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Comment by Imustaskforhelp | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this price change like 800% crazy damn lot?

I have personally been using Revanced on phones and Ublock origin on my computer devices, highly recommend them

How can a company in current world environment where unemployment and everything bad is on the rise think that the best way is to simply raise the prices.

Also the free youtube experience has degraded so much that I cringe so much whenever I am forced to use youtube without ad-blocker, sigh.

Edit: Its going from 13.99$ to 15.99$ whereas I had misinterpreted it as going from 2$ to 15.99$, though that being said, I find it now a bit both funny and depressing that I fully believed that google might do something like this and people would still be forced to pay. And also the ad blockers are working mighty-fine if I didn't even know the price of Youtube premium.

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I think every single one of these streaming companies is seeing exactly how much people are willing to pay to avoid ads.

From what I’ve read the old Premium pricing was already more profitable than an ad supported viewer.

I pay yearly for Premium, watch requires a manual renewal every year. Last year I tried not to re-up and made it less than a day. My primary platforms for YouTube viewing are the Apple TV and PS5, so playing plugin cat-and-mouse doesn’t really work.

I do want to support ad-free business models, as I don’t like the dynamic ad-supported-everything has created in the world. That said, these costs that continuously ramp up don’t seem sustainable.

This price increase won’t break me, but at some point a line in the sand needs to be drawn. I did that with Netflix and Amazon over the past couple years after almost a decade of subscriptions. They will keep raising rates as long as people keep paying it. I do make it a point to totally cancel, I refuse to go to an ad-supported plan that I also pay money for. I cancelled my whole Prime membership over ad-free video being a separate charge.

> How can a company in current world environment where unemployment and everything bad is on the rise think that the best way is to simply raise the prices.

Economics talks about “price elasticity of demand”. A good or service is elastic if small changes in price greatly affect the demand. An inelastic good is, at its extreme, one for which people would pay literally anything.

Basically YouTube is betting that their Premium subscription is so important, or will become so important, that it will pretty much become a necessity. Likely because of discounts (invite a friend and get a discount) and network effects (YouTube Premium becomes a new video-oriented social medium like Tiktok?) or because the standard free version will become so bad that you will pay the subscription to have a somewhat decent experience.

> because the standard free version will become so bad that you will pay the subscription to have a somewhat decent experience.

I suppose the term for this is called en-shittification, correct?

I feel like this is because of Youtube being a monopoly, which is used by almost all people including here, far more than any other platform I have seen.

We kind of need more Youtube alternatives. I know bandwidth and storage is a hard problem to solve, but we probably need better alternatives if a company can seemingly just charge 8 times more. I mean, raising prices 8 times is seen as a joke by most if not all companies/products.

I personally wouldn't be impacted because I use ad-block and have given my family the same. But to imagine someone either getting so many insane ads (can we now expect ads to be 8 times more too?, I hope I am not giving someone at Youtube some ideas) or people who might be struggling financially because of so many instances to be asked to pay money or be shown X ads in Y time.

I had thought that Google had deep pockets but I genuinely feel like we are all funding the AI bubble one way or another through mechanisms like these and we are having no say in any of these things.

I feel like as the world itself is turning en-shittified and we are all having no say in all of this :-/

"8 times more" ?

The price is going from $13.99 to $15.99 , that's "up $2" .

It's not going up from $2 to $15.99 .

> The price is going from $13.99 to $15.99 , that's "up $2" .

My apologies. It's a bit late here and I misread it.

And I was completely out of the loop about pricing (ad-blockers as I have mentioned) and so I had genuinely thought the tag was going from 2$ to 15.99 my apologies.

(that being said, it does say something about the society perhaps that I genuinely thought it was within the realm of possibility that google might raise the prices 8 times and people would just be forced to use it, showing the monopoly of Youtube)

Yes, being a monopoly certainly helps, but that monopoly is YouTube, not YouTube Premium. Since the basic offering is free, raising the price for the Premium version only makes sense if they don’t expect a shift from Premium to free users. This suggests that they believe their Premium offering to become more important, so its users can tolerate a price increase without shifting to the free version (or a YouTube alternative).

I don't get what you mean by 800%.

It's going up $2, from $13.99 to $15.99 .

Sorry, I had misread the original post. My apologies. I should've read the post with my glasses :-D . Thanks for correcting me though.

Well, I didn't notice I was replying to the same person twice and I'm wearing my glasses, so... :)

How do you set up Revanced?

There is an android application which you have to install called Revanced Manager.

You install a working version of youtube from apkmirror and microg core and then patch it with the manager and then install that too.

There are also ways to do the same with cli tools. It's a bit more complex but you can find guides online.

Nowadays I am hearing some news about morphe too, it seems to be a revanced fork iirc, but I am currently happy with revanced so I am gonna stick to that but I can recommend checking out morphe too perhaps

Hope this helps.

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