YouTube Premium is getting a huge price hike in over a dozen countries, sparking user backlash. Some countries are experiencing hikes between 30% and 50%
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#YouTubePremium is raising subscription prices globally, with hikes of 30-50% in over a dozen countries, including Ireland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Colombia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Italy. Users may consider cheaper alternatives for their streaming needs.
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YouTube Premium users across the globe are facing significant price hikes as Google increases subscription costs in over a dozen countries. This follows earlier price jumps in various regions, including the United States last summer. The latest increases vary by region, with some countries experiencing hikes between 30% to 50%. For instance, in Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, the Family plan will rise from €18 to €26 starting November, while the individual plan will increase by €2 to €14.
Countries affected by these changes include Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, UAE, Switzerland, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Colombia, Thailand, Singapore, Norway, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Denmark. Although most Reddit reports are from European users, the price hikes also impact the Middle East, Colombia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. YouTube had already raised its subscription prices in India by 15–20% in late August.
i dont like being addicted to their platforms and limit my time using it.
however, the idea of being a luddite and isolating myself from the useful things in them just because their current owners are greedy capitalists sounds even worse.
Wouldnt that just cause them to increase prices more? Since now someone else has to pay for the bandwith you use?
Thus what you are doing is using your technological know how to offload your costs onto less technical users who can't adblock.
The morally correct thing to do is to stop watching youtube and/pr go to a paid platform that's an alternative, like floatplane or nebula and support the creators there, isn't it? But let's be honest, we all know you just want adfree youtube videos for free.
You think YouTube is some kind of Mom pop shop down the block? They have more than enough money to burn. Least they can do is to serve adfree videos, better, I might add.
Thus what you are doing is using your technological know how to offload your costs onto less technical users who can't adblock.
I’m ok with all of that. It furthers my goal of hitting the platform back in response to their predatory marketing practices and de facto monopoly. Also, I do support creators outside of youtube. In short, I don’t feel bad about any of this.
That might be their response, yes. But they also have some other options:
improve the service to be worth the cost
reduce the cost to increase Premium subs - I have a price in mind, and they're way above it
add an a la carte alternative to Premium (i.e. pay per video or something)
cut expenses, such as by reducing the amount of useless videos that are uploaded (i.e. small charge to upload videos, recur every year; allow some amount for free)
But no, raising prices is the easier "solution." I'm willing to pay (I pay for Nebula, after all), I'm just not willing to pay what they're asking for the service as-is.
The whole reason I got on YT Premium was because it was free with Google Play Music. I have real issues watch non-Premiun now, because I've always disliked advertising methods. (Not so much th ads, which can be entertaining, but just being shown content I didn't request instead of the content I did request.)
Bitwarden is worth it. (Yes, I know, I should self host it. I do, but I still see it as a good deal.)
Also Hetzner is a good subscription. So yes, some are worth it
I like SimpleFIN ($1.50/mo IIRC) + Actual Budget. I can pull in transaction data from multiple sources into my self-hosted Actual Budget service, which is super nice (or I can DIY if I want).
I used to use Tiller ($80/year I think?), which is basically the same, but it pulls transactions into a spreadsheet (Google Docs or Microsoft Office) and they have some budgeting tools around that. I'm trying to move away from Google and Microsoft, so I ended up cancelling, but I really liked their service.
Agreed. Mullvad is absolutely epic. A question: why do we have to pay for domain names? And why do some providers offer a domain at a lower price than others, while offering the same services? it doesn't make sense to me, an explaination is welcome
I pay for my email (Proton) password manager (last pass), and VPN (nordvpn).
I'd say subs that maintain your privacy and security are well worth it - there is no such thing as a free lunch and instead the tech giants are dining out at the expense of users.
Googles ad monopoly needs to be torn apart. Because YouTube premium prices may actually represent what it really costs to maintain video sites like YouTube, but Google have managed to destroy all competition with the free model and now there is no one realistically able to compete on content or price.
