I will pay for premium when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities. Since they won’t change, I won’t pay.
I also want to be charged the amount they actually make off of me. I suspect that’s less than the subscription price
I will never pay for premium. Yewtu.be and all the similar front end ad killers are always there when ublock Origin gets half a step behind in the never ending cat and mouse it seems to have with YT. Fuck tech companies. Fuck YouTube. Fuck Reddit. Fuck em all.
Who are they selling your data to?
Literally everyone. Have you been living under a rock?
I simply turned off my watch history, no more algorithm.
"They do want to pay for premium! They just don’t understand what a great value it is! SHOW THEM THE AD AGAIN! SHOW THEM ON EVERY VIDEO SO THEY WILL UNDERSTAND!!! "
Not to be rude, but I’m struggling to believe half the comments in this thread are legit. Do you really mean to tell me that Lemmy, a platform notoriously populated almost exclusively by anti-corporate tech people that really value FOSS and privacy –hence the reason why all of us are here instead of Reddit– has this many users thinking it is a remotely acceptable idea to pay for a Premium service for one of the most invasive companies online?
I think most of us understand the many underhanded techniques used by Google to achieve an almost monopolistic control of some aspects of the internet, but when talking about YouTube, suddenly all the logic is reduced to “if you use a service, pay for it, or else let them show you ads”?? what??? Also, what’s with comparing adblocking to stealing???
My own answer to the topic of this thread is that no, I won’t be paying for YouTube Premium anytime soon, possibly ever. Google has betrayed my trust many times in the past, and on top of that I don’t consider adverts as a legitimate source of income, so I will block any and all ads everywhere without paying an extra cent.
“But if you keep using their service, so you need to give them some form of revenue! Otherwise you just want free stuff!” I only keep using their service because Google has spent many years dumping on other platforms so that YouTube is –almost– the only platform that still exists where all the good creators are, so I will begrudgingly watch them on YouTube because there aren’t any options. But I will resist Google’s many insidious attempts to monetize me to the best of my ability while doing so.
That said, it’s really dishonest to claim that people who block ads on YouTube just want free stuff and don’t understand that services have a cost. Personally, I pay for Nebula because I do support the project and the creators involved. But YouTube won’t see a cent from me, not with my consent at least.
Not everyone is on Lemmy because they’re anti-corporate, FOSS enthusiasts. For example, I came here because Reddit became a dumpster fire of unreasonable policies and very restrictive accessibility to the site. I simply will not install their app. Everything I’ve seen and heard about it is revolting. I’m certain I will hate it and I’m not going to bother trying at this point. Since a nontrivial amount of my time on Reddit was via an app, and that app no longer works, I’m just not going to use the service.
I like FOSS, and I support FOSS whenever I can, but I’m hardly anti corporate. The big G has tried and failed at getting monopoly status for most things. Arguably their most successful services are search, mail and YouTube.
Me, personally, I pay for Google’s services and share those benefits with my family. We have extra Google drive storage, YouTube music/YouTube premium, and all the benefits that come with that (I don’t recall all of them right now). One payment takes care of my entire household. So for less than $20/month we all enjoy all the benefits of those subscriptions. It comes out to less than $5/person/month.
I don’t blame anyone for not wanting those services. I certainly don’t hold that against them. I completely understand the viewpoint. YouTube is very aggressive about everyone having premium. I see ads on YouTube when I’m using it on my work PC for music or to look something up on there; because my personal Google account is not and will never be associated to my work PC. I see what it’s like “on the other side” so to speak. I can see how aggro their efforts are to get people to subscribe to premium. How invasive the ads have become, and how annoying it is to deal with all that. I get it.
I also don’t really hate Google for it. They want people to buy their premium service and they have taken steps to try to encourage that. I understand, but I don’t necessarily agree with their choices.
In my mind they’re not the most egregious offender for being anti consumer in their methodology. Good examples of anti-consumer behaviour is Netflix trying to put an end to account sharing, or Reddit’s API changes that basically kicked out a nontrivial number of its users for seemingly no good reason. There’s plenty more anti consumer actions from other companies that I can point to that are far worse than what YouTube is doing.
In my mind, Google has supported FOSS more than most big tech companies. Android, at it’s core is FOSS, built on Linux. Chrome is based on chromium, which is FOSS as well. There’s numerous other examples of Google supporting FOSS. Sure, they have their own versions of that integrate Google services into the products and provide extra features on top of what the FOSS versions do. But I can’t think of any company that even comes close to the support of FOSS that Google has. In my mind they’re simply not the worst offender. They’re not innocent, but not the worst.
