I work in a position responsible for decisions like this. They do AB tests to determine if the price change results in an excessive loss of subscribers. Usually the calculation is: if(profit increase > loss from churn); proceed. They only exact price increases if their tests indicate they won't lose too many subscribers compared to the increase in revenue. That's why these price increases happen little by little.
Why would you? Google still tracks the shit out of you even with premium, so you’re still the product, you’re just paying for the privilege of them collecting your data instead of blocking it with Adblock.
I’d consider premium if it wasn’t so absurdly expensive for what it is. So instead I use uYou+ on mobile and uBlock origin+SponsorBlock in browser. I’m a member of my favorite channels to support them, fuck YouTube/Google.
I would consider it for $6.99/month. Do you have a student account or something? The closest cost that I see online is the Student cost which currently says $7.99/mo which I am assuming is the newly adjusted price. The individual annual plan is showing around $11.66/mo.
I would never pay google for anything. They’re making enough money taking all your data and selling it. I will always use an ad blocker with sponsor block and donate to any content creator that provides good content for me.
The only thing worth a YouTube premium subscription is probably the higher bitrate formats if you download/archive all the videos you care about. Latest version of yt-dlp gives you access to those (except the highest audio quality format, I think it was 256kbps AAC), but this will probably be patched sooner rather than later.
Google’s really been on one lately. They’ve also been laying off staff, increasing ads while trying to ban ad blockers from YouTube, raised the pricing of workspaces yet again and closed the unlimited drive storage loophole. Removed photos from the album archive thingy. And I feel there’s been a few other things within the last couple months I’m forgetting.
I was grandfathered in from the Google Play Music days. I enjoyed being able to upload my CDs to my library. still locked in at $8 a month. no YouTube ads and no music ads.
I really wish they’d drop the YouTube Music aspect of this and just do an ad-free YouTube sub. Happy to pay content creators for their work; less happy to give Google money for a music platform after what they did to Google Music.
Switched over from Spotify after they went too hard on Joe Rogan, so I never used Google Music. I like YouTube music. That said, they’ve just started adding podcasts - really hope they don’t go the way of Spotify.
That’s cool. I’m not saying they should only offer it without YT music, just that they should offer an alternative way of supporting YouTubers without buying a service you don’t need.
They actually did a trial of such a sub in various Scandinavian countries, cost about five quid a month or so, which is entirely reasonable. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.
I’m the opposite. I’m still grandfathered into the $7.99 Google Music sub, which turned into YT Music + YT premium. The cheapest music service with basically free YT premium is nice
I pay for YouTube premium family as much as I hate doing it, mainly because of my step daughter. It's not easy to block YouTube ads on Roku, and my wife and I weren't a fan of the ads they would be showing before videos we would put on. She travels to her dad's place often so I have the family plan so no matter where she is she won't have to deal with ads.
Rather not be raising a child messed up by advertisements telling her what to think. When she gets a bit older and can understand what advertisements are I'll finally cancel, but she's very young and impressionable.
I’ve got one! …but it’s only connected to a computer. All of our screens have computers connected. Computers that can install adblocking software and play videos are insanely cheap. I’m astounded anyone uses smart TVs’ rubbish software or a stick of any sort.
Also you can use a browser (I usually recommend Brave but I think the tide of opinion on them recently has turned?) that has adblocking built into it, navigate to youtube, and use that to cast to TV.
There’s catt which can be installed in termux on Android or directly on your PC easily enough. AFAIK there’s also a few (T)UIs for it out there. I personally have set up a bash script in termux as a share target and send the links from the revanced app to catt for casting. But yeah, it’s definitely more work and needs more expertise setting it up than hitting the cast button in the app, fully agreed.
You can also use Apple TV which is hands down best streaming box, use ATV remote on your couch without faffing with computers and pay for good service that YouTube and content creators on YouTube provide.
It’s easy to avoid paying but the experience is just worse.
And if you’re really short on cash, subscribe from Argentina or India and pay ~$2.
But, only way I have found I can get casting + sponsorblock without messing with any third party apps on TVs or casting devices has been just using Safari + sponsorblock and using air play.
Paying for YouTube doesn’t solve the issue of me wanting to avoid being exposed to segments of people begging me to like and subscribe etc. Those I actually find way more annoying than ads.
That part is annoying but I generally don’t subscribe to channels that overdo it. My remote has a button to skip 10s forward so I keep pressing it until I see sponsored segment is over.
I’d love to be able to use sponsorblock on ATV but I don’t see how it could be reasoned that it makes morally ok to not pay Google and content creators for the service they provide (with cash, ad views or otherwise). Video hosting ain’t cheap.
But, I don’t have to press any remote at all. I don’t even need sponsor block installed on any ATV or Android device. It’s been as simple as just air playing a video from safari. Such a polished experience.
Whoa, this looks awesome and I do have always on server for Usenet/Plex and Homebridge.
Thanks!
[edit] Installed and working great but I had to change os.exit() to sys.exit() in one of the files, looks like it’s not compatible with recent Python versions out of the box. Converted into system.d daemon, now working 24/7.