Sorry if you get this a lot, but have you tried Bitwarden? It's been a while since I compared but last I checked I found it miles better than LastPass.
So, steal everything or something else? Content isn't free. The ad model exists, but only works if people see the ads.
If everyone blocks all ads, and doesn't pay a subscription, how's that work for those providing the service?
I'm not defending YouTube here, just curious what your solution is to have a service and not pay for it.
I do pay for YT family Premium in the US. I watch mostly YT, and it is my music streaming service. I definitely liked it more when it was costing me $15/mo for that and was mad when that went to $23. I even tried switching to Spotify and using ad blocking on YT. I didn't jive with Spotify, and while ad blockers work for YT, it's a bit of a pain installing them on TV boxes and managing subscriptions across devices, asking with which videos you've seen etc.
Youtube revenue in 2023 (before these price hikes) was 31.5 billion USD.
The revenue for the entirety of alphabet in 2023 was 307 billion USD.
Youtube alone generated 10% of the entire revenue of alphabet’s portfolio in 2023.
Yes, revenue is not profit, but I could not find profit figures for youtube.
Alphabet’s operating income for 2023 was 84.3 billion USD. Assuming a similar proportion of revenue to operating income (I know, hella extrapolating, but again no direct sources for youtube) that would put youtube’s operating income in the ballpark of 8 billion USD.
It’s not that they aren’t making money because people are “stealing” as you say from poor little indie company youtube. It’s just that they want more more more MORE MORE MONEY.
Not op, but I think a solution would be having AI watch the videos and tracking what the people are saying, wearing, using etc and posting links to purchase those things in the description. They get a cut of sales and can also sell links for competing products if companies want more exposure. This could be effective and noninvasive. Give a cut to content creators and it may be even more effective.
You don't lose anything for the moment, but it might come back to bite you later regardless. Because Youtube needs to grow until the end of times but can't, it will end ugly one way or another. It's more of a symptom of a bigger problem than an isolated, 'smart' business decision.
Yeah they are continuously slowing down Firefox and I see a future where I will simply stop using YouTube.i thank them in advance for when that day comes
Do you know of a good free alternative to YouTube? Preferably one with a smarter algorithm that doesn't just feed me the same boring bullshit over and over again?
Yes I like cars, computers, and video game history, YouTube, but I like other things too, you know. I wish there were a way to view other people's YT homepages so that I can find something new to watch.
As an iPhone user I like to use YtLitePlus, it’s pretty much the same user experience as using revanced on android, maybe even a bit better.
I’d like to have an alternative client such as NewPipe but hey, we can’t have everything.
I use to use tubular, but it stopped working and I'm not computer savy enough to fix it. Can anyone offer some assistance please? It gets the infinite loading icon and then gives me an error
Google is having problems, they can't make profits anymore. Its different because reddit was never profitable, but googles been profitable for years.
Edit: I said they can't make profits, but what I should have said is they can't innovate and produce new value, they can only cut expenses and squeeze consumers with subscriptions and advertisements in order to remain profitable. Eventually there won't be anything left to cut and will then cease to be profitable. Google is on the decline.
Eh, I don't need Netscape, but I need Firefox to not die/turn into AI spamware. I'm also excited about Servo, hopefully that becomes a project in its own right.
And that, kids, is why you should pirate. Paying customers are restricted and being ripped off. Piracy gives freedom, it pays off, it makes sure you dont have to agree to stupid user agreements which take away you rights. Make sure to support your favorite creators though, through other platforms like Patreon. Don't take the money away from them. Just take away the power and control away from the evil mega corps like Google and Meta.
You don't even need to pirate, just use an ad blocker and support your creators directly. My perspective is that, unless you agree to their TOS, it's on them to prevent any activity that's unprofitable to them, and so far, uBlock Origin on Firefox works fine on YouTube directly.
Take what you would've spent on YouTube premium at a more reasonable price and send that to the creators you follow.
