[john___matrix]

To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.

Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.

I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?

[runtime_blues]

As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?

I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.

[DanielHB]

Pretty much all big tech companies figured out this is the recipe for infinite money

Only Microsoft seems to be aware this causes Dutch Disease, min-maxing your monopolistic platform revenue is terrible long-term for you company

[iLoveOncall]

> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.

I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides.

Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.

[joshmanders]

In Google/YouTube's defense, this mentality is why we can't have nice things. You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does? Paying for premium to remove ads is a way of saying "Thank you for providing me this service, instead of displaying me irrelevant ads, just take my money"

[lkbm]

This is what we want, though, right? The alternatives would be a paywall, or charge per view. (Or, I guess, pay to "own", like a Kindle ebook, but seems like a mismatch for most of their content.)

[j-bos]

This strikes me as eating the commons.

[stOneskull]

you do get youtube music included which is a decent alternative to spotify.

[raincole]

By this logic, buying e-books from Amazon is the worst value I can think of, because I can get them effortlessly from libgen and other "sources", and a single book can cost as much as the whole year of YouTube premium.

[barneygale]

uBlock Origin is literally free

[jeffbee]

The cost is you have to give another party total access to all of your data on all sites.

[baby]

how does it work on iPhone or on the TV?