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Comment by dageshi | Hacker News Reader

Youtube premium is £12.99 / month or £19.99/month for a family plan.

That really doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

To know whether that is unreasonable or not you'd have to compare it to the cost of providing you that service, taking into account that youtube is just a delivery mechanism and so is infrastructure, not content.

And what is or is not affordable is really dependent on where you live and that kind of money is a very large amount in some places. And especially in those places access to youtube for educational purposes can be quite important.

Youtube premium also pays out the content creators you watch in lieu of the ads you don't watch does it not? At least that was my understanding.

If so it's not just the infrastructure cost which itself is not trivial for a site like youtube.

Infrastructure costs are such that they're a rounding error on the total google budget.

With all respect, do you have a source for that? I thought Alphabet was losing money hand over fist on YT before they started being so aggressive with the ads.

Let's for the moment assume that you are right, then they shouldn't have bought it in ... 2006, all of 17 years ago. And if they are short of money why are they pushing more and more junk on people? Let's start with switching off autoplay by default, limiting videos to 640x480, and offering creators to pay for the hosting so that their video can be shipped, just like I pay for the hosting of my web servers.

Their whole position is horribly inconsistent.

Were they losing or weren't they making enough to satisfy their greed?

Why would the cost of providing YT be relevant? I look at the value I get, and YT Premium is a no brainer.

Here in South Africa YT Premium Family is R109.99/mo (5.83 USD). By comparison, Netflix is R159/mo. Minimum wage is R25.42/hr.

Because infrastructure is cost+, Neflix gives you content that they have the rights to.

I agree, and I think its also important to fund the creators making the content we consume. Artists need patrons and YouTube has made that possible and practical on a scale humanity has never seen. That's a valuable thing, and if google wants to get paid for it, I don't begrudge that.

Ads are phycological warfare and must be eradicated with prejudice but asking the audience to chip in a couple bucks a month seems reasonable to me.

I watch like 5 videos a month. No way they're making more than $1, maybe $2, off of advertising to me. Why would I pay them 10x that? Don't be ridiculous.

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