WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 46105058

(no title)

M4v3R | 3 months ago

Is $14 dollars for ad-free, unlimited access to literally billions of videos really a steep price? Personally if I were to get rid of all but one of my media subscriptions I would stick with this one, since it's got everything - entertainment, education, inspiration, you name it.

discuss

order

homebrewer|3 months ago

$14 is two days worth of living in my country for your average man on the street, among many other similar places. Imagine if you had to pay $200 to watch YouTube, that's how much these services cost for us.

They refuse to correct for purchasing power parity and are left with nothing in the end. Steam seems to do very well in comparison.

(I don't watch YouTube even for free, but practically everybody I know does without paying anything, and it makes a lot of sense).

carlosjobim|3 months ago

There are a lot of things in this world besides YouTube Premium, which cost $14 or more. That some people in the world are very poor is no kind of argument as to how companies should price their products.

"Purchasing power parity" is a non-concept for almost 100% of companies and products. But YouTube Premium is priced differently in different regions. Sometimes much cheaper than $14.

balamatom|3 months ago

A semi-successful YouTuber in a low-income country is basically an infinite money hack. Neat little form of advance scouting, like this forum.

graemep|3 months ago

I am not going to watch billions of Videos.

Its not entirely ad free, just fewer ads, AFAIK sponsored segments remain so there are still ads, sometimes quite lengthy ones.

$14/month is $168 an year, and if you subscribe to multiple other video services the annual total is going to be quite high.

carlosjobim|3 months ago

YouTube is 10x the quality and 10x the quantity than any other video service.

As for the ads, YouTube Premium now has built-in sponsor skip. They can't really block sponsored segments, as that is a freedom of speech issue and also something they can't easily determine. Creators can just omit that some product is sponsored.

stronglikedan|3 months ago

sponsored segments are skipped with a single button push, so they are negligible. it also comes with yt music

cyberax|3 months ago

SponsorBlock helps with them.

dottjt|3 months ago

When the alternative is the exact same thing you describe but for $0 dollars, then yes.

jfindper|3 months ago

For sure! $0.00*

* $0.00 plus additional risk that the author of the alternative you are using is compromised, you end up using a malicious version of that alternative, and get pwned.

Obviously for some/many, that trade-off is totally cool. But it needs to be included in the analysis, otherwise you're being dishonest.

podgietaru|3 months ago

Not to mention included YouTube Music. It's one of the few subs I pay for, because I watch a _lot_ of YouTube on the TV. And also like to have it in the background for "Podcast" style videos where the video is really only an accompaniment.

microtonal|3 months ago

That's actually worse. They used to have a separate YouTube subscription. I don't want (to pay for) YouTube Music, because I already have Apple Music and Tidal, which I prefer.

londons_explore|3 months ago

14 dollars a month for a decade is $1680.

To save $1680 I'd prefer to just use an adblocker (which I have done for the past decade)

carlosjobim|3 months ago

The hacker boy one day came back from school panting, sweating and exhausted. His father asked him:

- What happened to you?

- I figured that if I ran behind the bus, I'll save the $3 dollars the ticket costs-

The hacker father smacked his son hard on the head and cried:

- You fool! To run behind a bus like that! You should have ran behind a taxi instead and you would have saved at least $50 dollars!

Then they both watched YouTube together the rest of the evening, thinking eagerly about all the juicy money they would save over the next decade.

hhh|3 months ago

Yes, and you choose to risk losing the most important platform to humanity next to Wikipedia. Youtube should be a public service.

spaqin|3 months ago

That's extremely subjective, but I'd rather save that $14 a month towards retirement. And if YouTube was only available with ads... well, that's no videos for me, maybe for the better, I would waste less time.

didntcheck|3 months ago

Sure, and you're free to

1. Save $14 for retirement and not watch Youtube

2. Save $14 for retirement and watch Youtube with ads

3. Pay $14 a month for Youtube without ads

The only option that's not fair is expecting private companies and creators to give you entertainment and its delivery with nothing in return

GoblinSlayer|3 months ago

I get cat videos through messengers.

