Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.

You know the worst part? I do pay for YT Premium and yet Google still finds a way to throw ads at me on Youtube videos through videos it suggests via Google Feeds (the leftmost screen on a Pixel). I bloody pay for the service and yet I am still getting ads on any youtube video I play when clicking any youtube suggested video on that feed. How annoying do you think that is? When you give in and pay, yet you are still getting harassed.

I had this issue as well and logging out (in my case, switching accounts) wiping Google app cache, and I think rebooting to make Pixel Launcher refresh, then logging back into the YT Premium subscribed account fixed it for me. Convoluted I know, but I think the issue was it wasn't picking up some profile variable or token denoting me as a subscriber. Hope that helps!

Hey, thanks for this, just did this. Will now just have to wait and see until Google suggests me a new youtube video to see if it worked.

I knew that google feed was advertising, any reading about google news and google feed that talks about this? I have a pixel, same findings.

To be honest, I'd happily pay for YT Premium if Google didn't use my data to personalise other results and content on the internet. I personally stop using products/services that dictate what content is deemed "suitable" for my consumption. I'll happily be served adverts so long as I'm not getting manipulated.

If everybody paid for facebook, it would have as many ads, if not more. That companies would leave money on the table with no incentive to do so is a bizarre self-justifying myth that people who live off advertising tell themselves.

You pay for cable. Paying customers are a better audience for ads than deadbeats.

But everybody doesn't pay for Facebook, and the reason they don't do so is because Facebook is funded by ads and no one has paid for a Facebook without ads. But sure, Facebook might hypothetically still have ads if users paid, and my grandmother might hypothetically be a bicycle if she had wheels.

Facebook's purpose of existence isn't for somebody to "pay for it".

Facebook's purpose of existence is to make money.

And the way they make money is by someone paying for it. Some sites collect payments from users directly. Facebook collects payments from advertisers because most users wouldn't use Facebook if they had to pay for it.

Do you have a point? This reads like an unfinished thought.

there is absolutely no reason that they cant do both at the same time, there is a mental short circuit going on when people think paying for a website means no ads. Its never meant that in pretty much any other media.

Yes there is a reason, users often don't expect to pay for services that show ads, and users who pay for services often don't expect to see ads. That's why most popular online services don't mix the two, eg. Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Google, etc.

"mental short circuit" better describes your argument that jumps from "it's possible to both show ads and charge user fees" to "they always will".

Where did you get that number? That's actually far, far higher than I would have thought and quite encouraging...

On Feb 4th, Google said there were 20 million Youtube Premium users, and I believe the latest estimates put Youtube at 2 billion users, which would be a 1% subscription rate.

It would be interesting to see how they count a "user" too. If a good portion of those 2 billion people don't use YouTube very much then the % of users who are using it regularly and subscribing might be a lot higher.

The irony is that there's a disincentive to skip ads on 'paid' users even more -- because people willing to pay for things are even more valuable to advertisers -- so if you make a paid option with no ads, you're also gutting the value of the freemium-ads option (beyond the average user loss)

Paid-for Facebook would be a viable business if it wasn't competing with free-facebook. It's not ignoring economics to think that Facebook is causing significant negative externalities that ought to be priced or regulated to allow more ethical alternatives to thrive.

free facebook should be regulated out of existence. what else is free that is good for you? in big cities you have to pay for clean air to breathe already.

That does not tell us much. Where can we look at YouTube's balnce sheet? There is likely more to YouTube as a business than selling ads on YouTube. For one, YouTube under Google is like AC Nielson on steroids. The combination easily rivals any "smart" TV.

I paid for youtube for a while, but I did not get a different algorithm. It was the same feed of addictive, stressful content. I stopped paying once I noticed this.

I already don't get ads on youtube, so I don't see why I should pay for this when I can get all of the benefit with none of the expense.

> Pay for Facebook

You can do that?

Compare how much money google can make off ads in a month to $15. You’re paying for way, way, way more than just removing ads and it’s obvious

That's why you get other benefits that are much harder to price in.

....and most don’t use or want.

Of course they conveniently only bundle these features so they can pretend it’s what customers want—hell downloading and playing when the screen is off should be a part of youtube. Just another step in the long saga of companies intentionally crippling their own services to bilk customers.

I don't use Facebook, and I want it to die. Facebook is one of the many, many reasons why advertising must be destroyed.

How? AFAIK you can’t pay for Facebook. There’s no “Facebook Premium”. There’s only Ad Spigot Facebook.

Let's imagine for a moment that a decentralized social network actually took off.

How long until those ads crop back up anyway? Instagram should give us some idea on how sponsored content might look in such a system. According to some random site, the average price for a "sponsored" instagram post is $300. You think your friends are above showing you an ad when real money is on the line? Maybe they won't be making that kind of money with very few followers, but when Pizzahut asks you to post an ad in exchange for a free pizza, I think you'll see plenty of takers. Now, granted, at least the people being paid are your friends, instead of Zuck.

But the kind of people who get $300 for a post should have a very large group of followers. Which should imply that there should be a reasonably large group of people prepared to part with some money in support of their work.

And for the small group of people it seems to me that it should be easily self correcting by normal social cues since there’s no network effect to offset it.

This played out in LiveJournal, and the outcome, generally speaking, was that paid promotions were too blatant to be effective outside of influencers proper (where it's part of the explicit contract between them and their audience).