Yes. I am one of those who pays for premium. I primarily watch on my tv and probably watch more youtube than anything else. Also still on the old $10 plan but we will see how long that lasts.
You can use a secondary google account, sign up for premium family plan using a vpn to Turkey and pay like $10 per year, while adding your main google account as a family member to save a bundle of cash. I haven’t bothered since I’m happy with STN on android tv, but knowing that there’s a working sponsorblock solution for appletv now I might have to make the switch lol
Huh? You can Airplay those. Not sure what do you want to stream there that would be a better experience than downloading it outright from Usenet or torrents.
Chromecast is fine for what it is and a very good value but it does not compete with Apple TV or Nvidia Shield.
All of these options are unreasonable when you are talking a whole household and catering to a family that is not tech savvy. I have a pihole and it does not block ads from the YouTube TV app.
I have a plex going with content enough for the adults, but the kids consume so much media there is no reasonable way to get enough and fast enough and to meet their current interests. Youtube is the only streaming subscription we have left in the house because nothing even comes close for kids. Even Disney+ completely fumbles when it comes to appealing to what used to be its target market.
Best solution is PiHole. If you can find RaspberryPi, but any replacement will work. Essentially local DNS which ignores requests to ad servers. There are also some other DNS servers which filter ads. But I’ve had less success with them.
The only solution I’ve found on mobile without installing security certificates and stuff is to use You tube’s website on Firefox with ublock installed there too.
Pihole won’t keep you from watching ads,for what I know its because google uses the same servers to serve the content and the ads.Pihole is great to browse the web though… I have it at home. For me what gets the job done is newpipe for my android phone and Smartube on my Android TV.
If u have an old Laptop colleting dust you can always install a light weight Linux on it and use it for YouTube or even pirated Films or series on your TV
So pay them directly or through other platform. Why would you pay them through Youtube rather than Patreon when using Youtube Premium is going to make them get a lower share of what you paid?
My resources are limited. I'd love to support them all in more direct ways. And a few of them, I do support outside of YouTube from time to time, as well. But I only have so much money to give, and there's so many creators whose works I've benefited from. It's the most conscientious use of my limited expendable income.
Because the platform does actually deserver a share, too?
We’d be living in a very different world if we hadn’t grown entitled to free shit because ads, and were actually paying for services that, you know, cost money to provide. The “ad supported” business model is utterly broken, dead, and gone, and was only ever able to support low-cost services like email and social media… But video streaming? By all accounts, it makes no sense.
And on top of that, YouTube’s revenue share is by far the most generous in the industry. There’s a reason creators ditch twitch, tiktok, etc. for it, even without the sign-on bonuses that other platforms have to resort to.
Ah, yes, I can see the poor company is suffering, nevermind, I prefer my money to go to shareholders who have their life solved rather than towards creators who are making amazing content yet aren’t making a living yet /s
So you just… never buy anything? Do you shoplift your candy bars, too, since they are probably made by a company that makes more than enough already?
YouTube is trying to move away from a shit business model, to a much more fair one. One that’s more fair for the platform, more fair for the creator, and more fair for the user. Because guess what, taking shit for free, was never fair. I’m not paying to support google. I’m paying to support common sense.
Ads are shit. They are shit for the platform running them, they are shit for the creator, and they are especially shit for the user. Fuck em. Actual subscriptions net so much more for all involved. As long as YT doesn’t try to double dip like twitch, hulu, and now netflix, I will continue to support a move away from them.
The size of a business doesn’t come into that. A mom and pop car service shop that scams their customers with technobabble, would be just as deserving of bankruptcy as facebook is.
And paying for premium isn’t mutually exclusive with donations, or supporting through patreon (which guess what, also takes a cut), when you find creators who you think deserve it. But you can’t claim to be righteous if you pay for the food a farmer grew, while the truck driver who actually brought it to you is standing right there, unpaid. No, his cut should not be large, but he should get one.
The concept of fairness for Youtube gets out of the equation at the very moment we’re talking about a natural monopoly with the capacities to accumulate immense wealth, for the mere virtue of having the lead, and bend the knees of anyone who thinks their policies are not fair, but cannot find a viable alternative.
Yeah I’m not a fan of their lead either, but until peertube or something else, like floatplane or nebula, lets me interact with the type and amount of content youtube hosts…
I will vote for the least evil path I can find. And yes, I think paying youtube to remove the fourth party in the transaction, advertisers, is that option.
They started blocking users with advanced adblockers completely in some places. It’s expected they’ll roll out that policy in most countries. Prepare to either ditch Youtube completely, watch dozens of ads as well as sponsored segments every couple of minutes (because why would Google pay content creators who make them a huge pile of money by providing content for free adequately, right?) or pay hundreds of dollars a year. Even then they might start showing you some ads because why the hell not? Big tech stole the internet from us and now they’re banking in on it big time. Needlesly to say this is not a sustainable business model, but since when did that ever bother mega corporations?
Firefox is pretty much the only browser Google doesn’t own directly. I’m afraid all of the other browsers will soon malfunction on that front so we’ll have to see.
This right here. Crazy to me that people would pay for what ublock origin does for free. Especially people defending the need to shell out for the service to “support” a trillion dollar company like Google.