Alternatively, Libby is free (and yes, legal, though not available everywhere).
You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?).
That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.
I agree that Apple News+ is bad, but I think this is an example of why these plans always fail:
Someone says "I would pay good money for a service that does..." and then the service that does the thing appears and the goalposts keep moving as people realize their threshold for wanting to pay for something is higher than they originally thought.
I would subscribe to the paper directly, but after the 19 week trial, it renews for random intervals for increasing prices.
My only overriding and most prominent concern is that given how every other webservice has been, that once they have sufficient ownership of the space they will increase the cost, likely significantly, and then they will likely add in their own ads on top of everything else.
It will take a literal once in a century genius to make something like this that actually works and that companies will latch onto.
Every popular / beloved service is a target for these giant piles of cash. The fact that lots of people like it is de facto proof that it's underpriced, or over-resourced, or coddles its users with too much content. According to the finance industry, a stable business relationship should have the userbase reluctantly concluding that they have no other option, gritting their teeth and opening their wallet - and that's the sort of maximally profitable entity that a giant pile of cash will leave alone, letting it just exist, as a business.
I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.
It should be a public utility. It should be as ad free as reasonable. It should not track you.
The internet should be a lot of things that it currently isn't all because rent-seeking money and power grubbing bastards have too many of the strings and love pulling them like they're pulling their puds.
IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.
If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.
If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
Anyway, this is something you can have if you actually want it.
Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NOT. It's a fucking scam to make us pay a premium.
I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...
> I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...
There in lies the problem. Your eye balls (assuming well employed with $$$ disposable income) is another 10x worth to advertisers.
If I were to make a guess, Youtube for sure will lose money at $14/month on your specific browser.
You are literally subsidizing internet for, let us say for arguments sake, some zip code in rural america or <sub any rural part of the world> 's Youtube streaming needs.
Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).
The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.
----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.
By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.
I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.
Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"
And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.
Which is a great idea and a great site, but why is it even necessary. The sheer dumb that means there are 12312 Netflix 'class' stream services is beyond ridiculous. I used to love one-stop shopping, now it's so fragmented I just went back to piracy. I don't have time to monkey with 10 sub services.
My point? As soon as such a service existed, there'd actually be 50 of them, and the stuff you wanted would be on 8 separate services.
