISPs for peering - even if they are though, it's marginal compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo datacenters will charge significantly more than what it costs Google.
Throttle the connection so its slow enough users get 480p video at peak viewing times. Ask google for $$$$ to stop doing that.
Also, that 1TB/month cap is just foot-in-the-door technique. It will stay 1TB or so as videos, games, websites, etc. continue to get larger and larger and then they will lean on Appeal to Tradition (logical fallacy) when people complain that 1TB/month isn't adequate.
Remember that for a while they were just about the only site that could load Flash. YouTube is that important.
I should also note that Google will send data from their DCs over dark fibre to their PoPs near you, so they only transit onto the internet locally.
For example, transfer out from S3 gets down to $0.05 at just 150TB, including the AWS markup.
(Note that CloudFront data out is not directly comparable to S3 data out!)
No, there are no startups in video for the same reason there were no startups in office apps or operating systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the space.
The problem with a video startup is that you have to charge for your content. And some jerk will download your video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.
If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see innovation in the space.
Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust action, the video startup space will continue to remain dead.
Also youtube's bitrate usually far below that amount.
> It's why twitter doesn't do HD video.
Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.
My question is specifically about YouTube.
We had a "showdown" moment with our kids some time ago due to inability to manage device usage. Ended up with me changing the wifi password and all the kids devices permanently lost internet access at home.
The kids have been playing together - and outside! - and generally much happier ever since. Mental health definitely better. Who'd have thought it?
I watched a lot of the History Channel, TLC and Discovery Channel growing up. I've seen all manner of documentary about all manner of thing. I'd say plop your kids in front of that every now and then, but these days it's just Pawn Stars and Hoarders and Deadliest Catch.
The monthly show checkouts are somewhat limited (I think 10 a month) but their offerings are pretty large and generally family friendly or education based, even though they do have some more modern or topical movies or shows from time to time.
YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify. I actually had to leave Google play music (and YouTube music) for Spotify because the product was so subpar.
The only benefit was that some random thing on YouTube might be there but, other than that, just part of the Google poor support of their paying users.
The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps and, again, they worsened the experience to push you to premium which is extremely shady.
It makes sense only if you believe everything on the internet should be free.
> YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify.
I don't disagree. It's highly subjective.
> The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps
Piracy is always an option. But if you choose not to do it, buying premium makes sense.
> It makes sense only if you believe everything on the internet should be free.
I wish HN readers would try and stay away from strawmen and address what others say.
If a product offers something and suddenly makes it product progressively inferior as a means to make a distinction of "this is premium", then it's an anti pattern. It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
>> YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify.
> I don't disagree. It's highly subjective.
It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
>> The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps
> Piracy is always an option. But if you choose not to do it, buying premium makes sense.
Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
I mean, you do you but it's an unconvicing sell.
The inferior experience in terms of YouTube is the increase in ads. I like to think of it as a price increase due to inflation.
> It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
That's a standard practice actually. I have seen new restaurants offer food for free on the day of opening to attract customers and then charge from next day onwards. They will also gradually keep increasing their prices to cope up with inflation and/or other reasons.
> It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
Treating your preference as objective just shows how much disconnected you are from the reality. In my country, YouTube is the goto choice for music. Moreover, YouTube ads are skipable, but Spotify ads aren't.
> Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
Desires of citizens like you is to get everything for free. That's what I have understood.
> You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
Your happy customers are your best marketers.
> Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
I agree, they did make the product shitty for free users. But that won't make me and many others stop using it.
> The inferior experience in terms of YouTube is the increase in ads. I like to think of it as a price increase due to inflation.
It's a coping mechanism. Just like people who think their lives need to be worsened due to inflation and "that's due to exogenous characteristics" and not to do with their gov policies.
>> It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
> That's a standard practice actually. I have seen new restaurants offer food for free on the day of opening to attract customers and then charge from next day onwards. They will also gradually keep increasing their prices to cope up with inflation and/or other reasons.
I knew you'd go for this one. Transparency matters. Restaurants are usually upfront about this. Have a taste before buy is fine. Destroy the competition and then abuse a captured market while still actively destroying the competition (lobbying, attacking funding, purchase with intent to stop, etc).
Also, Just because something happens, doesn't mean it's ethical. People made money squatting on URLs like savehaiti.com after the hurricane and, even though it works, it's scummy and not something to laud.
>> It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
>Treating your preference as objective just shows how much disconnected you are from the reality.
It's not preference. You didn't state it initially as preference. There's also objective features to analyze or no product would be better than another.
This poor attack at me is funny seeing as you want to move the ballpark to play the victim and not have to defend bad claims.
> In my country, YouTube is the goto choice for music.
Which doesn't mean it's a better product. And did you think about everyone else's Country before making your statements or does it only work to excuse your lack of solid arguments?
> Moreover, YouTube ads are skipable, but Spotify ads aren't.
