YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads.
Google is increasing the prices of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscriptions in some regions, right after blocking ad-blockers.
YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads.::Google is increasing the prices of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscriptions in some regions, right after blocking ad-blockers.
I never see Vivaldi mentioned in these. Yes, it’s chromium based, but I have not seen a single YouTube ad since they implemented built-in ad block many years ago. Without the need for extensions, plug-ins, or user managed block lists.
yeah, ive been using vivaldi and only very recently did i see my player diabled with ubo off but if i disable ubo and put vivaldi's blocking option to just block trackers, that does the trick tho the ad starts with a black screen but the skip button instantly appears under .5 seconds or the video starts
Where was Google's concern for paying for infrastructure in the past? Google choose to bleed money which made it harder for smaller competitors to compete and take a share of the users, and now Google wants to have their cake and eat it too. Too damn bad.
I am unwilling to pay for the content while Google is where the content is. Odysee seemed shady to me so I stopped using it. Floatplane is proprietary and I'm trying to kick the nasty habit of using proprietary software, I don't want to start using new ones. I used to pay to listen to a podcast but I got tired of the content. I donate to Wikipedia.
You're getting unfairly downvoted. I agree with the negative sentiment around Google but the only semi-alternative is nebula but they obviously don't have the same amount of content.
It's not reasonable to expect YouTube to operate for free
Youtube by itself produces almost no content. All content comes from content creators on the platform, which are getting severely underpaid by Youtube. If Youtube actually paid them their fair share, this argument would be somewhat valid.
This is why Google has been using their browser monopoly to push their "Web Integrity API". If that gets adopted, they can fully control the client side and prevent all ad blocking.
Google also said they would cancel there plan to roll out FLoC after significant pushback a while ago, only to renamed it as Ad Topics and roll them out anyway when no one is looking. If Google do the same with web integrity API, I wouldn't be surprised anymore.
Anti Ad-Blocking Software would be (and arguably, already are) illegal as not only do ads count as a form of malware, but Anti-AdBlocks run scripts on YOUR machines without your consent, and thus are ALSO malware.
If some day I cannot block ads on YouTube I'll go to Patreon or any other platform that gives creators a real share of what I'm paying. Google will not see my money.
Has YouTube even done anything to improve the platform in the last 8 year? The only thing that I’ve seen change is the search turning to trash with “recommended content” after 4 real search results.
In fact they've made it objectively worse by restricting what you're allowed to make videos about.
The state of True Crime is abysmal.. it has gotten to the point where censorship is stricter than Cable TV, as the names of various felonies have to be bleeped out in order to not catch youtube's wrath.
Yet Far Right Political Channels are free to drop whatever slurs against transfolk they like.. and openly accuse whatever drag performer they want of being a kiddie diddler even though true crime channels get a content strike for saying "pedophile" even though it's in the context of someone literally tried and convicted as one.
Ever wonder why the kids are saying "Unalive" so much? It started as a cute 4th wall leaning cover for death in a Deadpool/Spider-Man crossover...
Now it has regular usage because direct references to death (Again, Regardless of context) is against Youtube Terms of Service.
It's so bad that a close friend of mine who is a streamer, despite not posting to youtube, has had to train himself to exclusively say Unalived so that clips of his streams can be safely posted to youtube, his livelihood cannot risk him using the "d" or "k" words.
It's absurd because a reason web content became so popular is that it wasn't restricted to the same kind of censorship the FCC puts on Cable TV.. We can have an Angry Nerd drop as many F Bombs as he wants while talking about something as innocuous as Super Mario 3...
I believe Louis Rossmann said that giving a single dollar directly to a creator is more than a lifetime of watching their ads. Premium I think is really good comparatively but that's only because ads pay so little.
Some creators have said that the cut they get from premium viewers is higher than that of ad based (SpiffingBrit for example, in his YouTube download exploit video).
I don't believe so. As I understand it, all Premium money goes into a big bucket. Then, views/watchtime/etc. are used to calculate what percentage of the pie a given creator will receive.
Only issue would be getting the creators to move. That nay be more difficult than said with some. I already follow some on rumble, I only stay on YouTube as others haven't.
Makes no sense.. they don't have anything like the production overheads. Stuff like Star Trek and Stranger Things are expensive. '10 greatest cat videos' is not.
Heck, they don't even pay a good fraction of their bandwidth because they put caching box in your ISP location to reduce loads. This is a huge privilege as ISPs won't let any random companies run equipments for free in their network, which is one of a huge barrier for any YouTube competitors.
They might be allowing them to run the boxes for free, but the ISPs are saving money on bandwidth, too.
Get enough users for the ISP to care and they'll work with you. Otherwise, you probably don't have all that many users to begin with, so the overhead that maintaining and distributing these boxes would create wouldn't be worth it anyway.
Youtube expenses is revenue share with creators and hosting untold hours of video, over 500 hours uploaded per minute, that others just don't have to deal with.