StopDisinfo910|3 months ago

That's a very generous characterization of what most YouTube content is.

My experience is that you are basically paying to remove the official ads from your disguised ads.

The various algorithm tweaks for engagement these past few years and the introduction of shorts have significantly degraded the content quality and many good channels have just thrown the towel.

mrguyorama|3 months ago

Right, I want premium because it's a "fair" payment for the service I use and would help support the people who make good content, but the vast majority of those dollars go to the company who is solely at fault for encouraging and essentially requiring creators to use clickbait and fake thumbnails and put out slop every single day and never ever ever try doing something slightly different and consistently change things in ways that those creators do not want and hate. Every complaint you likely have about youtube content was forced by youtube for their own profitability. Don't like sponsorships? People mostly started seeking them out after Google cut ad payouts essentially in half with no warning. Don't like videos being way longer than they need to be? That's because youtube started paying out based on watch time instead of views and that encourages padding. Don't like censorship? It was Youtube's choice to shadowban/punish anyone who even said the word pandemic during a literal global pandemic that people probably wanted to talk about, even in passing. Buy into Youtube's new "channel member" feature in good faith? Well then Youtube changed it so that the videos that only members can watch are now shoved in front of everyone's eyeballs without your approval or desire or asking and it's really annoying to all your viewers. Don't like every video spending 30 seconds telling you to subscribe and "hit that like button" and then the fucking bell? That's because google decided that if your video didn't have a high enough click through rate, it wouldn't be shown to subscribers at all, and then introduced the bell for "subscribers but for real", and then even that hasn't really been honored. Youtube has for example suddenly decided that I should be shown low view russian language plagiarism of videos I like that have then been autodubbed back into english rather than the video from one of my subscriptions that was copied to make the russian video. How is that supposed to help anyone?

I will happily pay for youtube when they show that they want to encourage good content and help empower the people who make that good content, but Google doesn't want to do that because Mr Beast slop advertising to your kids is more profitable.

So I pay for Nebula instead.

encrypted_bird|2 months ago

Listen, I only make about $350-$400 a week after taxes and deductions. So, yes, $14 a month is a LOT. With my income, even $5 can and does break the bank if I'm not careful. Not everyone has a SWE's salary.

tcfhgj|3 months ago

$14 dollars better spent on liberapay

RobotToaster|3 months ago

For something that was previously free with only unintrusive ads, yes.

krige|3 months ago

>ad-free

hasn't been in over a year

Wilya|3 months ago

Youtube premium is still ad-free. There is a Youtube premium lite which is kinda-ad-free-but-not-really, but the full ad-free one still exists.

denkmoon|3 months ago

??? I've been on youtube premium / redtube since the beginning and I've been served 1 ad incorrectly in that time.

prmoustache|3 months ago

> for ad-free

Most youtube content being disguised ads, this cannot be true.

malka1986|3 months ago

I hate google, and I refuse to give them any money.

bigyabai|3 months ago

Thanks for paying $14/month to support my ad-free yt-dlp archive, shmuck.

fragmede|3 months ago

Usually people who are a leech, a drain on society don't go around bragging about it, but you do you.

ManlyBread|3 months ago

$14 and I still have to run several plugins just to make the site actually usable. No thanks.

hansvm|3 months ago

It's >12x the ad revenue they bring in per monthly-active YouTube user (suggesting they'd still be happy with a much lower price), and the price has increased 75% in the last decade (compared to the 40% real inflation over that period, suggesting they intend to continue increasing the price till public backlash or other effects reduce their total revenue). Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users, and we'll see how far that initiative goes.

pcthrowaway|3 months ago

> Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users

Do you have a source for this?

I do value watching unlimited youtube videos without ads, but if they're gonna add the ads back in, I'd easily stop paying for the one google product I currently pay for (and honestly the only reason I haven't already done this is laziness and convenience)