That’s my opinion though and it’s just one of many possible opinions. Far be it for me to impose my opinion on anyone else. If you want to distrust Google and use FOSS things instead, that’s fine. It’s your choice. If you agree but still don’t want to pay them for premium, that’s okay too. Or if you want to drink the Kool-aid and pay for all of their services, that’s also your choice.
Have a great day.
I’m only here 'cause it was the first lemmy instance I joined after the reddit bullshit.
I pay for YT Premium.
I’m also back on reddit arguing with people.
So, yeah… I’m everything this place hates.
I don’t hate you. I’m sure there are plenty more that feel similarly.
I also feel like there is a nontrivial number of people who could not possibly care less; and as always, a silent majority of people who are simply lurking, who express their voice through voting only. (Special shout out to all the lurkers. You’re awesome)
It’s all personal choice and the opinion expressed in the OP is just that, an opinion. Same as me. I can only express my opinion. If that upsets people, then I’m sorry for that. I’m not going to change my opinion to gratify someone else in their opinion or position. If anyone wishes to have a discussion about why they think my position is not properly informed or wrong in their eyes, then that’s fine. I can engage in conversation about it, but at the end of the day, I make my choices, you make yours, and everyone else makes theirs. My decision to pay for YT premium doesn’t really affect anyone but me, and Google.
No one hates you, some people just think youre an idiot for still using reddit after leaving it
More content than Lemmy shrug
Im not gonna lie, if raw content is all you want reddit is, like, option number 50 in terms of both volume and quality.
Is it really content count? Or just habit?
I like the layout of reddit/lemmy. If there’s something like that but has the activity of reddit I’m all ears.
So habit then. If its the specific formatting, no, reddits the literal largest of this style.
We don’t hate here. Except capitalism. We hate that.
Shoutout to Nebula! I might pay for it but it’s like old YouTube without the bullshit. Worth it in my opinion.
Absolutely agree with the youtube subscription part. I am not giving them money if i can.
So what do I do? Patreon. I watch ad free, and i give 1 dollar a month instead on patreon. Win-win.
P.S. However, this way only a select few get money from me, but it is what it is.
I started using nebula which costs $30/year (discounted price, easy to get). It has some of the YouTube creators, shares revenue with them, has no ads, and isn’t google.
Sure it has a fraction of the YouTube content, but there’s more new stuff there every day than I could watch. And it isn’t toxic like YouTube.
I’m only here because Reddit pissed me off. I toss money toward my instance and I’d be fine tossing a few bucks per month to YouTube if it meant no ads.
You have it all wrong. Giving money to FOSS is okay, giving money to YouTube is bad.
See my other comment. I also noted a lot of the accounts that promote YouTube premium, are less than a week old. So there is suspicion of trolling or astroturfing
I’ve been riding an old “premium” subscription from the introduction of Google Play Music (or whatever it was called) years ago when it was introduced, for like $3/month. Seemed like a reasonable deal to me.
They did just (finally) jack the price up on me, though, so as soon as i get some free time i’m canceling.
Half the community came from reddit during 3rd party app purge it’s no surprise they wouldn’t be too concerned or know anything about privacy
Reasons not to buy premium:
- Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
- Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
- YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTube’s copyright claim system wasn’t so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. https://youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
- Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
- Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.
Your utub link seems to contain a tracking Id.
Not particularly surprising. It was copied from the YouTube iOS app…
Meta-evil
Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
They already do this anyway. They also do it whether you have an account or not.
Point one: I’m pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you’re on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want. Is it Ideal? No. But you should’ve acted 10-15 years prior if you wanted to stop this. It’s still not ideal though.
Point two: I agree. There does need to be space for them to repent, but they aren’t actively trying to, so don’t trust them (see the next point as an example of that).
Point three That’s a shame. They really need to fix that, though with how corpos do things nowadays, not sure that’ll happen.
Point four: That’s normal, expected and a reasonable business decision. Most of these features they likely added after premium, and they’re meant as incentives. Why else would you want to but their premium, if not for the added features?
Point five: This is shitty and mostly inexcusable behaviour. It’s god awful, and they really shouldn’t do it. I do have to play devil’s advocate a little. They are fully, 100% in their right to do this. If you don’t like it, vote with your wallet (and time). If we stop using their services, they’ll stop making it worse. They are still A-holes for doing it though.
Point one: I’m pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you’re on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want.
I mean sure, they could try combining the user agents my unofficial apps provide with my carrier’s NAT IP to build a profile on me, but it would be highly inefficient and imprecise to the point where it’s almost useless for them. With a Youtube Premium account they have an identity tied to an email address, full name, and payment info that they can relate every click in their apps and websites to. If I also use their other services with the same account, I would be paying them to spy on everything I do and sell my data, so other companies can sell me crap.
