That's what I got out of this, anyway.
There's another industry that operates like this, your local drug dealer that gives away the first few hits to get you addicted then charges going forward.
Sorry, but this comparison doesn't hold water. Your ability to use Youtube is not a binary decision based on being a premium subscriber or not. Advertising has been a thing on the Internet for a while.
I wish it also allowed you to escape the incentives that cause them to design the app to be crappy (default to 'home' instead of subscriptions), but at least they also let you turn all of that tracking/history off.
If only the other ad-driven services allowed such an escape hatch.
When I realized that Facebook would not let me pay $5 / mo to opt out of ads on their platform, subscribing to YouTube was a no-brainer.
Our family uses YouTube for so much education and entertainment, paying $16/mo or whatever it costs for a family plan is a no-brainer. YouTube is one of my favorite parts about the modern Internet, and I want to directly pay to support it and its content creators.
My main complaint is that I cannot sign up for YT Premium Family on my Google Workspace account where my family members have lots of YT history under their emails.
YouTube wants to have their cake and eat it to, in terms of a free product to get users and be the market leader and then hound those users .
Personally I think it's my most valued subscription cost. I'll drop everything else before I drop YT PREMIUM.
It's my understanding that, per viewer, Premium pays content creators more than ad impressions. Remember, that's per viewer. For even the very large channels, their Youtube revenue is primarily ads, but it's because their Premium viewers are a small portion of their total viewers.
Make your own choices. I'm not going to tell you what to do. Just don't play mental gymnastics over it and understand what you are actually doing when you make the decision to deprive funding "out of principle".
If you like the content you watch? Pay for it. You have two choices with YT: ads or Premium (or sub to a channel but I'd rather support them off YT).
There are things like Nebula and Floatplane, but largely I haven't seen a compelling reason to go there, and YT Premium for my family is pretty good value for money IMHO.
The other alternative platforms have the same problem. A few youtubers I subscribe to encourage joining them on their other platforms, such as Odysee. Again, not available on my TV.
So it's not "content creators need a slice". Content creators need to get paid, and distributors need a slice.
Well, yes. That's the point. We can't do much about Google as a company, but if we hurt the creators badly enough to make YouTube no longer viable, then they move to a different platform.
Do you know why content creators use Youtube despite it being a fairly hostile place for creators? It gets views. Odysee doesn't get views. Vimeo doesn't get views. Youtube is your best chance of getting discovered and finding success.
If you want to drive content creators to other platforms, you should stop using Youtube and giving them views. That's how it's done.
You're not entitled to the content nor the platform for free.
This hits the nail on the head for me.
So much internet-based subscription marketing is purely targeted towards heavy users. That makes good business sense, of course - heavy users are more likely to pay up. But positioning your product solely towards these users trashes the user experience for people who still want to use it, just less frequently.
Adobe Creative Cloud is another case in point. I use Illustrator a couple of times a month, no more, for a few legacy freelance gigs that don't pay very well. Before CC, the Illustrator pricing model worked quite well for users like me: only update every few years and you were fine. Now? It's £240pa whether you're the heaviest of heavy users, or just an occasional user like me. I can't justify that, so I'm still eking out an old copy of CS6.
I remember visiting the original Legoland in the mid-90s and being impressed that they offered cheap tickets from mid-afternoon onwards. The London Boat Show used to do something similar. As the inexorable move to subscription models continues, I'd like to see more of this "lite" pricing.
Common also in gambling and gaming (particularly "loot boxes"), as well as other "high roller" activities.
Among other issues, whales may themselves have addiction or other psychological issues and be manipulated into participation, and content and interactions become modified with time to increasingly appeal to them.
There should be more literature on this, though this article is a fair introduction:
"What it means to be a ‘whale’ — and why social gamers are just gamers"
<https://venturebeat.com/games/whales-and-why-social-gamers-a...>
More on loot boxes: <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...>
And whales, gambling, and advertising: <https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...>
The in-app purchases problem: <https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-95346-1_...>
This Google Scholar search seems to give some relevant results: "whales" ("big spender"|"high rollers"|gambling|gaming) economics
<https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=7%2C39&q=%22...>
I mean they want to pay for it. Should Youtube be about people who don't want to pay?
NewPipe legally web scrapes. To shut down NewPipe would be to shut down youtube-dl
Lol. Where else are you going to go? YouTube is a de facto monopoly when it comes to self-published shortform videos.
The consequences of the "everything-is-free" Web 2.0 internet has created some very arrogant consumers that won't even pay $10/mo. to support content creators.
YouTube premium isn’t worth it to me, not because there is a free option but because YouTube content isn’t worth 10$/month.
