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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

Pay for YouTube. It’s worth it.

I remember 2004, when ads on the web were incredibly annoying.

There was (loud) sound, and half the information was buried under ads for certain pages.

Me being a teenager back then, decided I've had enough after a late night gaming session with friends ended with a stupid website screaming in my ear to buy a new car.

I installed an ad blocker and since then my web experience is (mostly) ad free.

When I see ads I immediately know what NOT to buy. I feel I've already paid with my lifetime, so I am not going to add (haha) money on top

How have you paid them with your lifetime (whatever that means)?

Especially since you've been actively avoiding advertisements.

Follow-up: If you like someone's YouTube content, how would you suggest they be compensated?

The catch is that you pay Google and not the content creators..

Patreon of content creator that I like.

> If you like someone's YouTube content, how would you suggest they be compensated?

Not my problem to solve.

Perhaps content creators or those who host their content can find less offensive ways of monetizing?

Sure, they could charge you per view, which is being done indirectly now through ads. You're not entitled to free content no matter how much you think you are.

I'm absolutely entitled to whatever bytes some server is happy to send to my machine. It's up to my machine to then decide which ones of those bytes to actually turn into light and sound.

I am not entitled to anything, but as long as I have control over my devices, I will surely exercise that control :)

"How have you paid them with your lifetime (whatever that means)?"

Occasionally I watch TV (the oldschool satellite thing) or drive around and see ads.

> Follow-up: If you like someone's YouTube content, how would you suggest they be compensated?

If they have a Patreon, I go that route sometimes... but generally: I don't. It's a hobby for me, if it's your business, it's on you to find ways how to monetize it, just like I have to do with my business :)

If you've been paying attention to the industry you'd know we're going to have ads on the paid tier also

- Netflix

- Hulu

- Prime (coming)

If you've been paying attention to the industry you'd know driving customers to bit torrent is suicidal.

Which means I simply quit... I mean, I actually did already :)

Netflix has it on their cheapest tier. Prime already has ads but for their own content only. I don't have Hulu. Either way, you can always just pirate stuff with Sonarr, Radarr, and a Usenet server account. Black Friday is coming then you can get huge discount on Usenet server account / block accounts, Torznab/Newznab server (you can use SpotWeb, too), VPN.

The payments will increase until we get ads with them

The payments and ads will increase until morale improves

It's so expensive. I have multiple people in the house, and I already pay for music with Apple. It's a big price to just get no ads and nothing else.

I pay $6.99 for the student plan which is not that bad.

Since I got AdGuardHome on my network ads started to be very very very aggressive on YouTube so I just gave up and paid for it since I use it extensively during the day.

It's not "so expensive". It's a couple of cups of coffee from Starbucks, for 720 hours of content per month per person. Even if you factor in 8 hours a day of sleep you could watch it for 16 hours per day per person for one low price. That's about US$0.01 per hour.

I obviously don't watch anywhere near as much YouTube as you do.

The price is higher than I pay for any other streaming service. I don't drink coffee, but a quick look suggests it's 4 to 6 cups of Starbucks coffee here in Australia.

I remind again that this is the price I'd need to pay for my household, not just one individual (just like the other streaming services I subscribe to which is used by the whole household).

Way too expensive (unless you are able to pay in a currency of a third world country which is what I do). They still do tracking on you. You still get sponsored ads by 'creators', so you'll need Sponsorblock as well.

For Android, consider using "NewPipe x SponsorBlock x Return YouTube Dislike" [1]

[1] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe

I don’t mind creators having sponsors. I skip past it if I’m not interested. How do you people expect all of this to be free?

(I've not once seen a sponsor I'd be interested in. Many of them are scams, US-centric, or just stuff I don't want/need and I certainly wouldn't be stimulated to purchase something because of a sponsorship.)

I don't expect that. I, like everyone else in this world, have limited amounts of time and money, and I'd like to spend them wisely with the tools I have available.

If only YouTube gave the creators a reasonable share.

From my knowledge a lot of YouTubers get paid by advertisers and they don't even let the viewers know.

The single view is not much worth - I estimate the streaming costs are quite high (think of all the bandwith you need for 4k/8k streaming with low latency).

Sadly I couldn't find numbers for YT profit.

Here is a solution: make high res streaming separate price tier, or remove it.

They do, AFAIK creators get much more money from Premium viewers than ad-supported viewers. And not just relatively, sometimes in absolute numbers as well.

That’s the kind of comparison YouTube hopes you do.

Compared to patronage systems, it’s a pittance. You may as well try to pay your favourite shows directly rather than give your money to Google and have them redistribute it on your behalf.

Google is providing a service here. I think people have gotten so used to the internet they forget the massive costs involved in running a website like YouTube.

The cable companies wish to convey the same.

What revenue share split do you think they have right now? What share would you consider reasonable?

When will YouTube pay me for watching ads?

Isn’t that what the videos are for? What you get in exchange for watching ads?

Why would they do that? No reason. You get paid with the video stream. That’s your payment.

Why do they get all the negotiating power in this arrangement? They should pay me to watch ads. I'd watch more videos. Win-win for them.

Otherwise they have polluted their value prop -- to be a video sharing platform, and my content that I share, your content that you share, and all your watching patterns data, which has value, is stolen without recompense.

Please. Don't "but you get something for FREE" me -- we're the product and that ain't right. Youtube should be a service -- pay for or not -- not a package delivery vector for ~~meme viruses~~ content-free and meaningless adverts.

If it costs YouTube 2 cents to stream a video to you, and they get 3 cents for delivering the ads with it, let’s say they could pay you half a cent and keep half a cent of profit for themselves. For that to be worth it, you’d need to watch 2x the videos (and ads) for them to break even on the deal, and more than 2x for the deal to make more than the current deal today (you watch 1x and they keep the whole 1 cent). Would actually watch 2x more content to earn those pennies?

These numbers are made up, but explain a possible model of why YouTube doesn't try to induce more views with a monetary incentive.

> Otherwise they have polluted their value prop

> Please. Don't "but you get something for FREE" me -- we're the product and that ain't right.

I think the economic deal is clear to you. You don’t get something for free. You’re paying by watching ads (same as OTA TV broadcast for the last 60 years) and with the collection of your habit data (modern surveillance capitalism). In exchange YouTube serves you videos.

If you don’t like the deal, and they won’t negotiate with you, then you should walk away.

Personally I pay the $14/mo to not see ads; YouTube doesn’t produce content directly but they incentivize the production of a lot of niche content creators who otherwise would never get a deal from Netflix etc, and the YouTube mobile app is the most reliable one I use (better than Netflix, much better than Hulu).

They pay you by providing you access to the infrastructure that lets you watch videos on their platform.

I'd consider it if it was a part of Google One for the same price

I would if they didn't datamine me so hard. simple as.

Also i get to chose what runs on my machines, not them.

Wait, now that i think about it i wouldn't. I would rather give that money directly to few creators i watch, instead of them getting 0.01% of that.

Sure, if they also stop harvesting my data after I pay.

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