Suddenly we are talking about a free tier and not the product GPM/YM vs Spotify in their premium versions? More goalpost moves.
>> Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
> Desires of citizens like you is to get everything for free. That's what I have understood.
"Citizens like me". You don't know me. You made a bad sales pitch for a product that abused customers and instead of recognizing that you start attacking anyone who points out the truth with poor strawmen.
You don't know how many services I pay for but you should have inferred that I pay for Spotify and that I paid for GPM/YM so your whole dishonest line of attack is moot.
>> You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
> Your happy customers are your best marketers.
Actually, you've massively failed as a marketer by being unable to point out advantages or defend why YouTube had deteriorated their product and demanded payment for it. And let's not even address the behaviour towards the creators who built the bulk or their content.
>> Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
>I agree, they did make the product shitty for free users. But that won't make me and many others stop using it.
No. You just acquiesced and got screwed over but think championing it is a good thing. It's hilarious but at least you agree on the core.
Good marketing, bud. They should hire you.
The premium experience still absolutely sucks, merely the free is even worse.
And during the day I occasionally leave the live stream of a stork nest running. One of them learned to fly just two days ago, and it was fun watching them getting to learn how their wings work, while they don't have much space to train [1], which makes me ask how many such livestreams exist which normally would be volatile data. I'm not sure if these live streams do get stored, but it would be a huge amount of bandwidth for almost no added value.
Then there are fun mathematics videos which show you how to solve mathematical problems [2], daring you to solve them.
Basically there's so much of value, like `the native web`, `ServeTheHome`, `Jeff Gerling`, `No Boilerplate`, `Code to the Moon`, James Briggs`, gliding, mtb-riding, windsurfing, so much quality content which is hard for a TV station to deliver.
I don't see it comparable to Reddit.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...
I would buy YouTube premium but I don't really want to remunerate Google for their anticompetitive business practices or their mistreatment of content creators. So I just go for patreon of channels I like.
I didn't mention those in my comment above as the main issue was alternative front ends to mainstream services, but another obvious option is alternative services.
The key stumbling points for that seem to be discoverability and monetisation.
Historically the problem was you had to get people to install an app instead of visiting a website, but now everybody's trying to get people to do that on mobile anyway.
In theory P2P isn't great on mobile devices because they run on battery and have limited cellular data, but devices also allow apps to tell if the device is connected to a charger and unmetered WiFi. And if you only upload from devices that are, that's probably still enough bandwidth to give you a significant cost advantage. Then add in anyone you can get to install the app desktops and TVs, many of which are always on and have fast unmetered connections.
Then offer streaming on the website, but only if you subscribe. The paywall on the website links to the app installer, which is free (with ads).
How much are you paying for someone hosting? If you're paying them the same as your costs (high), then why not just pay for more servers which will be more reliable? Especially because of the difference between how much bandwidth during peak demand hours, which is probably going to be when there are the most devices on battery, and when you'll need the most servers anyways. The same way peak electricity demand in some areas is after peak solar.
So even if you do 1:1 view time credits, now you're losing money if they upload at night, and watch that same amount during peak hours. Probably what most people are doing. This is what happened with California new solar NEM3 plan that changed the export rates from 1:1. You only get something like 20% credit for the power you're putting in. So can you pay hosters enough to want to host, but not enough that you're better off paying for your own servers?
This doesn't even go into storage costs yet.
There's a cryptocurrency for P2P storage and transfer, Storj. Looks like they even have an S3 compatible gateway, but they don't look that much cheaper than object storage on DigitalOcean or CloudFlare.
You often hear the argument that people aren't going to "use" their bandwidth and watch ads, but that's dumb. The ads are to pay for development of the app or the content. The bandwidth is to offset what you downloaded yourself. It's two different things. And if you have unmetered bandwidth you're not using anyway, don't be a miser.
But if you really want to give people something as an incentive to upload, show them fewer ads, and give more credits during peak hours. Now, if you want to see no ads, you have to upload something like 10x what you download, and correspondingly up to 10% of users can get that deal. But if 10% of users take that deal, you eliminate your bandwidth costs and still have 90% of the ad revenue. And if more are willing to take it, it means you can give fewer credits until it balances, or vice versa.
There are also ways to shift demand around, namely through pricing. Make electricity cheaper during sunlight hours and more expensive between sunset and 8PM and suddenly tons of people are doing laundry midday on a weekend instead of in the evening during peak hours. Which also makes it more economical for people who can't avoid peak hour usage to buy an energy storage system so they can run on stored energy when the power company is charging high rates and then charge it back up when power is cheaper.
YouTube is an endless goldmine of quality videos made by people who actually give a shit about the topic they're talking about, rather then people who are just trying to make "content" to monetize.
I also appreciate that at least some of my monthly payment goes to the people making the videos I'm watching.
I'm honestly surprised to hear such a cynical take on it.