If you’ve already got that much of a set-up to guarantee privacy, it’s a very good point. Most people aren’t that dedicated to privacy (I think), but it’s still a very valid point in your case
I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions. I have mine set to delete cookies, cache and history (minus a few trusted domains) on close but I’d imagine it would be easy to differentiate between me and others in my household by browser fingerprints alone. The only question then is whether those guesses are reliable enough for Google to essentially treat those sessions as 1 person, or throw it away since there are bound to be quite a lot of cases where 10s or 100s of people on the same IP have very similar browsing habits and configurations and trying to figure out who is who would be incredibly difficult (think offices where everybody could have exactly the same laptop and share similar browsing habits due to working for the same company). That’s my cope anyway. The alternative is Youtube over Tor for which would be painful.
Points 4 and 5 on my end are essentially two sides to of the same coin. I should clarify, I don’t have a problem with YouTube introducing a new feature and making that Premium-only.
I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions
It’s called fingerprinting
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
What about the reasons to buy premium? Pretty much none right?
I mean, fair. The two big reasons are that your views are worth much more than normal viewers to creators, so it does mean you’re helping support the content you watch. Further, the more people who pay for content the less influence advertisers have. All this said, I would assume that $5 a month to your favorite creators (Patreon, Paypal, Librepay, etc) would be worth more to them than a share of your YouTube Premium subscription fee.
That’s what I’m thinking. The day I have a job I would much rather support my favourite creators directly than pay YouTube and hope for some trickle down effect
Fyi all the removed features of the YouTube app they want you to pay for? Work fine on Firefox
Playing while locked doesn’t seem to work unfortunately in Firefox for iOS. You can do the trick where you start PIP and then immediately lock the phone to play in the background, but that only works if you don’t unlock your phone again.
That’s weird. On Android I just take the “notification” and can press play and it’ll work just fine.
iOS always has been finnicky
The problem is that they actually don’t mean that. And truthfully I don’t mind the idea of paying for video hosting, that shit’s expensive, but YouTube is going about it in the worst way possible.
slowing my buffer down is not how you get me to turn of my adblocker. no thanks.
YouTube didn’t slow down the buffer. It was ublocks latest update. There’s a patch rolling out I believe.
Was gonna comment you’re wrong.
Turns out you’re not. Well fuck me I guess.
Do you mean the actual video buffer or the page’s loading time? Because they made it take 5~ seconds longer to load on Firefox when they started going after adblockers and my filter that replaced it with
0.0001(or whatever) seconds hasn’t been working for a little bit.Is it really uBlock Origins? They mention AdBlock and AdBlock Plus, which are separate from uBlock Origins.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/iBTEibxAi7I
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
No no, we mean it, at least at that price. I’d be willing to kick YouTube a few bucks a month. I’m not going to pay them more per month than most MMOs. They’re trying to charge streaming service prices for content they don’t produce.
Because they pay the creators from that? They’re not taking the whole thing as a cost for hosting
Right. Some people get stuck up about getting things for free that they think they should get for free.* But a lot of the problem is the obnoxious ways companies go about control and profit.
*There are important arguments to be had about freedom, still.
This idea that nobody on the internet is willing to pay for anything is outdated. Most people know that if it’s not money, they’re paying in data, time and/or attention. I much prefer paying with money, as do most people that use Proton, Kagi and other paid alternatives to free Google products.
Im not holding my breath for someone to start hosting petabytes of videos for free. I don’t like ads, so I’m just going to pay.
imagine paying to remove ads
They started the war, never forget, never forgive.
Used to be ads on the side of videos, and they were still scams like “Hit the target to win a FREE ipad!” At least they didn’t block the actual content. No one should ever feel bad about blocking ads lmao.
Ads are as pure brainwashing as the definition allows for, literally changing your subconscious behavior by ceaseless repetition. It’s considered torture under the Geneva convention, not sure how people got to the point where they think this is ok on radio, tv, billboards, everywhere all the time 24/7, but I have a feeling the brainwashing played a role.
It’s also cool that YouTube Premium pays a bigger cut to creators when compared against regular YouTube ads.
I do like that.
How much? I doubt it’s more than just enough to make people think that, “oh that’s nice”, while doing some absurd minimum…
If you want to support Youtubers, then buy their merch or something like that.
The cost of supporting every YouTuber I watch with merch greatly outpaces the cost of a few years of premium
Maybe, but at least it doesn’t give money to google.
You say that as if it’s the only option while being on a platform that explicitly isn’t a single organization hosting the entire thing. There’s no way this is a serious comment.