It "makes sense" in that, unlike those two, YT has to deal with thousands of hours of video being uploaded to their servers every minute. What they don't pay in streaming rights, they pay in storage and bandwidth costs, plus a couple of peanuts for "moderation", which is probably more expensive in the long run
Depends on how much you use it. I watch Youtube pretty much every day for at least an hour, while using Netflix or other streaming services about once evey few months. I use Spotify every day too, just because I like their app more in some ways.
If I had to choose, I'd swap my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions for YouTube. I think I watch YouTube videos about three times as much as Netflix and Disney.
I can't see the value in using youtube for music.. it's not like I can watch music videos in my car. That's worth $0 to me, and I imagine the majority. Spotify is better.. or apple music if you're on the fruit side.
This is healthy for the ecosystem, it makes it possible for other video platforms to compete, and be sustainable. Google providing the loss leader in video streaming makes it difficult for other platforms to exist, and sustain themselves, because they don't have Google's war chest.
So it's going to be a difficult transition, but now there is wiggle room for other platforms to exist. And with 1 gigabit, and 10 gigabit home internet connections becoming more common globally, we have options for more interesting gorilla distributed video streaming.
More like IPFS. If you have a bunch of gigabit residential internet connections distributed globally. That's a reasonable approximation of a video streaming platform.
I'm not saying I have a good solution for today, but all the components are there to build a competitor to YouTube, and now if the price barrier going up, there's room for whatever organization competes with YouTube to get some sustainable income
Agreed, I'm in northern Canada and only the capital city of my territory has cable internet, the outskirts of the city and the smaller communities are stuck with ancient and capped (300GB per month) DSL at 15 Mbps while I get unlimited 100/10 Mbps for $140 per month. I'd kill for symmetrical 100/100 so I could access my plex server outside of my house, let alone 1 Gbps fiber internet.
I'd guess we're a minimum of 5-10 years away from fiber internet sadly, we just don't have the population to make it profitable enough for the greedy ass telecom companies, even with the extra government funding the telecom gets for serving our low population territory.
You're right I hope. Especially about gorillas sharing video! We need a guerilla movement to get these gorillas some cell phones and I've been saying it for years!
This is a really good point, I never thought about this. While we still haven't seen the anti-adblock message from YT (Firefox + uBlock Origin on Linux Mint), we've been using Nebula more and more lately. It would be great if there was a similar service for quality kids content. As it stands we stick to just a couple YT channels for our 2.5 year old because of how much absolute, irredeemable garbage there is targeted at kids there. I can't imagine how shit the ads are for them.
I have no idea what the content is like on YouTube Kids but on my YouTube app when I cast kids stuff the display ads on the phone side are often for mobile games with really creepy shit like dead Paw Patrol characters and grieving Elsa.
I'd never leave a little one attended with an iPad with YouTube on their own
No, not really. I get what you mean but the truth is, that unsustainable practices should've been capped, and made illegal BEFORE there was a monopoly. Now that there is one, they can do what they want. Google aren't idiots. They know FULL well they can do this. All of this is calcualted.
i know my problem: besides im almost immune, my family isnt, my devices connected in the same network could be affected by a malware sponsor on 1st search result, besides im the one who got to fix anything that could go wrong in their devices, etc
It's good that there is at least one person in a family that can fix electronics. It's worse when there's no one. I think the majority of malware coming from ads (and persisting on devices) is in those families that lack that one techy person.
Do you feel better after making fun of people who use other devices and not just a smartphone and browser? There are a hundred news that aren't your problem and you don't comment there, but you make sure to come in here and "rub it in" to people who care about this, by not providing an actual solution.
Sucks for them. This is what happens when you buy into the corporate, locked down, sanitised and monetised walled garden.
Privacy first and FLOSS software have been out there the whole time for people willing to invest the time (and money, but often it's cheaper than the commercial option) to learn them and gain those benefits for themselves.
But if people want a device so they pick up the one with the shiniest marketing and then wonder why it's shoving ads down their throat, well, that's what they get for not researching the options. There are alternatives, they've been posted many times over in this thread and similar ones.
Google isn't going anywhere. We are the minority. People who know what "open source" even means are the minority. The vast majority of people will just put up with it because they don't know any better. You are highly highly overestimating the tech literacy (and motivation level) of the average person.
Well, more crazy things has happened. Do you think that Google is going to be here forever?
It's the little things that corrodes a company. Hence the "crack in the armour.
I like to think that most people surf the Internet with an ad blocker. Simple because the Internet is just riddled with ads and the experience is frustrating without one.
So if you see your grandma has a bad experience online, you are likely to install an ad blocker to help her out. Most people knows how to do this, at least one person in the family. That is what hurts Google the most.
It's the annoyance factor that is a great driver of change. The way people do things. Even if they are used to do things in a certain way.
