Watch how they steadily increase the price now (which they’ve already been doing)
It went up like four bucks this month for me this past month. I feel like I am in a no-win situation. I want to support the authors of the videos and music I like, make the platform sustainable, and I hate ads and data harvesting. There doesn’t seem to be reasonable way to satisfy all three objectives (or even two).
I’m mostly in the same boat with supporting the creators, however I don’t really like Google to be honest. I end up supporting creators outside the platform, such as via Patreon or by watching on Nebula. Most of my YT consumption is done via NewPipe, Piped and Freetube
There’s a little part of me that likes the fact that YouTube is burning a hole in Google’s finances tbh lol
Patreon for the ones you really like, and substituting watching my own content on Plex is how I’m weening myself off YouTube.
Unfortunately, anymore, even if you pay, companies (especially googie) are STILL harvesting and selling your data… I don’t know if there’s a way to avoid it without either unplugging entirely or going full in on dark web and anonymous browsing techniques, and even then, your data will still be harvested from other people in your life
If it wasn’t as freaking high as it is there would be a lot more premium users. Every other streaming service is full of professionally made movies and TV shows. YouTube is absolutely chock-full of berate crap where they’re barely paying anybody but the top 1%. It’s a grift. It should be priced with the absolute cheapest services out there.
The price makes a little more sense if you factor in it also includes YouTube music, which puts it more on par with a premium Spotify subscription, with the benefit of no ads on YouTube. Which is basically how I got YouTube premium, I was already paying a monthly fee for Google Play music as it was at the time, and the upgrade to add YouTube premium was only £2 extra a month.
Sure but a LOT of us don’t want the music service and have never used it once. People like me aren’t costing them a penny on music and if they offered a plan without music I’d jump in an instant.
This is my issue. I have and love Apple Music and do not want to pay for another music service. If YT gave me an option for an ad-free YT without music for only like $3 or $5 a month, I’d jump on it. For now, I’ll continue using uBlock Origin and SmartTube.
I own my music though, I don’t want to rent it.
I agree with this sentiment completely. Not sure if they still do it or not, but YTM started out letting you upload your own music and then being able to access it across any device through the app. YTM doesn’t have the best catalog now, let alone when they started so i think the upload feature was a way of acknowledging that. I uploaded both local bands that are defunct and literally nowhere online and artists that didn’t embrace the internet age and restricted their catalogs. I can still listen to the music i uploaded back then through the app or a browser. That feature set it apart from the other options available at the time. I guess I’m trying to say that i also want to own my own music, but i dont hate the convenience of some of it floating in the cloud waiting for me to pull it down. Speaking of… ownCloud is dope and what i’m transitioning to for my media. When in doubt, roll your own solution.
As long as it own cloud doesn’t do what next cloud did and try to rename all of my files on import then only retain their names and databases. Currently holding my own with Plex /jellyfin
I was in the same boat for ages and was happy paying as I kept the original rate. Then they bumped it by almost 50% end of December. Quit before the change took effect and have been using ad block ever since. The ONLY thing I miss is YouTube music as I’ve gotten too lazy to rip the remixes/soundtracks that aren’t on other streaming services.
Yeah, that’s what made me get premium. Even before the adblocker crackdown, the prospect of supporting creators and being able to ditch Spotify’s horrible artist compensation model made it a simple choice.
While YouTube doesn’t commission, much, content it does store disproportionately more data. A streaming site has maybe 1,000,000 hours of content. That amount of content is uploaded to YouTube every day. It’s a totally different business model.
And, I don’t think I should be the one paying for that.
They should charge minor storage fees to the creators and uploaders. You pay to put your content up there if people watch it you get paid back as many multiples as necessary. It would be a fantastic method to reduce the amount of trash video stored up there that nobody ever watches.
It turns out creators don’t want to pay for the storage.
I’d say we’re at an impasse, but if I don’t buy premium and I don’t watch ads in their content, they’re not getting paid.
If they paid a pittance to keep their storage and it pushed their quality up and push the price of premium down more people would watch and they’d make a hell of a lot more money.
But let’s be honest, you’d probably block their ads if they self hosted.
I only started blocking the ads when yt started allowing 2 back to back 15 second advertisements and creators started putting in mid rolls.
This crap they’re pulling is downward spiral. They can’t get 20% more yoy by squeezing people to pay Netflix prices for crap. And most of the creators need patrion to even survive.
I truly hoped something like Odyssey could survive and we could just dht our likes. But it just becomes a sesspool.
It would be a hard-sell these days to charge someone to gamble on whether or not their content is going to get any views. My guess is that the conent economy et al is like an iceburg, it takes a lot to float it but only a little bit is worth seeing the light of day. Ie, you have to host a ton of garbage to be able to sift out the gems.
Hard sell maube but they’re the only game in town. I suspect it’s not a matter of if but when.
uBlock Origin has 36,000,000 users according to Google and ABP has 46,000,000 users. Another 13,000,000 use AdGuard and 67,000,000 use AdBlock (the crappy one, but nonetheless, it blocks YouTube ads).
Also on Firefox there are 7,780,587 uBO users. Checkmate
I use uBlock origin on firefox. All my devices are always connected through a VPN with all the ad and tracker blocks turned on.
I am a YouTube premium subscriber.
There are dozens of us… dozens!!!
Same for me!
Me too! Im a dozen!
This “Article” is short on details, And according to this article Google did not reveal data about subscriptions in the recent earnings call. I can only think this a PR piece to fluff up Google’s shares and discourage critics. Unless Google can be confident enough to explain which regions added subscribers and how much of such a subscription was part of a bundle… We can’t conclude that their anti-adblocking measures and price hikes were successful.
Example: India would fluff up numbers without adding as much revenue (bundles are common and subscription prices are low) than NA or EU
Their war on ad-blockers must be paying off
We can’t really tell for sure because:
- They left out subscriber numbers in the recent earnings call (according to this article)
- Hence, we don’t know if the subscribers were from bundles vs. individual subscriptions.
- Subscribers could be from low price regions and the revenue there wouldn’t compare to NA and EU.
Most people don’t even know that ad-blockers exit
and probably more than a few upsells from cross-marketing a yt ‘premium’ sub to those that came over from satellite for nfl games.
Just paying for it is worth it for the official apps.
Revanced all the way, baby!
I had to get grayjay because revanced stopped working on an A13, but I can’t seem to find an auto play feature
Yeah I got it after some other lemming told me that you can get it for cheap with a family account. I pay 4 bucks per month now which apparently also supports YouTubers more than watching ads on their videos.
Been doing the same for years. Absolutely worth it.
100 million idiots
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hot on the heels of Google’s “One” subscription plan obtaining 100 million users, YouTube is also hitting that big milestone, with 100 million people paying for Premium and YouTube Music.
YouTube’s subscription data didn’t make it into the earnings call three days ago.
After warning users that ad blockers violate YouTube’s terms of service, the pop-ups show a big “try YouTube Premium” button.
Premium also added an exclusive “enhanced bitrate” 1080p setting, although 2K, 4K, and 8K options have always been free.
YouTube Music is free with ads and a more limited feature set, but subscribing gets you ad-free playback, background playback on phones, and access to YouTube Music streaming on Google’s various speakers.
YouTube’s blog post highlights quotes from many big music industry CEOs celebrating the service.
The original article contains 280 words, the summary contains 127 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’ll be honest. I did. With a VPN. It costs me $2.50 a month.
