Remember when the big selling point of cable TV was no advertising? And then it became 99% ads?
Yeah.
ummm I was born ~90 and I’ve always seen commercials. don’t take it the wrong way, but when were you born???
Before the 90s. I think the best time for cable TV was between 1982 and 88. MTV wasn’t crap. The History Channel had actual history shows and the Discovery Channel always had top notch science shows. We also had “Night Flight” on “USA’s Up All Night.” They would run back to back episodes, starting at 9pm on Saturday nights and ending around 4-5am Sunday.
Anyone who remembers 80s cable TV should feel incredibly ripped off by what they’re showing today.
So, you’re actually viewing the past with rose tinted glasses here. There was never a time when basic cable was completely ad free. There was certain channels that started ad free, and some like HBO only ever showed ads for their own content, but there was always ads. TV now is very different and arguably worse, but not for that reason.
I remember these days. Cable felt really special. Then the ads, and every channel became reality TV and less about what the channels original purpose was. TLC is all trash TV, History is all ancient aliens and conspiracy theories now. YouTube sorta has brought that back, but for me the premium subscription is too expensive. I have a subscription to Nebula where a lot of YT creators have channels and it costs far more reasonable.
Paying for services?
Absolute evil.
Literally Hitler
“Absolute evil” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s YouTube/Google’s fault (by closing off and centralizing their video platform) that it is impossible to go elsewhere for videos.
Google just made it really hard for creators to go anywhere else and created a monopoly of sorts.
Literally every corporation does or attempts to do the same thing. What we would need is to revive the politicians that broke up rockefellers empire and tell them to do the same with apple, microsoft, google, meta, amazon and every tech „giant”.
No more providing every imaginable service under one company.
Literally every corporation does or attempts to do the same thing.
Exactly. Every single corporation is evil and should be dismantled 🔥🔥🔥. This is just one of a thousand reasons to do so.
I agree that YouTube is Google monopoly, but I I’ve been wondering… They handle massive amounts of data. Would any other non-trillion dollar company be even capable of storing, processing, and presenting videos on the same scale, with the same quality, and with what is arguably very good latency world wide?
What could competitors do to beat Google without hemorrhaging their money just trying the manage the overhead?
If they use the same monetization no probably not, other platforms that do work like that (like Odysee) have some limits, for example Odysee doesn’t transcode the videos and has a limit of 16mbits and 15gb total. It may be possible for platforms like Vimeo or Nebula as they have a relatively high subscriber count compared to their size and accordingly more money available per person, or something like peertube (or general torrent based) could work if the workload is split between instances and users, but peertube has no monetization so it’s problematic to maintain
They don’t need all of the data that’s on Youtube. The vast majority of it is crap.
That’s not answering my question. Crap or not, it is an important consideration.
My opinion is content creators could host their own content and then links to these could be aggregated on sites like lemmy/reddit/twitter/etc for the purpose of discovery. This way one site doesn’t get to control the narrative by manipulating what videos people see and creators can monetize their content however they like.
My opinion is content creators could host their own content and then links to these could be aggregated on sites like lemmy/reddit/twitter/etc for the purpose of discovery. This way one site doesn’t get to control the narrative by manipulating what videos people see and creators can monetize their content however they like.
People are free to do this. It turns out hosting video content is expensive. Most YouTubers aren’t exactly rolling in cash. The ones everyone knows, sure, they’re making a living from it now. But that also wouldn’t have been possible for most of them starting out.
Like it or not, YouTube provides something important to the internet: a place for content creators to get started with comparatively little upfront cost.
I don’t really understand how that’s YouTube’s fault. They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit. There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did). You can literally post the same video to as many platforms as you want. Sites like Instagram and GitHub have more lock in than YouTube does.
They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit.
They created an inherently centralizing implementation of a video sharing platform. Even if it was done with good intentions (which it wasn’t, it was some capitalist’s hustle, and its social importance is a side effect), we should basically always condemn centralizing implementations of a given technology because they reinforce existing power structures regardless of the intentions of their creators.
It’s their fault because they’re a corporation that does what corporations do. Even when corporations try to do right by the world (which is an extremely generous appraisal of YouTube’s existence), they still manage to create centralizing technologies that ultimately serve to reinforce their existing power, because that’s all they can do. Otherwise, they would have set themselves up as a non-profit or some other type of organization. I refuse to accept the notion of a good corporation.
There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did).
That’s a good point, but while there isn’t a de jure lock-in for creators, there is a de facto lock-in that prevents them from migrating elsewhere. Namely, that YouTube is a centralized, proprietary service, which can’t be accessed from other services.
I mean this is every ecosystem though right? YouTube, Apple, Steam, everyone tries their best to do it because they want you locked in.
Don’t be disingenuous. We are already paying for that service, in our data and attention.
