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Comment by phildenhoff | Hacker News Reader

While I disagree with trying to prevent Adblock, I’m a recent convert to YouTube premium and it’s just so nice. I only tried it after using my girlfriend’s account on our TV for a bit, I was vehemently against it prior.

Am I super happy about paying for YouTube? No. Is it worth ~CAD$30/mo to not worry about ads anywhere, have background playback on mobile, and support the folks I watch? Absolutely.

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Same here. Apparently paying for products is a controversial thing these days. Never mind that the monthly cost is about the same as a single meal at an average fast-casual restaurant.

$20 a month for unlimited, unrestricted access to literally millions of hours of high quality content is a really good deal. I regret having waited so long and wasted so much time waiting to click through ads.

$30 a month?? No way I'd consider YT worth as much as all other streaming services combined..

Maybe I'd consider $3. Especially since even "ad free" videoes themselves now have lots of ads baked into them by the creators. Not a fan of the double dipping.

SponsorBlock skips those.

If you pay in UAH, it's only $3 ;)

That’s a family membership IIRC. It’s for 5 or 6 people. We don’t have any other streaming services and spend a lot of time watching and listening to YouTube, so it’s well worth it.

If you want to remove those embedded ads, SponsorBlock and DeArrow are great extensions to make YouTube more bearable!

  Am I super happy about paying for YouTube?

I would gladly pay money for Youtube, but I'd sooner eat a live subway rat than pay money to Youtube.

Even if I believed a for-profit model were appropriate for the largest repository of the world's video content, I wouldn't want AlphaGoogle to be the company implementing that model.

So if youtube wasn't owned by google, you'd be happy to have paid?

I actually think this is irrational, because reason google is forcing thru anti-consumer features is _because_ they can't get enough revenue out of youtube!

Youtube generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue per year, for a company that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year.

If you're skeptical about how/if massive corporations are able to leverage their market power and monopolization to generate monstrous profits and force through very anti-consumer features, I'd encourage you to read Goliath from Matt Stoller: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...

> So if youtube wasn't owned by google, you'd be happy to have paid?

Maybe.

YouTube should have to police copyright for the little guys as strongly as they do for the big guys. Instead, YouTube is happy to flat out steal content from little guys while stomping all over fair use when the big guys are involved.

I don't wish to support that. I want YouTube to go under so we can maybe get a video site that doesn't suck.

I'm not against paying premium personally but the pricing is INSANE, it's probably 10x higher than what they would get with ads per user.

I'm skeptical they even consider YouTube premium a real option internally or if it's just there for potential regulators.

I also don't like the trend to blame adblock, Google is losing money now because there's an advertising scandal where they lied to customers, that's not adblocks fault.

Protip: You should download a non-stock YouTube app to your TV instead, for instance: https://smartyoutubetv.github.io

It has YouTube premium and more, e.g. Sponsorblock, it's over all superior. And free.

I use that app for SponsorBlock - I can't live without it now.

However, I find the app's UX to be a little off-putting compared to the actual Youtube app.

SmartTube Next is great, and I do use that on my Shield now for sponsorblock. On web I recommend adding DeArrow to your YouTube extensions to make the experience a bit more bearable. Hopefully they add that in soon too!

Ah the good old breaking your legs in economy to make you appreciate the ‘value’ of business. Works every time.

Not sure what you mean? I’m also not super happy paying the amount that I do for rent. That doesn’t mean I don’t like my apartment or that I’m not willing to stomach that extra amount for the value I get.

I’d prefer they were both cheaper. That doesn’t prevent me from seeing the value they provide me.

I'd pay maybe $5/month max, which is infinitely more than they make from me now given I block everything and have as far as I recall never willingly clicked on an internet ad in my life.

Sounds like they're justified for blocking you then.

Even though $5 > ~$0?

You don’t set the price, they do.

They can ask whatever they want, it doesn't mean they are going to get it

> and support the folks I watch?

YouTube takes a 45% cut. So out of that $30, YouTube pays a few cents for bandwidth, and takes $13.50 thanks to its dominant market position. I'd much rather watch with AdBlock and donate via Gumroad or Patreon.

Care to show your math on how you arrived at that few cents in bandwidth?

Right. And the other 55% goes to… the folks I watch.

Steam takes a 30% cut or something when I buy video games. I’m not about to start pirating games and mailing cheques to the developer.

I don’t assume that my YT Premium is paying for lavish meals for my favourite channels. But I watch lots of different channels, not all of which I’m going to sponsor on Patreon. They at least get something.

Problem is that services like that always get more ads eventually. They just can't resist.

The problem with YT premium is that I often browse in Incognito for enhanced privacy and YouTube premium doesn’t work in incognito. So I would still be seeing ads half of the time, if I didn’t use an adblocker.

Wait, you actually believe that Incognito Mode gives you privacy? Have you looked into that with facts and data?

What other option is there?

That depends on your goals, the scope of the privacy you wish to achieve, and the services you wish to use while preserving that privacy.

If you live in Turkey, or happen to "visit" there for a short period of time, Youtube premium is $15cad / $11usd for 12 month subscription, or alterantively a few dollars a month.

I have two issues with paying Google for YouTube Premium:

1. I don’t trust Google at all and am very reluctant about giving them any personal information.

2. Even if I pay, I still get all the promotional crap that the content creators put in their videos.

Wow, here in New Zealand I'm only paying 10 NZD/month (8.04 CAD), grandfathered in from when it used to be a Google Play Music subscription.

It's fantastic value for that price, but I would definitely think twice at 30 CAD/month.

That’s the family plan

Ah, that makes more sense!

I won’t pay them a cent unless doing so disables all tracking of me across their ecosystem.

I agree. I’ll pay for quality.

There is no quality on youtube.

The terrible thing is that, buried deep under the mound of trash, somewhere among the million videos of pathetic grifters and desperate attention-seekers and supremely-confident cranks, there is quality content.

There some amazing lectures on YouTube

That's also part of the issue of YouTube premium, we talk a lot about the pricing but the fact that you can't search videos makes the platform less valuable as a media platform.

Google is designing YouTube as a ad distribution platform, not as a media platform and it shows

my problems are 1. it's insanely expensive for what you get, and 2. background play was a feature everyone had until google put it behind a paywall.

finally, without something like sponsorblock you still end up with ads uploaded as part of the video.

I can't overstate how much I despise advertising.

Send the video to yourself via Whatsapp. It plays in the background.

The revanced player is a must on android https://github.com/ReVanced

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