Youtube doing what I told every Premium adversary they would logically do after dumping more and more ad space onto the site. And to make Premium look worth the price, they'll continue to shove more ads in your face just before, you guessed it, doing another price hike. Rinse and repeat. Premium users are strong drivers of this enshittification so I will continue to call them out on it whenever they tell you to join the scam as well. I'll stick to my ad blockers.
I really like Grayjay, also on Android. The nice thing is it also supports other sources, so you can watch Odysee, Rumble, Nebula, Peertube and others on it. If the same video is on multiple platforms, it recognizes that and only shows one.
This is simply Business 101. Once you have a customer base you want to trade low-payers for high.
Did this with my computer business years ago. Woke up one day and said, "Why am I sweating these cheapskates that constantly bitch?" Fired them and kept the higher-paying, and less bitchy, clients. I was making more money for less effort and less overhead.
I don't know what amazes me more, that people keep paying when they know the price will keep going up, or that people bitch and moan. Last I checked, YouTube access isn't a human right. I'll keep using it until these is no way around their ads, but I'm not paying them a dime.
Exactly. My brother bought an accounting firm and is planning to do just that. You can probably double-dip as well by selling these customers to a competitor/new startup as referrals.
Business tends to follow exactly that model:
get users at any cost, and lose money if you have to
raise prices to improve profitability
go to 1 if needed (i.e. promotions), otherwise go to 2
It's so odd that a platform that relies so much on user content charges as much as or more than network streaming services. The market hold is leaking into it (and out).
I suspect the user content is the root of the problem. 500 hours of video is being uploaded every minute. YouTube has to transcode and store everything, and be ready to stream it at a moment's notice, even though the vast majority of videos probably get only a handful of views (if any). That's a lot of unused resources that have to be paid for by subscribers and advertisers.
If they were to charge just a little for uploads then content creators would be more inclined to consider whether their upload is of interest to anyone else, and that might take away a lot of the waste.
But then you potentially lose fringe interest videos which the creator makes for fun, only expects a thousand views from people with similar fringe interests and isn't interested in being paid
Creators are users. I think the OP is saying they rely more on smaller shops than large media orgs, which is opposite from big streaming services. Then again, some YT creators are pretty large.
Unless the backlash is a huge percentage of users immediately stop using the service, they won't care. They already calculated how many users they'd lose and how much more profit they get to bring in off of those who decide to stay.
Woah. I just cancelled my subscription last week because it's too expensive, and now they raise the prices further. Guess they really don't want me back.
Please tell me a simple, idiot-proof way to block YT ads on all devices incl. Mobiles, Shield etc. that doesn't require something complex like piHole, works outside the home (family's phones etc. ), and doesn't risk blocking stuff it shouldn't. That's my trouble. Premium solves all of that, while bringing other small benefits. Maybe there's a better way.
I've been paying $25 CAD to support five family accounts and prevent my daughter from seeing ads during her monitored viewing. If that price goes up 30-50%, I'm fucking done. This was an expense I was willing to incur, as YouTube is literally the only media platform my family even uses anymore. Better price than cable and multiple streaming platforms, and (again) I'm paying that for five active accounts.
If anyone knows of a way for me to adblock through my Roku TV so that we can continue watching YouTube on it without a Premium account, I'm all ears. The TV is the only reason I'm not just using uBlock to begin with. I'm really not into the idea of hooking a laptop up via HDMI if I can avoid it. Just feels like a sloppy user experience for anyone else in the household wanting to watch YouTube on TV.
Pihole doesn't block YouTube ads as it's only a dns blocker, Google serves the ads from the same servers as the videos from what I understand. Adguard home works the same.
You got a scrap Roku and move into a platform that supports one of the ad-free clients but I wouldn't do that just yet. YouTube's about to shove in-stream ads down which is going to break every bit of that blocking for quite a bit It might turn out something else is the way to go by the time the dust settles.
Invidious used to work, it's a self hosted YouTube instance that blockw out ads and has things like sponsorblock. I have Playlet installed on my roku pointing at my instance but about a week or so ago it's been giving only errors 😔.