It would be an entirely different story if paying for Youtube Premium immediately opted you out of participating in Google’s data-mining and data-selling, and if paying for Youtube Premium removed not just the overt ads but the algorithmically-manipulated advertising content as well (what is the effective difference between a Pepsi ad and a Good Mythical Morning video titled “trying every new Pepsi flavor”?), but it since it DOESN’T do those then we aren’t talking about paying for a service - we are talking about a company asking for every penny in our wallet for a service which we are already paying for.
All hail modded YouTube clients
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Another happy customer of YouTube premium here. I canceled Netflix, never had Spotify. The only subscription I pay, worth it. The family plan works to 5 or 6 euros per person per month.
Yea YTP individual isn’t worth it, but the family plan is (if you can fill the slots)
Filling slots is how you make the family
Seeing this comment, my mind thought in 3D and I saw like 12 perspectives of what you said😭
Angry upvote.
Same. I still feel the individual is worth it for me as YouTube is the bulk of content I watch. People also tend to forget that a portion of every subscription goes to the creators that you actually watch.
Thank, finally i can be evil without doing the genocide.
Wheres the fun in that?
C’mon, we all wish to be evil at least once in our lives! 😋
I thought the devil created Chihuahuas with that chance
Can confirm; roommate has a chihuahua.
I have begun to see that YT is being hostile to adblocker users - and this worries me. I assume YT is already probing the clients to see which are circumveting the ads.
I had an (let’s say unconventional) idea at one point: an add-on which only purpose is to show the YT ads in the background which uBO blocked. All of the blocked ads would be played (eventually) - except that the user can just ignore this happening in background and wouldn’t be actually seeing the ads. I.e. the browser would just move playing the ads into a background container not visible to the user.
Newpipe ftw
The main issue with YouTube premium is the price, I can’t imagine that they’re making anywhere near $14 a month from showing me ads that I never click on. I’d love to see a breakdown, including how much is subsiding free users, how much is going to creators, and how much is going into the pockets of shareholders.
I think like most if not all of the people I know would easily pay $5 dollars for premium
Reach out to friends and fam! We do a family plan which I think comes out to $4-5 a month per account.
YouTube and creators make significantly more from premium users than ad-supported. But I’m okay with that. I’m paying for a service, that service works (mostly) great. I get essentially Spotify and ad-free YouTube for that price, and thus get far more bang for my buck than a Max subscription or a Hulu subscription or whatever.
A lot of the features of YouTube Premium (ad-free, downloads, offline music, background play and PiP on mobile, video queues, etc.) are likely available from other YouTube clients, but given how much I use the service I don’t mind paying for it. Especially since using other clients sucks for the creators (unless you’re personally subscribing to everyone’s Patreon, and I don’t know about you but there are a few channels I subscribe to on Patreon and FAR more that I just…watch).
I signed up through Pakistan and got the family plan for $4 AUD a month.
Been going for a couple of years now and no problems.
Also the big benefit is YouTube music, so I don’t need my spottyfi account anymore either
It’s actually great value, I never watched YouTube for entertainment before I got it, now I get to watch people do way too big deep dives on subjects I would normally find boring, but because they go too far it gets interesting
You’ll get an email shortly kicking you off that plan, they’re just working through the list. Had it for 4 years, signed up quite a few others as well. Everyone has been booted over the last 2-3 months.
Well that’s a shame, I don’t see myself buying it at full price.
I don’t know the breakdown but I know that creators generally earn much more per premium view vs normal view.
Even if there was a single ad that I would want to click on, ever, I would still just simply look up the site instead. The only reason I’ve clicked an ad in the past 20 years was when I did it accidentally. They know that (as in, they know that the click ratio will be low) and I’m sure their goal is just for you to see the ad.
Of all the current media subscription services, this is the one I have no issue paying for. The service I get for the money I pay is appropriate. I’ve taken my own measures to limit the amount of PII that Google can vacuum up from my life as well. I’m fine with them knowing what I like to watch and providing algorithmic recommendations for new content. I police said algorithm aggressively to ensure its always on topic and never trying to show me ragebait or shit I don’t want to see.
When the day comes that the cost outweighs the return I’ll stop paying for it and use Grayjay or Newpipe or whatever other option there is. If its a full on dystopia by then, well y’know what? I don’t need Youtube to survive. I’ll be fine without it.
YT premium is a good value for me and my family. Guess I’m evil.
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I don’t mind paying for good services, personally.
Yeah until it gets shot by A/B testing again lol. I love newpipe, but for somebody with a family it’s hard to justify, especially bc the non-techies of the fam are gonna want something that ‘just works’.
My 3 kids all use iPhone and we have a bunch of chrome casts. The only practical way to avoid the ads in YTP.
YouTube Poop?
Your tight pants
Literally Satan.
It’s Google.
I wish I could be as pleased with it. I don’t want to pay for a service and have that service still collect data on me to push ads elsewhere.
Unfortunately that’s everything. Netflix, buying groceries with a credit card, even driving your new car.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Somewhere in the past something went wrong.
No. Nothing went wrong. Just nobody cares how anything works just so long as it does.
