The price of an individual YouTube Premium subscription is increasing by $2 to $13.99 per month in the US for new and current customers.
This price increase is live for new subscribers as seen on youtube.com/premium. Instead of $11.99, YouTube Premium now costs $13.99/month. Meanwhile, it’s $18.99 if you’re subscribing from the iOS YouTube app.
As with all monopolies/cartels/prohibitions unsatisfied demand always finds alternatives. If the rules get in the way people circumvent them. Youtube premium price increases will create a bigger demand for ad blocking. Just as the balkanisation of streaming services and reduced value will return many people to piracy. The people who run these organisations are idiots who destroy brands and shareholder value to get short term attention and bonuses.
Youtubes changes are successful. Less people use ad blocker and more people are using yt premium.
There’s so many people who dont want to constantly keep looking for work around and having their sites break etc. Once one person in their family buys yt premium then it makes sense for them to get a family plan.
My issue isn’t with youtube running ads or charging for their service. My gripe is that they built their website as a free ad based service and out competed everything else based on that. Then they slowly ramped up ads and monetization once they had a monopoly and they won’t stop squeezing.
In my eyes the only ethical solution is a distributed competitor where users can pay for the service of streaming videos but can’t be forced into a single vendor. For example if one peertube instance started charging to much then you could move to another.
I pay for Nebula but watch nebula creators on Youtube. Watching on Youtube boosts them in the algorithm and gives them a small share of premium and it is more discoverable. The problem with distributed alternatives is that using them would disadvantage creators on youtube which is their primary outlet. We may need to concede that unlike Reddit or Twitter that clearly can and should be replaced by distributed alternatives, Youtube has proven to be a natural monopoly and as such needs to be regulated to protect consumers and creators from monopolistic abuses.
I dont know how people would switch off youtube. Youtube would need to shoot itself in the head or even a chance of people leaving the platform. Maybe creators could unionize or a new form of media could dethrone it.
When I tried Odysee I also did the same. I subscribed and viewed the videos on odysee but would pause and watch on youtube to save odysee bandwith and ensure that the creators I like that are pretty small wouldnt be hurt.