I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is known to be awful/non-existent. All they do is in essence provide the platform.

> All they do is in essence provide the platform.

That’s not quite correct. YouTube pays out creators who monetize their channels using YouTube ads (separate from any sponsors in the video itself). The amount paid out varies but is around $3-5 per 1000 views.

With YouTube Premium, among other features you get to avoid seeing ads. But Google still pays out creators a share of the YouTube Premium fee. See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276

His point still stands - Google only pays a share despite having much less overheads than let's say Netflix who in addition to providing the infrastructure also create the content itself (and the production costs of it are much higher than a typical YouTube video).

Google shows you content they have licenced just like everyone else. It isn't like Netflix made all the content they host etc, Netflix also licence content from third party creators so they can host it, Google just doesn't have a filter and instead accept everyone who wants to put stuff there, and then by paying you support those smaller content creators rather than just Hollywood or other big studious like you do when you pay for Disney.

So from my perspective paying for YouTube is more important than paying for Netflix, since with YouTube you help support smaller creators, while with Netflix money gets consolidated into big names and brands. The platform takes a cut at both, but it is still better to have some go to small creators instead of everything going into giant corporations.

And even if you pay for YouTube, you'll still get ads, despite YouTube detecting and tracking advertisements in videos.

YouTube itself doesn't serve ads if you're paying for premium. Outside of that, sure, content creators can do their own "sponsored by" ad segments within their videos.

It's worth it in my opinion:

you can listen to any video on mobile in the background, also no ads on mobile (so you don't need some hacky 3rd party app)

And you get YouTube music, which is comparable to Spotify (I prefer it in fact)

There's more content on YouTube then any other video platform, so in my opinion 15 per month is worth it

Keep in mind that Youtube premium is effectively a music platform as well, although you can make the same argument about Prime. Ultimately it depends on what content you consume, I spend a lot of hours on youtube and consider the advertising avoidance worthwhile for myself.

I bought prime youtube, it's basically a pay-to-get-rid-of-my-ads, fine with me but yes lower price will be better. maybe that's what they earn from a visitor per month via selling ads?

But you might as well just install an adblocker instead? It is free and there are no ads.

They can block people who are using adblocker from watching, as long as they don't do that I can't really see any moral grey area here.

I ran ads blockers but they seems not blocking Youtube's embedded ads shown up randomly every a few minutes, which is annoying. But you might be correct, just found out: Adblock for Youtube at chrome store, will try it. Thanks.

I initially balked at the price until I realised that I probably watch 2-3x as much YouTube per month as I do Netflix, which I was already happily paying for.

It’s nice to know I’m directly supporting the channels I watch too, as I can’t feasibly sign up to dozens of Patreons.

When YouTube was primarily cat videos, it made sense as an ad-supported platform. Now that it's dominated by medium-to-high-production-value content creator stars, a subscription business model would be a much better fit.

It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.

[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.

Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?

But Youtube does have a subscription business model? You can pay for Youtube Premium ( https://www.youtube.com/premium ) and see it without ads, with downloads for offline viewing and listening, and so on. Almost exactly like Spotify.

People just ignore the ads instead.

They suggesting a model where you subscribe to individual YouTube channels rather than the platform.

You can do that too.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7491256?hl=en

Sounds like you ignore that YT has a subscription business model along side the ad-based one..

Subscribing to what amounts to a search+CDN video w/ads service wholesale isn't even in the same ballpark as throwing money directly at the creators you want to support.

The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so.

But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars.

I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".

Youtube has a Patreon competitor service literally built into the platform, you can "Join" a channel and it behaves exactly like Patreon. They were just very late to the party and most creators promote their Patreon more heavily.

Is that something only available to paying subscribers?

I've never even had a YouTube login, but the few channels I access fully via the web interface only ever spam me with YouTube Premium offers for eliminating ads.

There's zero offering/marketing of direct-to-creator subscriptions, not that I've seen.