Been paying for years now, got a 50% price hike. Canceled on the spot. I like the creators I follow, but recommendations have sucked for me for several months now anyway.
Any advice for streaming ad free on Chromecast or Samsung tv?
I'm in the same boat as you and never found anything for Samsung tizen os. Smarttube is android based only and anything streamed to a Chromecast still has ads.
Edit: okay I thought let's search one's more. And there is tizentube did not try it yet but seems promising
Honestly, every YouTube app alternative I've tried has been better, and my only issue is occasionally streams break, which is due to changes from YT, not the app. Instead of putting effort into making the experience worse elsewhere, why not make the experience on the official app better? Features I really like on other apps:
adjust brightness and volume by sliding finger on half of the screen
nice offline downloads manager
remove unnecessary crap from the app
access other content than just YT videos
run in background (audio only or picture-in-picture)
Some of those are premium features (why?), and others just don't exist in the YT app. If the experience was better and the price was reasonable, I'd probably pay. But it's not, so I use alternatives.
YT ads will never be unblockable. They legally have to be indicated somehow and people will always write software to detect them. Worst case scenario, you have to download videos you want to watch ahead of time.
The Peertube protocol developers should develop a central hub webpage space for newcomers, allow accounts there to follow all channels in every instance (and to only follow and block specific instances too), and then develop apps for smart tvs. It's the only realistic FOSS alternative to Youtube i can think of, and i dont know why the first point is still non existent (having already subscribed to several channels in 3 instances using separate accounts).
I've been paying for YouTube premium and have been watching a ton of YouTube for years. But I've been finding myself watching less and less YouTube lately and this might be the push to finally cancel and back away some from the platform.
Streaming in general is approaching the old cable prices. Once you've subscribed to the fractured marketplace to find the shows you want you are spending far more than you expected.
You gotta make up for a lack of innovation but just price gouging customers on absolutely everything. I only have Spotify because of the radio function but otherwise all of these services are absolute dog shit. They don’t offer anything new. They’ve just created a new set of moats for features, songs, videos, television and games. Eventually this system has to collapse because treating customers like employees that have no choice but to stay will lead people to innovate on piracy.
I don't know about samsungs, but Sony and any android or Google TV is a breeze to hack. Vizio and lg are a pain in the ass but they can be done, so I would assume someone smarter than me has figured it out and posted a tutorial
There's the enshitification we know and love! Freetube for desktop and Tubular for mobile is how I've been watching YT for over a year now, and it's great!
Was actually considering buying premium now that I use YouTube for music more than Spotify, but then the ad stuff happened and now this. Going to avoid it out of principle now.
Yeah I'm affected but will probably keep my subscription. Spotify has a shitty track record as well and the price difference is still worth it to enjoy ad free YouTube on the TV. I feel like it's still a good value to be honest. But it also does suck to get squeezed.
YouTube is the only streaming platform I pay for. I don't want to bother with 3rd party apps, and I use it every day. Plus I get YouTube music out of it, so I don't need to pay for Spotify. Overall 7/10 it's fine.
No judgements toward people who don't want to pay though, I get it.
Pretty much same. I do get a "free" premium account with Google Fi. But since I'm paying for family already, that just sits there. But still, 5 bucks per family member per month for music and YouTube ad free, I can't argue. It works for me.
I would reconsider things if price went up 50% though. Nothing is irreplaceable.
I bailed because the YTM algorithm is terrible compared to when it was Google music. It had got progressively worse and I really realised how bad it was when I subbed to Deezer for a trial.
If they hadn't trashed Google music by integrating it into YouTube I'd still be paying for premium if it came with both. Can't imagine I'll ever pay for it again now.
I understand. It's just that even the videos themselves have ads and are loaded with product placement and paid content, not to mention the low quality of most videos. I am just surprised that people actually do pay for it, instead of finding something else to do.
I know, it is the reason why I don't watch YouTube. I am just surprised that their tactic of gradually increasing the amount and duration of ads, worked!