Lemmy has 50 thousand users and hosts mostly text and static images. YouTube has 2.7 billion users and hosts mostly high quality video. Pretending it’s even remotely the same is pointless.
Of course, and that’s why something like PeerTube works differently.
Then give us a fair price. YouTube is not making any content, so I just wish to pay for the hosting privileges. That shouldn’t cost me 15€/month. Give me simple prenium that removes ads for 6-7€, and I will jump in. It’s all about what I feel I’m getting.
For instance, I fucking bought a 1300€ pixel 8 pro ROFL.
Counterpoint. There used to be far less ads
Counterpoint. Still not making profits.
Counterpoint to the counterpoint: Youtube made $28 billion in revenue in 2021. Bandwidth and storage space are expensive but i can’t believe they’re that expensive. If they’re not profitable then i have to assume that’s a decision they’re making.
But how will the CEO afford their 7th yacht?
They pass a lot of the income to producers. Youtube allegedly pays best. They have a ginormous catalogue of videos and allow any user to upload unlimited data.
1 Ad - Fine. 2 Ads - Ok. 3 Ads - Closed YouTube.
4 Ads - uBlock Origin installed on Firefox
Should have been from the beginning
I pay for a premium account and I get more value out of it than Netflix or any other streaming service.
People are out to lunch on this whole situation. Try running a service that hosts somewhere between 2 and 3 billion Gigabytes of data. Where basically anyone on the planet can upload gigs of video and YouTube will still make it available 10 years later. You are never going to crowd source that, ever. I also pay for premium and I get at least 5x the value of any other streaming service. Just on home renovations, it’s probably saved me 10k+ being able to watch tutorials about every kind of repair.
Youtube Premium is literally the only subscription service I pay for. Apart from your reasons there is one very solid reason behind my choice:
I can find shows and movies for free online if I bothered trying, it isn’t difficult. I cannot easily do the same for Youtube content.
The best part is: Youtube doesn’t even do any of that. It’s the creators that try to keep other streams off the web, because they wanna drive traffic to their own channel.
Idk why, but it’s just funny to me.
I’m very curious about why YouTube allow users to upload what seems like unlimited footage in 4K HDR and keep it around indefinitely. Only guess is they don’t want to miss out on the next big YouTuber. I upload a lot of video for very few views. There is no way in hell that Google make money from my account.
I’m starting to wonder, what will YouTube do once it stops being remotely sustainable to run?
Is more efficient video compression being developed faster than people are uploading content?
Like, at some point, they might just run out of space and will have to purge millions of videos.
Youtube can show ads and offers subscription without being this shitty though. Just look on how popular region-specific video services like niconico (japan) or bilibili (china) operate. They also have ads and subscription, but nowhere as crazy as google adding multiple video ads upon ads and pick a fight with ad blocker users (which used to be a minority when google haven’t aggressively pushed more and more ads. the current popularity of adblockers today is google’s own doing). This is only possible because google has killed off competitors in western market and now it’s time for cashing out.
you’re not putting the bar very high there
They should include sponsorblock with youtube premium, I won’t pay 12€ per month to watch more ads than on free tv. Youtube doesn’t even make their own content. 5€ max for youtube would be okay with no ads.
Absolutely. 5$,sponsor block, no ads and no music premium bullshit. I don’t want it.
Edit: I forgot! Give me the fucking downvote count back so I can quickly know which videos are bullshit you assholes!
YouTube cannot do that. YouTube’s content legal system does not allow this.
That said, I use SponsorBlock and love it to the degree of finding it necessary depending on what type of content I am watching.
Why do people hate YouTube Premium anyway? I don’t quite get it. I have had it since it was available in my country, and I love it.
Also, I have to say I use the YouTube Vanced app with SponsorBlock and custom layout (no shorts, no uploads, no etc.) and YouTube Premium subscription. I don’t like the default YouTube app.
So, I don’t know if I like YouTube or just the model and content/creators behind it.
I just refuse to pay to watch youtube videos which is why I dont like youtube premium
Yeah, I know that, XD but why?
What makes it so that you think you should be able to get creators and their content, server capacity, and storage for free? Who should be paying for it in your mind? Who should eat the cost? The creators, the platform, or the user? or all of them to a degree? And who should be able to profit?
I think it’s pretty clear that the end-user will carry most of the cost in the end.
No they need to add DVR so i can save all my favorite videos abd dont have to watch them live /s
How is it relevant that youtube does little in house production. The revenue is passed to the creators anyway(by watchtime)
Oh yes you are right, thank you.
