"I find significant value in one of the most amazing resources to exist on the Internet, but I steadfastly refuse to pay a penny for it out of sheer principle. Now, read more as I engage in extensive mental gymnastics to bolster my position and die on this hill."
Another way of viewing this is Google intentionally lost money on Youtube for years in order to kill out competition. Now that competition has been eliminated and its network effects are firmly in place Google is has greatly degraded their service to grow revenue.
There's another industry that operates like this, your local drug dealer that gives away the first few hits to get you addicted then charges going forward.
first few hits to get you addicted then charges going forward.
Sorry, but this comparison doesn't hold water. Your ability to use Youtube is not a binary decision based on being a premium subscriber or not. Advertising has been a thing on the Internet for a while.
I'm a premium subscriber but feel like I was bullied into it rather than wanting. I can deal with the ad breaks and unskippable ads. But the skippable ads! If you let 2-3 in a row go by without skipping them, youtube starts throwing 45 minute long ads at you.
Like, I'm fine with ads, but why do I need to physically interact with them every 7 minutes or be punished.
Yeah - YouTube is one of the few services that actually allows you to pay to escape the ads. If you value that, pay for it (I do). This doesn't free you from "sponsored content" from the creators themselves, but that's generally easier to bypass.
I wish it also allowed you to escape the incentives that cause them to design the app to be crappy (default to 'home' instead of subscriptions), but at least they also let you turn all of that tracking/history off.
If only the other ad-driven services allowed such an escape hatch.
When I realized that Facebook would not let me pay $5 / mo to opt out of ads on their platform, subscribing to YouTube was a no-brainer.
Our family uses YouTube for so much education and entertainment, paying $16/mo or whatever it costs for a family plan is a no-brainer. YouTube is one of my favorite parts about the modern Internet, and I want to directly pay to support it and its content creators.
Both are easy to bypass with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock. Not all videos are indexed by SponsorBlock but between helping out on my own marking the ad timestamps and the huge amount of people already doing so, I barely ever see an ad on YouTube. And that goes for both mobile (polymorphicshade's fork of NewPipe) and Android TV (SmartTube Next) as well.
I agree. Of all the "premium" services from any company, I find TY Premium to be near or at the top as far as cost/benefit.
My main complaint is that I cannot sign up for YT Premium Family on my Google Workspace account where my family members have lots of YT history under their emails.
I started there but ended with the writer. First of all, they are paying for the product in time spent watching ads, and second of all if YouTube is going to offer this ad-supported product they should offer a good ad supported product. It’s like complaining about arduous enterprise software, it’s not that they don’t want to watch ads, but five or 11 in a row, is that even good for the advertisers if people are watching multiple or the same ad?
YouTube wants to have their cake and eat it to, in terms of a free product to get users and be the market leader and then hound those users .
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"I find significant value in one of the most amazing resources to exist on the Internet, but I steadfastly refuse to pay a penny for it out of sheer principle. Now, read more as I engage in extensive mental gymnastics to bolster my position and die on this hill."
That's what I got out of this, anyway.
Another way of viewing this is Google intentionally lost money on Youtube for years in order to kill out competition. Now that competition has been eliminated and its network effects are firmly in place Google is has greatly degraded their service to grow revenue.
There's another industry that operates like this, your local drug dealer that gives away the first few hits to get you addicted then charges going forward.
first few hits to get you addicted then charges going forward.
Sorry, but this comparison doesn't hold water. Your ability to use Youtube is not a binary decision based on being a premium subscriber or not. Advertising has been a thing on the Internet for a while.
I'm a premium subscriber but feel like I was bullied into it rather than wanting. I can deal with the ad breaks and unskippable ads. But the skippable ads! If you let 2-3 in a row go by without skipping them, youtube starts throwing 45 minute long ads at you.
Like, I'm fine with ads, but why do I need to physically interact with them every 7 minutes or be punished.
Right out of the Rockefeller playbook. I thought we had a consensus on this matter a century ago.
Yeah - YouTube is one of the few services that actually allows you to pay to escape the ads. If you value that, pay for it (I do). This doesn't free you from "sponsored content" from the creators themselves, but that's generally easier to bypass.
I wish it also allowed you to escape the incentives that cause them to design the app to be crappy (default to 'home' instead of subscriptions), but at least they also let you turn all of that tracking/history off.
If only the other ad-driven services allowed such an escape hatch.
Exactly.
When I realized that Facebook would not let me pay $5 / mo to opt out of ads on their platform, subscribing to YouTube was a no-brainer.
Our family uses YouTube for so much education and entertainment, paying $16/mo or whatever it costs for a family plan is a no-brainer. YouTube is one of my favorite parts about the modern Internet, and I want to directly pay to support it and its content creators.
Both are easy to bypass with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock. Not all videos are indexed by SponsorBlock but between helping out on my own marking the ad timestamps and the huge amount of people already doing so, I barely ever see an ad on YouTube. And that goes for both mobile (polymorphicshade's fork of NewPipe) and Android TV (SmartTube Next) as well.
I agree. Of all the "premium" services from any company, I find TY Premium to be near or at the top as far as cost/benefit.
My main complaint is that I cannot sign up for YT Premium Family on my Google Workspace account where my family members have lots of YT history under their emails.
I started there but ended with the writer. First of all, they are paying for the product in time spent watching ads, and second of all if YouTube is going to offer this ad-supported product they should offer a good ad supported product. It’s like complaining about arduous enterprise software, it’s not that they don’t want to watch ads, but five or 11 in a row, is that even good for the advertisers if people are watching multiple or the same ad?
YouTube wants to have their cake and eat it to, in terms of a free product to get users and be the market leader and then hound those users .