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Comment by arter45 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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).

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