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YouTube Premium price increased by nearly 30%

41 points| low_tech_punk | 3 years ago |9to5google.com | reply

29 comments

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[+] beauzero|3 years ago|reply
Yep. Just got the email. Still worth it not to see ads on youtube at work. You never know what will pop in there.
[+] tartoran|3 years ago|reply
Ad blockers work for me on youtube, though with hiccups. I figure that when that stops working I’ll use youtube less, it’s already a time sink. And will also dust off torrent clients.
[+] janef0421|3 years ago|reply
I created a separate work YouTube account, and now all of the ads are just pitches for various kinds of enterprise SaaS products.
[+] stokehacker|3 years ago|reply
Have to admit, ad-free is worth it but I also hate the feeling of being locked in.
[+] low_tech_punk|3 years ago|reply
I'm kicking myself for declining the 7.99/month lifetime price when Google Music initially launched (sometime in 2010-2014).
[+] berkeleyjunk|3 years ago|reply
Don't kick yourself. I had a locked in family price of $14.99 and it is going up to $22.99 (more than a 50% hike). My consolation mail started with

"Thank you for being a loyal member throughout our journey. "

[+] coldtea|3 years ago|reply
don't kick yourself. Many such "lifetime" prices just get shut down... so much for the "lifetime" promise, it's all about the small print
[+] sphars|3 years ago|reply
Thankfully this new price hike seems to be only for family plans, and I can still keep my $7.99 grandfathered individual plan. Though the day that gets increased I'm jumping ship to something else.
[+] nano9|3 years ago|reply
I will never pay for YouTube until I'm guaranteed a way to opt out of the recommendation algorithm. It's not so much a recommendation algorithm as much as it is an adversarial search on my behavior to see what cheap content I'll actually engage. Every so often I'll notice a video from a clickbait-ey channel in my sidebar about a topic I care little for, like expensive luxury items or epic pop star moments.

So, I can't trust YouTube to be objective in its recommendations. It's very likely attempting to train me to seek deeper pools within their content graph so that I use YouTube more. Which is fine if it were a free model ("freemium", really), as I would implicitly agree to be mined in exchange for a hosted service with plenty of content. That I would PAY for that, however, is not something I would feel happy about. It would feel like paying for the privilege of receiving a slap in the face.

[+] togs|3 years ago|reply
So that's a 15% raise for content creators?
[+] jsnell|3 years ago|reply
No? It should be a 30% raise for them (for the YT Premium family plan slice of viewers). As long as the revenue split percentage stays constant, an x% increase in the total cost will obviously translate to the same x% increase for each split.
[+] ViceCitySage|3 years ago|reply
YouTube is a constant strain for Google and its been that way for the past few years. YouTube itself is very expensive to maintain (https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...) and has had times when they operated at a loss. Alphabet has blamed YouTube repeatedly for years when they make losses in revenue. Feels like someone crunched up some numbers recently and got angry at what they saw. Almost like this time around someone set a strict revenue goal and are determined to find more ways to profit off YouTube.
[+] tiernano|3 years ago|reply
seems to be for Family plans only... Still waiting for the plan without Youtube Music... I have Spotify already, so dont want Youtube Music...
[+] slipheen|3 years ago|reply
If you were ethically inclined toward such things, I've read posts online of people using VPNs to sign up for Youtube Premium from Argentina to pay a reduced rate.

I can't vouch for the effectiveness, but googling does show some people report having tried it successfully.

[+] r3a1d33p|3 years ago|reply
I share my US family plan with friends in the UK. Their account would be banned occasionally. So, Google is probably aware of this hack, it's just they are not enforcing it too seriously.

EDIT: they only banned the added family member, not the account owner. My workaround is to just recreate family member account.

[+] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
So I’m going to slow down my gigabit symmetric internet and route my traffic through a third party to hypothetically save $5.00/month? Wouldn’t the VPN be more expensive?
[+] digianarchist|3 years ago|reply
I use a Thai account. It works but the Google account needs to have the country set to the same one used for billing.