YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally
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I feel like advertisements are one of those things that need more than just the free market to decide their limits. And that's because the ways of psychological manipulation are just too vast to be countered by rational human judgement.
For example: Unhealthy, addictive food along with modern food preservation is responsible for the most deaths in the US through obesity and heart disease, with obesity having a a high number of comordibities including sleep apnea, anxiety, depression, and (arguably) ADHD (further research needs to be conducted). Food in the past was limited and not available in vast excess to the average human, and certainly not foods that are extremely unhealthy and addictive.
Another example would be a higher average life expectancy. How do you deal with a population of 70-80 years olds who many can't work, require disproprotionate resources for their survival, and age related mental & cognitive decline.
What is the solution? We can wait for humans to adapt, evolotuarily and socially, which will take many thousands of years. Or we can enact political change. The issue is that we these changes need to balance the increasing power and ability of the state with individual freedoms. Along with having a lean political machine that can further change for the future. I don't see a way forward, not that it doesn't exist, but this is an environment more unlike any other one we have ever known and the next 10-100 years of the species is as unpredictable for us as it has ever been spanning back as far as the start of the agricultural revolution.
It reads "We value your privacy", followed by a list of 1,573(!!!) "partners" who want access to my personal data. Some of these are opt-in by default due to "legitimate interest", and I'm not sure if the "Reject all" button even applies to them. At least there is one, and it's relatively prominent.
The state of advertising on the web has become absolutely insane. The fact YouTube now also shows ads when videos are paused, and they have the gall to increase the price of YT Premium is pure greed.
Not only will I never pay for this because I don't won't anything to do that would support this insidious business model, I will dedicate my time and effort to teach others how to do the same.
Fuck everything to do with this, and Google primarily for ruining the web. None of their tech contributions comes close to negate the harm they've caused.
"Opt-in" means that the default is off, and it is optional to the user, if they wish to take action to opt-in to sharing/communications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-in_email
"Opt-out" seems like what you mean, where a legitimate interest makes them default to sharing, and you are doubtful whether a "Reject all" opt-out will affect those settings?
Then "opt-in" can continue to mean you have to opt to be in, and everyone should avoid saying "opt-in by default".
Out of curiosity, how is YT Music different to looking up music on regular youtube? (the latter is what I do). (just spent a couple of minutes googling/llm-ing but can only guess it boils down to 'background play' [hardly a 'feature' IMO] and better operability across multiple devices)
YT Music has a significantly modified UI. The entire UI is geared towards listening and discovery of music, artists, albums, tracks. If an artist is properly set up in the system, they will have a home page, and a list of their albums, songs, videos displayed. You can touch off a radio station playlist based on that artist, etc.
The difference in content is that many YT videos are simply unavailable inside YT Music, if they are not deemed "music". Therefore you won't be inundated by creators or comedy acts or newscasts, or anything but artists and music.
Music Premium has a feature that allows you to switch seamlessly between an "Audio" and "Video" version of your track. This is not magical but depends on both existing as YouTube entities. They do often match different audio tracks to a corresponding video. And if you're coming through an official "Artist" page then it may be more likely that you discover an official track, but I've never had trouble doing that in YT itself (it's usually a matter of "always only the second link in the search results").
Some artists configure "Playlists" and/or "Releases" tabs in YT proper, but indeed, YT Music is better organized so that you can discover those full albums and use them directly as a play queue.
I am fairly sure that there is no content exclusive to YT Music, only the structured presentation. All their tracks and videos are present and accounted for in YT itself; if you share a link/UUID you'll be able to find it. Conversely, as I mentioned, if it's not "Music" it won't be offered in that app. (This classification may be surprising -- I've found musical tracks and artists that aren't in there, such as the long-form BGM stuff. YT Music is for conventionally short tracks and vids.)
So another way of looking at it is:
"If I pay Youtube instead of spotify/apple then I also get no ads if I pay just a bit more"
It's a bundle, just like amazon prime's video service is part of a bundle.
I'm still annoyed about that one. Bought music via google music. poof gone
Lacking a mobile contract or a SIM-capable device, I signed up for Voice in 2015, and all the changes since then have been completely understandable, since Voice is a "fake phone" number that can't be allowed on-par with actual mobile services, particularly Google Fi itself. And that's precisely why I needed it 9 years ago.
Any pointers for your setup?
But, they won't do it, because the 99 % (source: my behind) of people who don't pay for YouTube give it extreme social relevance. If they turned the site into an exclusive, paid club, another tech giant (Amazon? ByteDance?) would roll out a competitor in a week and would take the "biggest free video catalog" spot instead of Google, and they would do it happily. The biggest obstacle to doing that and trying to compete right now, network effects, would be instantly gone.
As such, I believe Google's appetite for jacking up the subscribers' price is much larger than their willingness to gamble the site's social capital. YouTube is massive in terms of its cultural impact over the last two decades and I am not saying Google isn't stupid enough to risk this legacy if they were really hurting financially, but I can't imagine the current circumstances with the current percentage of ad-blocking and the current ratio of subscribers to non-subscribers or the loss Google incurs running YouTube (which I am not even sure there is any anymore) are even in the same numerical system as the values it would take for Google to consider doing anything real with the so called "freeloaders".
With that out of the way; I would gleefully see YouTube disappear before I paid them a cent. Throwing money at something until all of your real competition goes out of business is exactly the kind of behaviour you would expect of the type of company that then takes advantage of their new position to screw people over.
I've seen similar issues with yt-dlp, though they've been temporary so far, and the team is quicker to work around them. But it's only a matter of time until YT decides this is enough of a nuisance for them and blocks these completely. It would be trivial to do so, and workarounds could be very annoying to impossible.
> Access denied. Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked.
https://openjur.de/u/2466945.html
If you'd just get API access with the paid plan, man...