Nobody's watching a 25-minute video on TikTok.
but its all via roku/xbox rarely use the website via a browser. YT Music on phone mostly.
I mean, getting rid of the ads is great, but you still have to fast forward through the in-video ads from the content creators. "But first, a message from our sponsor..." is exactly the thing I'm paying to get rid of, but I can't even be free from that.
The thing that makes me the most upset is how they tie the YT premium subscription to the ability to turn off my iPad screen without turning off the audio. This kills me for two reasons. First, it used to be the case that you could do this for free on the original Apple iPad app. Then it became a paid feature. So that still bugs me.
But moreover, it's sets a terrible precedent. The iPad hardware is mine. The state of the hardware should be of no concern to the app. What's next, the video stops playing if the audio is muted? Or I can't mute ads? I subscribed to Peacock because it was $1.99, and now they show ads when the video is paused. We're slowly rolling to the future where you have to stand up and scream "McDonald's" before you video will resume playing, and I don't know how to stop it [2]. Subscribing to YT Premium seems like giving in and admitting defeat.
p.s. This is kind of an edge case, but the other thing that's terrible about YT Premium is the support. I was recently locked out of my Google account, and that meant I couldn't get into YT Premium. Google offers 0 support in recovering accounts, the forum was useless and locked my question, and the only place I could find help was Reddit. Meanwhile, I couldn't cancel my YT premium subscription, because I had to be logged in to do that, which I couldn't do. So because Google offers 0 customer support to people locked out of their accounts, the only solution to canceling the YT premium subscription was to cancel my credit card, which is a huge hassle.
[1] I have it because my wife wants it. Can't say no to that.
[2] https://i2.wp.com/img.gawkerassets.com/img/17x24lto2ivnujpg/...
Wow. It’s like streaming services want to lose customers. Baffling.
I myself consume so much content on YouTube (hours of video essays and podcasts) - and the ads are so relentlessly aggressive - that paying an extremely minimal fee each month for the service is an absolute no-brainer.
How is this even first page HN material? It’s entirely a personal choice as to whether a certain streaming service is worth it to you or not.
Do I make a blog post that’s suddenly trending because I decided not to subscribe to Paramount+?
I feel like there's just a cycle here where you get advertising monopolies dominating and everyone else comes and goes / has no chance ... because nobody wants to pay.
If the money doesn't come from uses where does it come from?
That being said I also subscribe to office 365 and it seems like advertising there is getting worse and worse too. Outlook on windows recently started advertising the android app, because I apparently need to see ads in my paid subscription too.
All of this tells me that I will never escape ads, no matter how much I pay.
If rumble or some other platform gets close enough that I can use it instead, I'll try, but ultimately what makes youtube valuable is its content creators, and youtube hasn't pissed them off enough to make them all switch to an alternative yet, as no one else has the audience and budget.
For me this is getting less and less true by the day. Over the top voice inflection (to appeal to kids), in-video ads that are sometimes minutes long, etc. Try looking up a video on almost anything programming. Without a doubt the search will send you to some obnoxious shill like TechLead or the 1,000 people like him. It is VERY difficult to find stuff.
Aside from very niche creators the average "content creator" is a really annoying shill. Youtube has changed from a platform for people to post interesting things to a TV network where quality isn't even controlled. I'm not sure how anyone can justify paying for that.
But, I don't feel entitled not to pay for the service. I don't get mad at them for trying to show me ads that I try not to watch. And if one day they decide to stop me from skirting their rules, I'll have to choose what to do next.
Ad free is great, and I’m happy to pay for it / support the creators. Compared to my other subscriptions, I’ll probably keep this after I cull most of the others.
> Fast forward to 2022, and I cannot open YouTube without having an annoying pop-up urging me to subscribe to Premium
I mean, hitting skip on a popup is a very small price to pay for the content provided for free on YouTube. As opposed to cable, where not only did you pay for the service, you were still forced to watch 3 minutes of ads for every 6 minutes of content.
And then the author goes on to complain that:
> I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed that YouTube has progressively shown more and more ads to free users
This isn't controlled by YT. The people who make the videos decide how many ads, what timestamps to place them at, whether or not they are skippable, and whether or not there are ads at all. The YouTubers have full autonomy over this, and for the channels I watch that have chosen to not place ads on their videos (like NoClip), I have never seen YouTube place ads on those videos. So it seems like YT is respecting the channel owners decisions.
So I really can't get behind this sentiment.
And is it weird that, as the ads are becoming longer and less skippable, I'm considering upgrading our living room from an AppleTV to some sort of NUC, primarily because I can then run ad-blocking software for YouTube? This would likely cost > 1 year's subscription, plus setup time, hassle, etc.
Now if only I could pay YouTube for more API calls instead of playing games with quota appeals.