There's also zero chance of my buying YouTube Premium, but a non-zero chance of my giving money exclusively to the specific creators I value - even if YouTube took something along the lines of a haircut for making just those channels ad-free.

Hopefully the difference is clear.

By building a profile of each user based on their viewing history and then when they use the search engine that I also own I would show them personalized results with sponsored links to products to buy. Plus I would be selling that information to third parties. And then I would of course also show some ads to all of the the normies that surf without an adblocker.

Why not both? I get nothing but ads on Google lately.

I often bypass to Wikipedia, because it shows me what something is, not only where I can buy it.

You wouldn't even come close to breaking even from display/search ads like you mentioned. Advertisers would rather pay a lot more for pre-roll video ads, even if the user doesn't click. Those video ads usually result in a much higher ROAS. And people searching for funny cat videos on YouTube is a hell of a lot harder to categorize and monetize than traditional SERP.

I would gladly pay for an ad free youtube if they weren't also stealing my data.

This. I'd have been paying for years if it weren't Google who'd only use the payment details to link it to an identity. I have and pay for Spotify and Netflix because they're independent companies without an ad and tracking business as their main profit center, I'd be happy to add another video service to the mix. I've tried Nebula but saw all the interesting content ever posted (it's that small) in two evenings.

There was a weird movie with Justin Timberlake called "In Time" and I would use that model.

The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out.

If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time.

People who like it, can also sponsor it.

And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant...

But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories.

Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning.

And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.

Cold storage is next to toilet paper on their expense sheet. The vast majority of cost is in processing the incoming video and serving it, somewhere on the order of 25x more than the cost of storage if I recall an analysis from a ways back. Deleting the old content with such a system doesn't save much money, doesn't sound good to the users, and adds complexity. It'd be an interesting take on a popularity algorithm but they always seem to be toying with that too much as it is.

Hmm... I'm skeptical.

At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?

It's not just a postponement, old content takes less $ to store over time as well as takes up less % of storage over time. Just because it grows in absolute quantity doesn't mean it will inevitably become the largest costs.

Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.

If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments.

With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts.

The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.

> If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments.

This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it

As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get.

Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.

With AdWords text ads at the bottom of the video. Which is something they already do. It's less intrusive than showing a thirty second commercial in the start of every video.

Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.

I don't think everything needs to be monetized. I wouldn't monetize it, I'd use a p2p protocol like peertube.

So, it would be a public service?

It was kind of like that when interest rates were near zero, affording endless deferral of income.

Charge the content creator based on tiered usage. Why does it have to be different from any other hosting service?

Just to keep up with operational costs? Throw up banners like Wikipedia asking for money, occupying the top bar until I hit my funding goal.

Not my problem.

Alas! Your question reveals how capitalist production is both for the consumers but at the same time must contradict the interests of the consumers.

I'm waiting for the day when we can solve these ills of private property with technology.

People seem to invoke the word capitalism whenever things aren't a utopia for everyone involved. Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses. Say some, more centralized, agent decides YouTube is worthwhile - how would it get paid for? A state sponsorship made possible by a tax of some sort? Perhaps it would transition to be completely pay-to-play?

The employees and servers are expending real energy keeping YouTube operational. Meaning, whether it's through ads, a more centralized body stepping in, or some other less pervasive, opt-in business model - the thing needs to cover its own costs. I don't think a lack of private property would solve much there.

The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production is not that it tries to cover its costs. That is necessary in any system of trade/production.

The problem is using social services to generate capital. A public good for private interests is wrought with contradictions. And, as you can see, covering costs =/= generating capital.

Not even mentioning that the mode continuously works to undermine itself in making production more efficient by developing technology and driving down prices but profits as a whole too.

> Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses

You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism.

Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality.

Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. It's really hard to think without the restrictions of capitalism for me, because that's the only way I've ever experienced and it's so effective at prioritizing resources and productivity. Anything else has historically always fallen short.

Though it's still a pretty fucked up and heartless system

> Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources.

That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ...

Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.

> Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources.

"Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.