I personally have notest the Google maps are much more inaccurate nowadays than it used to be. It has become an annoyance.
The stupid thing is that they could have approached this in a much less dickish manner. Seriously. First, they are making money off us as it is with their demographics and the fact they are not utilizing this cash cow as before means they have gotten too greedy for their own good, or mismanaging funds which is a completely unrelated problem. Long ads, unskippable ads, expensive premium. This is the beginning of the end of something they used to offer as free, resting on their laurels as a monopoly, like the airline industry. When they are now practically forcing the cobra effect. Eventually, it will get so silly, it will go the way of the dod like Angelfire. AOL, and Geocities. Or, soon, Netflix.
I would have started it similar to Patreon, like, "by donating $1/mo, you can support artists like this," and incentivize the publishers with monetary gain and higher search results. Nobody is gonna miss $1 or $12/year. You multiply that by millions of viewers, that's millions of dollars on top of their demographics. Second, they could have had a 5 second bumper, similar to PBS, like "This and other find content is brought to you by Exxon and the Chubb group" or whatever. Five seconds. Front and back. Not enough to cause outrage. Skippable, but not so annoying, everyone skips.
The right-wing propaganda thing has been odd for me. I'm a liberal gun nut and watch tons of gun related stuff. You would think I would be run over by BS, but I'm not. Can't explain it.
OTOH, if one has a soft mind, I can see the rabbit holes they might fall into. Perhaps we shore up education so even the idiots know enough not to fall in?
Honestly I think Google has a horrible management culture. It worked fine when they were printing money regardless but at this point the incompetence is starting to show.
They've already calculated, how high and in how many increments, they can rise their prices, while still coming out ahead. For every country specifically.
Anyone who grew up in the U.S. in the 80s can tell you that we spent hours every Saturday morning watching ads for toys disguised as cartoons in between ads for toys not disguised at all.
A few months ago I was thinking about getting YouTube premium. It's a platform I'm on everyday and have been using it for years. But they decided to block adblockers and increase prices, so they can go fuck themselves.
I still maintain that YT Premium is a great service if you're like a lot of people and YT is the majority of your online video consumption. From a price to use comparison standpoint, it's unbeaten. Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc all pale in comparison.
But their insistence on bumping up prices, bundling YT Music and their war on ad blockers now is making it really hard to try to keep it. Hopefully now that Google is trying to cash in, we get some real competitors. Because right now when it comes to the sheer amount of content, visual quality and reliability of streaming nothing compares.
I've heard that too, but I don't know the details. It seems to me that their massive compute, storage and bandwidth requirements would be the culprits. If they're paying creators so much that they're unprofitable, that would make them very unsaavy with their money.
YouTube don't even pay a fraction of those bandwidth as they run caching box on your ISP for free. ISPs won't let any random companies run equipments for free in their network, so this is a significant competitive advantage. You'll have to be a company as big as Google, Apple, or Netflix to do this.
How? I keep having to clear cookies. Now use Firefox. With logged in window I find the video I want and I open it in private window with ublock origin enabled. No warning in private logged out window.
There are so many ways to watch YouTube without ads on all devices. I don't see ads anywhere in my house. And when I like a creator so much, I support them directly. Fuck Google. If they were reasonable with their prices/practices and paid people more I'd buy premium.
I don't need YouTube that much. It's competing with books, more traditional TV shows and movies, and Nebula / Curiosity Stream and Wondrium / LinkedIn Learning. I guess I might miss some reaction videos, but oh well.
I pay for YouTube because I leave it on basically all day. It's worth the 14ish(I don't remember) a month. I just wish more of my pay would go to the creators.
Aren't there sites that offer YouTube premium sharing for something like 3 euros and change? I remember landing on one while I was meandering the tubes.
Personally I'd say they should regulate the ads that are being rolled out so we don't have constant obvious scams but oh wait that would make for a better and safer user experience
I have thought about this but haven't seen anything about whether or not they will regulate the ads better. I enjoy not having obnoxious, repetitive ads. I also enjoy having no ads and directly supporting the creator of the media I like.
I'm so glad I early adopted Google play music all access. It locked me in at a permanent lower rate, and that got rolled into YouTube premium with the release of YouTube music.
That seems like it could work, and I would love to say you're right, but many of the companies advertising—especially as we're seeing more and more of the big players—have a really diverse ad spend budget so their dollars are all over the place. Because so many ads aren't looking for a direct sale but rather increase your awareness when you DO want to buy, say, laundry detergent, there's no way to tie your purchase to having seen an ad (though marketers LOVE to try and draw lines to efforts, many are hazy at best). So seeing ads and consciously not buying what you're seeing could in theory lead to a dip in sales, but the watch numbers are high, so no adveriser would be able to tell that dip is because of youtube, or podcasts or... uh... radio?.
So sadly the best way to hurt the system is to a) keep blocking the ads so the watch level is low and the advertisers want out or b) drop the watch level naturally by picking another platform.