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YouTube locks 4K playback behind Premium subscriptions in latest test

39 points| rtavares | 3 years ago |theverge.com

48 comments

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PeterStuer|3 years ago

I have a family Premium subscription. I'm sad this can not be the default YouTube experience for everybody as every time I see someone watching YT without a sub I do not understand how they can tolerate the barrage of advertising.

Surely this attention economy model must be a loss for humanity as a whole, no?

irthomasthomas|3 years ago

I just use ad blockers. I haven't a YouTube ad in years.

diebeforei485|3 years ago

This is reasonable. However, I don't like being forced to also pay for their music streaming service because I already pay for (and prefer) a different service.

_fat_santa|3 years ago

If you watch a lot of youtube video's it's worth it for just the ad-free experience alone. I actually did some math a while back and figured out based on my hourly bill rate that it's technically costing me money to not pay for YT premium (that is the time spent watching ads times my bill rate was greater than the monthly subscription cost).

Mindwipe|3 years ago

You're not really, it just doesn't cost YouTube any more in terms of licensing the music for their music streaming service than it does to clear the rights for YouTube Premium, so they literally may as well include it.

A YouTube Premium lite is available in a few territories, but where it isn't that's because the music situation means it could cost single cents a month less than the full service and therefore isn't worth doing.

Tijdreiziger|3 years ago

The Premium Lite subscription doesn’t include Music.

kajaktum|3 years ago

Can someone tell me how YouTube is supposed to make money without ads and premium service? No one has been able to give me a straight answer.

jterrys|3 years ago

Cute thought experiment:

Google is notorious for snuffing products they consider unprofitable. Yet persisted with Youtube for 16 years. Why?

ChuckNorris89|3 years ago

The same way YouTube was making money from 2005 till today?

hulitu|3 years ago

> YouTube locks 4K playback behind Premium subscriptions

... and HD behind compression.

iso1631|3 years ago

Uncompressed 1080p60 video is on the order of 3gigabit a second

robertwt7|3 years ago

Curious if any of the creator are actually getting something out of the premium if they're locking this...

james-skemp|3 years ago

I haven't seen any recent numbers or information, but I believe Premium views do generate some amount of money for the video creator.

I believe it shows as a different line item in their revenue dashboard.

Super basic official answer: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en

Edit:

From a creator at https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/xv8k6n/i_have_yout... (so take it as you will):

> Income from premium is distributed by your watchtime. YouTube takes a portion of your monthly fee and divides it between the videos you watched. You watch only a single creator, that creator will get all of it. You watch only few videos, those videos will earn a larger chunk each. You watch hundreds of videos, each video will only earn a small amount. You pay a lot for premium, more will be paid to creators. You use a vpn to buy premium from india or so, only a fraction of that payment will be distributed accordingly.

> If you are not using premium creators get paid from advertisements that are actually watched. So either you have to watch the full advertisement, if it is shorter than 30 seconds, or at least 30 seconds from a longer advertisement, before you skip it. Skipping an advertisement after 5 - 29 seconds means no payout to the creator.

bryanlarsen|3 years ago

IIRC, premium was a large part of the reason behind those wacky auto-generated kids streams that was in the news a couple years ago. Parents don't want their kids watching ads, so a good number of kids have premium accounts. Premium pays a lot better than ads, so targeting kids can be quite lucrative.

PeterStuer|3 years ago

I have heard in the past one Premium viewer is about the same revenue for a creator as 6 non-premium viewers.