What bothers me is that usually when sites offer a paid ad-free option, their prices are very much not what I would consider reasonable. "Reasonable" would be the amount necessary to offset the revenue lost from a lack of ad views, plus a little extra.

$10 per month is nearly the cost of a Netflix subscription. There is no way Youtube generates anywhere close to that much in ad revenue per user per month.

>There is no way Youtube generates anywhere close to that much in ad revenue per user per month.

What is your basis for believing that?

This is hardly my area of expertise, but my understanding was that banner ads generate less than a penny per view. I'm sure video ads are worth much more, but I'm finding it quite hard to believe that could add up to $10 per month for even a heavy single user.

If this is all terribly off-base, let me know.

I watch about 2-3 hours of YouTube creator content a day... far more than Netflix. Can't say for what my actual offset is, but the $10 is worth it to me.

I see this as a factor of quality over quantity. Stranger Things is worth a lot more to me than a how-to video or product review, and rightly so, given the budgets involved in making each.

I want to note, though, that this also goes for much more than Youtube. I read a lot of Vox Media websites, and I'd gladly pay for an ad-free subscription—but not for more than $10 per year (and less if it was just the individual sites, rather than a package). Unless I'm quite mistaken, that should more than make up for their lost ad revenue.

I don't want to be stingy, but I also read a wide variety of different sources, and all these subscription costs ad up. I also just don't think freedom from ads should cost so much more than the ads are apparently worth.

> Unless I'm quite mistaken, that should more than make up for their lost ad revenue.

It's not just the ad revenue itself that has to be replaced.

In addition to that, you have substantial costs baked into supporting a subscriber program. Customer service costs, payment processing fees, development effort to manage your subscriber system itself, incremental development and creative costs to ensure your wireframes and functionality account for the ad-free and ad-filled versions (which may include multiple form factors and platforms for content delivery), marketing related costs (be it marketing labor, development labor, conversion rate optimization labor, etc) for user acquisition and retention work, and additional complexity in ensuring harmony between what you promise in your subscriber contract and what promises you're making in your advertising/data brokerage contracts.

In addition to all that overhead, the people that pay for subscriptions are those with disposable income to pay for subscriptions. Which substantially overlaps with who advertisers want to reach. So the more valuable part of your audience pool is self-selecting out of your advertising pool, which exposes you to substantial risk of devaluing your advertising pool and the CPMs you can command overall far in excess of the value of any single individuals ad- and data- related revenue (which only gets worse as your paid subscriber base gets larger and more noticeably absent from your advertising pool).

So you take on risk at the beginning in the form of overhead, and as your subscriber base scales the overhead becomes less of an issue as it's amortized across a larger base. But your risk itself still exists, it just shifts over to the advertising side of the house where your addressable audience is becoming less and less valuable (or maybe even just less in volume, if not in value).

And after all that, if they just broke even it wouldn't be worth the risk. So in addition to just paying for your equivalent value to an advertiser that month, you're paying for that + a portion of the overhead and incremental costs it takes to support the ad-free version + a portion of the long term devaluation of the advertising pool that results from having an ad-free version + a bit of profit to ensure it was all worth the hassle to begin with.

I'm not just watching product reviews, etc... however, there's also a matter of scale. Even if it cost 1:10000th the funds per episode of a YouTube channel vs Stranger Things, they also make 1:10000th the money from it, give or take. Just like programmer books cost more than novels because they don't have as many buyers.

I agree that they all add up, and I've dropped a few this past year. I'm just pointing out that I find more value in the YouTube content I do watch than I do from other sources in terms of the time I spend watching.

I wish Google did this for regular ads. I doubt they'd stop tracking you (videos while paying for YT premium still contributes to your ad profile for when you cancel it later) but even $25/month for no ads across all of the internet (while signed in) would be amazing.

Maybe there would be two tiers; $20 a month for just "Google" ads, and $40+ a month for all ads to be removed (Via AdChoices).

There was an effort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor which worked very well: you set a monthly budget just like advertisers, and you participate in the bidding of ads on the website you are visiting. If you win the bidding, the ad will be replaced by a static image.

Sadly this was turned down and the new version of Google Contributor only works on some websites.

Strongly agreed! There are some weird outcomes regarding privacy and NoScript interactions with the "all ads" proposal. I'd be happy to just pay to remove ads from Google properties (Gmail, Maps, etc). But yes, anything where I can exchange money in return for no ads is something I'm happy to support.

What percentage of that goes to the creators?

"The Majority", so I guess at least 50% :)

> Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, the majority of the revenue will go to creators.

From: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en

EDIT: found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/9mj13u/sh...

According to them, a view from a Youtube Premium user nets them 36x more money than a view from an Ad viewing user.

> According to them, a view from a Youtube Premium user nets them 36x more money than a view from an Ad viewing user.

So we are overpriced 36 times for the privilege of not viewing ads ?

Wonder how it works with "demonetized" content... If I'm paying, I'd still like the creator to be paid for what I watch.

Demonetized videos still get YouTube Premium revenue.

I don't know, and most of the articles that turn up on a quick search are from the very launch of YouTube Red, so their speculation may not have held up in practice. My understanding is, creators get more revenue from Red viewers than from ad-backed viewers. However, I also support many of the creators directly on Patreon, and YouTube itself provides value to me which I don't mind paying for (high quality and actively developed app; decent discoverability features; bandwidth ain't free).