I pay for YouTube Premium. I didn’t really want that, I just wanted YouTube Music, but it didn’t make sense to just pay for YT Music. I don’t want Spotify and Amazon Music kinda sucks so YT music worked best.
Same for me but in reverse.
Remove music, deduct 2-3 € from the bill and I’d be happy enough with it.
Spotify suits my use case way better.I couldn’t justify $14 a month for YT Premium especially when YT Music sucks so much. And it’s very likely just going to get more expensive.
If they could stop bundling them both together and give me an option to just get rid of ads, I’d probably go back to paying. But for now, NewPipe is a way better experience.
I actually used to pay for the Premium account in Google Play Music, but disliked YouTube Music so much when they migrated accounts over that I canceled my subscription. Have they improved the radio/music discovery parts at all?
In the same boat. GPM was so much better than Spotify in terms of UI and basic features. People hype-up Spotify’s recommendations, but since moving there after GPM shut down, I don’t think I’ve ever had good music in my Spotify recommendations. Lack of basic features like being able to dislike specific songs, which they keep removing it with A/B testing, is so fucking infuriating!
I had YouTube when it was YouTube red and I was a part of a family plan with my friend for a couple years. I split the family plan with a few people and ended up paying $3 a month. Eventually he moved across country and YouTube said that since we didn’t have the same IP address that I could not be a part of the family plan so I ended up signing up for my own account. At some point I was trying to pay off my debt so I cancelled all my subscription services. YouTube premium included. I started watching YouTube and then I saw it. An ad. Something I hadn’t seen in years. It was the most annoying thing ever. I couldn’t believe that people put up with that. I was so annoyed by the ads that I looked at how to obtain YouTube and YouTube music for free without ads because I needed to save the money and the ads were so intrusive that this was what I was going to do and that is what I still do to this day.
YouTube premium has millions of users and it makes them literally billions of dollars. There is no boulder.
Absolute numbers are meaningless. They also have to maintain infrastructure for that many users.
The pebble thinking the mountain isn’t there…
I would be fine paying for a YouTube premium account if I could get one for like $3-4 that just removes the ads. I don’t want their music service.
But then you have to pay $5 for every funkin service, I use dozens of platforms, that’s going to be $100 a month for all of it. It simply isn’t feasible, and frankly, this is a systemic capitalist issue, and we need to revolt and tear it down.
deleted by creator
It’s not illegal to control what appears on MY screen.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I don’t get what you think that “realization” changes. I occasionally watch videos on YouTube and I’d be willing to pay a certain amount to watch to those videos without ads. Since they don’t offer that, I’m not paying them any money. For the record, they did offer such a plan called “YouTube Premium Lite” not that long ago and they axed it.
deleted by creator
Yep. With the 1999 MP3 quality, arbitrary intro tunes, and everything. Such a pity, Play Music was extremely good.
What’s worse is that they are folding podcasts into it. Google Podcasts at least had a nice timeline based feed of your podcasts all in one place. YouTube music, to see my podcasts? Open app, tap podcasts, under your shows, click more, then new episodes. And if you finish an episode of whatever your listening to, instead of the next in the sequence, it just starts playing random shit like an animation compilation from a podcast that I don’t listen or subscribe to. YouTube Music is trash. I don’t need another “Everything” app. Just fuck off and let me listen.
I am pretty sure that yt music doesnt increase the price by 9 Bucks. Lets not push the blame on that.
15 euros is just as much as cable these days fuck that.
13€ for a family plan in Lithuania. Is it gonna increase in near future?
15 in the Netherlands
Family or 1 account?
I’m stating what I would be willing to pay for and how much I’d be willing to pay for it.
Google really is the king of “you don’t REALLY mean ‘no’. Try again.”
YT Premium is the single most valuable subscription service on the net right now. Don’t regret mine a bit. I listen to hours and hours of YT Music a day, and I watch probably a few hours of YT content a night as well.
If I compare the usage of Netflix vs Youtube
Last 7 days (from right now): 24h 30min
Last time I used Netflix in a high volume: Probably <12h. At absolute highest maybe 18-20h in total.But: YT usage is consistant. Netflix/service of choice is at best a seasonal happening if a show is very good and you binge it.
So to me it’s worth it enough to keep. But I’d want to have an option to remove music as I prefer Spotify, have optionally Jellyfin and dont need yt music.
I have never watched YouTube in my life and I buy my music by the album. Yes I am a psychopath
I get you’re saying its a great value because of what you get out of it, but I’m not comfortable pricing things in that way… I’d rather it be based on the actual cost. I know real prices don’t tend to work that way (or at least not in many cases) but it just feels icky and exploitative still.