Last year google decided "fuck loyalty" and hiked the price to 22.99.
Same with Google Apps for Business. What used to be free now costs me $75+ per month and I can't get out of it because I have older family members with large amounts of data that I can't move to another platform. I also can't just upgrade one users account (as was possible before) but instead I need to pay for the more expensive package that has more storage for all users.
Corporations basically a manifestation of what people all across the globe and all throughout time have all identified as various forms of malevolent entities; effectively endless bounds to do harm and effectively zero accountability or consequences. Corporations are essentially parasites on humanity at every single level, from what is kind of like parasocial relationship by proxy that people have largely dependent on or from their connection to the corporation, to the vapid also parasocial identity that many build around their connection to corporations, to the heinous crimes the "corporation" commits on a global scale, often totally around the objective of sucking resources and wealth out of a particular place and/or people.
I have a netflix account that is older than the founding date listed on Wikipedia yet I pay exactly the same as someone who signs up today.
Why? What is the incredible value you're getting out of YouTube? Genuinely curious, because the moment uBlock stopped working, I just stopped using YouTube and haven't noticed.
Other streaming services guide all their content into a wide-audience general-public-friendly funnel. You are not going to find hour long specials on Fourier transforms or technical analyses on the Hubble tension. YouTube also has tons of low-production quality, high informational quality content that doesn't exist anywhere else.
Netflix, on the other hand, has maybe three niches: documentaries, high production reality TV, high production fiction movies/shows. And that's after scrolling for 20min debating which one you want to watch lest it be a dud after you invested 30min of your time.
On Youtube, I consume everything from debates to conversations to the news to police body cam footage (guilty pleasure) to gaming reviews to "upcoming RPG games 2025" to Let's Plays to Starcraft 2 tournaments to video versions of podcasts to interviews with an expert about cardiovascular disease to old seasons of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares to scary story montages for falling asleep. And that's just from me scrolling my homepage while writing this. And I can consume most of that while running around the park with my phone in my pocket.
There's just no contest when it comes to which service I'd cancel first vs last.
Later, I had a Blu-ray player and a combo monitor-TV where I watched OTA broadcasts after the Digital Transition. About 9 years ago, the TV broke, and was deemed unrepairable.
I chose not to replace any TV and I decided I was way better off without Jay Leno in my ear every night, and trash like Degrassi in my eyes every week. For a while, I was. I didn't play discs anymore, either, so my consumption of video content went down, and I was really immersed in interactive computer stuff.
Gradually I found myself to be a YouTube addict, and I've gone all-in with it. Over the years, the stuff they've added has made it a one-stop shop where I never miss TV programming.
At this point, YT has free films (just watch ads or pay Premium), it has on-demand streaming for rent or purchase, just about any major film you can name. They have TV-style packages offered. They are a gateway to other streaming services like Paramount+. There are even silly little minigames now. Mostly, though, I love music videos, and I curate dozens upon dozens of playlists for my tastes and moods. (Beware: user playlists are a legacy feature, and seem to get more inconvenient over time.)
YT has worked hard to become a hub for all things streaming, even as Netflix and competitors splintered into every studio's balkanized app. For someone like me, it's really a relief to just be loyal in one service, and not go chasing content over a dozen paid services or something. Being a low-income cheapskate, I mostly put up with a deluge of ads, because that's how folks get paid these days.
So much so that once I got Youtube Premium, I cancelled two streaming services after realizing how much we watch it.
That's exactly my point. For YouTube-type, independent creators and instructional content, there is no substitute. If you want to watch a drama or comedy, you have a lot of options. This is not scientific, but I know an increasing number of people who don't watch "traditional" media at all and look entirely to YouTube for something to watch, especially if they prefer non-fiction.
How is that different from a monopoly, other then arguing semantics?
I only pay this to skip ads, but a lot of content creators still have their own ads on the videos. There doesn't seem to be enough value to justify such price hike. I am likely to cancel my subscription.
I wanted to leave to go to twitter to work on distsys stuff prior to Elon..
Why would anyone pay that much just to be promoted to, when they can access a production-quality curated library on Netflix, Paramount Plus or Disney+?
There is Nebula and the like, but even that is still missing a lot.
EDIT: Seems very appropriate https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fq...
One reason (other than just money in general) that it's useful for YouTubers is because it's pretty easy to get demonetized depending on what kind of content you make.
Ad situations like "the publisher payed me to play this game" is usually fine with me too if the game is interesting and the content is good.
Look into SponsorBlock, as it allows the community to mark such segments, and your browser will automatically skip them.
At this point I have no more streaming services. Talking to friends about it and they use vance for youtube and illegal streaming services. I don't think I know anyone who pays for youtube. These companies are only hurting themselves by jacking up prices for what little content they offer.
This is incorrect. There was a 58% hike, at least for the Family plan.
Only a matter of time, even though its already pricey.
Life is unfair and business is never about doing what's the fair or morally right thing to do, but doing what's the best for your shareholders.
Youtube only cares about creators if they're whales like Mr Beast, LTT, MKBHD, etc otherwise they don't give a damn about you, and creators still flock to YouTube because there's nowhere else for them to go to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/177353i/you_should...
Two euro!?! I mean... I subscribe because I think it's a better deal than spotify even if the app is suboptimal, because I want the content creators I visit to get paid, but I've been paying about $14 for years. How in the hell were they only charging two euro.
1) replace spotify sub, but right now playlists and likes between youtube and youtube music gets disgustingly intermingled
2) replace patreon sub, determine exactly how much of payment goes to which producers. I don't want an even split, I want my favoured producers to get significantly more $$$. Better yet, I want to make sure I never give a certain cent to some producers. Like if 50% of fees is going towards producers, I want to pick who to support.