If you block ads everywhere else then it doesn’t really matter. Pi.hole, AdGuard, proton vpn, Firefox will all block ads for you on pretty much every other site on the planet.
Mate, you can’t use basically anything today then. Your car probably collects data on you. I’m not saying I love it, but life’s too short for me to cut everything trying to collect my data out of my life. Gotta pick and choose my battles.
Same. I watch more YouTube than probably any other streaming service. Plus I got the family plan and I sell the extra seats to my extended family and friends. Works out to be pretty cheap in the end.
I do the same for Spotify, Disney plus. Formally Netflix but they cut down on password sharing
If you have YouTube premium, why do you have Spotify? YouTube music is comparable and better in some cases.
I don’t pay for either but I use both and the youtube music desktop ui is really really bad. Plus the annoying thing of it often playing music videos instead of the normal song. I definitely like it better on mobile though
You can toggle video or song. I actually like yt music way more because it can play pretty much anything on YT, including hours and hours of mixes you won’t find on Spotify.
You can’t really toggle video or song though, you can toggle video or thumbnail to video with video audio
I’ve had a different experience. When I have it on video, it’ll play the music video version, and when I have it on song, it’ll play the studio version. Maybe that doesn’t work for every song, but it definitely has worked that way for me.
It definitely is better, but it sill has some stupid quirks that in some cases could probably be fixed by few lines of code, like not locking the screen when you are on the lyrics screen. It also is very slow to start-up in offline mode, which drives me nuts. But otherwise it is much better performant than Spotify and has better ways to listen to new music, instead of the dumb intelligent randomize feature on Spotify.
Honestly it’s the social aspect. Everyone I know uses Spotify, so sharing playlists and tracks are super easy. I know there’s converters out there but I can’t be arsed to do that every time I want to send or receive a link. I’ve also got some shared playlists between friends we all contribute to. At social gathering I can turn on the party mode or whatever it’s called and let people add stuff to the queue. The big one though is I’ve got a few friends with really good taste. I can check in on them from time to time to see what they’re listening to right now. Found a lot of great stuff this way.
get a good adblocker and donate that money to them instead.
thatd probably be the best value.
I do use an adblocker, and I’ll keep spending my money how I please, thanks.
everyone can use their money for whatever stupid thing they please
You subscribe to every single channel you watch on Patreon? That’s remarkable!
paying for youtubers
paying for youtubers
Like it or not the platform is full of people trying to make a living independently producing content. Most of them are not making very much money. Watching with an adblocker means they aren’t earning any revenue, which is unsustainable. Watching with a Premium subscription means I don’t see ads and they get more revenue (even more so than ad-supported views).
Those people aren’t massive corporations. They’re independent creators. And generally speaking the content I watch on YouTube is content I want to support.
I’m not trying to say it’s like, inherently ethically wrong to watch YouTube without ads or Premium. But it certainly isn’t ethically superior.
k
Then God created newpipe
I kinda got grandfathered into Youtube Music by using (and enjoying) Google Music, and since YT Premium was only like $2 more, I got it. I primarily use it for the music. The no-ads is just a bonus for me, I guess.
I wonder what happened to me then? I had Google music for $7.99 a month, then when they changed to YouTube music they gave me YouTube Red at the time as part of my subscription. Years later I’m still paying $7.99 (+ tax) and it’s changed from Red to Premium.
Same here. My monthly is $8.42. It’s kinda hard to beat that deal, but man, i sure wish Google would fix a lot of stuff that’s making YouTube / Music a really crappy experience.
Yeah, same. I installed UBlock Origin on my Firefox browser for free and gotta say that enjoying YouTube and YT Music Ad-Free is the way to do it!
I did the exact same. Google Play Music was actually a good service back in the day. I hated it when they turned it into YouTube Music. I complained about all the broken stuff, so they gave me a home speaker for free and upgraded me to YT Premium for a year. After that year I stuck with YT Premium, since it was less than $2 extra. They also fixed a lot of stuff I complained about. Not everything, but a lot of it. I think YT Music was released a bit before it was ready. Now it still has some issues, but is mostly fine.
Usually I watch 1 or 2 YouTube videos a day and without Premium I would most definitely not. I opened a YouTube video on a computer I wasn’t signed in the other day and it started with a 2 minute unskipable ad about crypto stuff (an obvious scam). So I closed it real fast, no video is worth sitting through that. Even with Premium I still need SponsorBlock. But with that combination watching videos is actually fun.
Still listen to YouTube Music all day at work, so that’s a good value for money for me.
I think that’s why a lot of people dislike youtube premium, because it seems they made the free youtube intentionally very annoying to use without it. Similar to spotify where if you use the free version there’s a ton of ads and half of them are from spotify themselves asking if you’re tired of the ads
It’s exactly this for me. Maybe Spotify and YTP are worth it, maybe supporting them does more good than harm, but there’s no way in hell you’re going to annoy money out of me. If you can’t respect me as a free user, you don’t deserve my money, especially when that money won’t be going to the artists I’m there for.
Seriously, the best ad is a good basic version.
