If you use YouTube regularly and you have some music subscription, I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just buy YouTube+ or whatever it's called that gives you free streaming music + no ads on YouTube.

I bought it right when it came out just to not have ads on YouTube. Then when you got free streaming music included, it was impossible to turn down.

The plus side is that YouTube music recommendations seem to be quite good.

YouTube Premium is a necessity at this point, specially with kids. Also a better business model.

It is a fantastic service. It is a little concerning Google hasn't touched it since it matured. $17.99 for commercial free YT for a family is a bargain considering how much we use it. I have to think there is a major price increase coming.

That's already substantially more expensive than a 1080p Netflix subscription!

The rates can get grandfathered in, I still pay $14.99 for the family plan (hopefully they don't see this and come after my $3/mo)

Hmm. Grandfathered? I've had YouTube Premium Family plan for years, since it was called YouTube Red, and I think mine recently went up to $19.99

YouTube music is really bad if you're anything beyond a very casual music listener though. The feature set is abysmal.

I share YouTube Premium and Apple Music family subscriptions but if pressed would give up YT Premium before I gave up Apple Music.

Most people are very casual listeners. Like in most of their products, google seems to be targeting the majority.

Also, you're comparing different products in terms of price. YT can offer a "pro" version at an additional premium (though they probably won't... Since they focus on the main use cases)

> I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just buy YouTube+ or whatever it's called that gives you free streaming music + no ads on YouTube.

For me, it’s because YouTube is clearly going the way of cable TV, and when they finally start showing ads on those fancy paid subscriptions, I’ll have to deal with the hassle of unsubscribing.

I’ll just watch YouTube until it becomes unwatchable, at which point I’ll stop watching.

If a hypothetical Music Streaming services has a perfect score of 10, Spotify would get 7, Apple Music would be 6 or 5.5, and Youtube Music wouldn't even score a 5.

And as usual with Google, they either dont know what they are doing or they dont seems to care about YouTube Music.

I have ublock origin and NewPipe on the phone.

What ads?

Probably. What drove me away more than ads is that I can’t find any good content that is less than 20min long. The “algorithm” feeds me shit that, yes I’m interested in, but is longer than a sitcom! (and drove creators to optimize for longer format,I know) I realize this is by design and blah blah engagement blah blah ad revenue etc. but I yearn for the days of good interesting shit where I could queue up 10 vids and it doesn’t take me a month to burn through it all…. I want an option to tell suggestions to keep it between 3-8min long content!!!

As a person I have silos of interests and ideal content desires.

Sometimes I want to watch long podcasts about war and other times I want 30 second puppy videos and I don’t understand why I can’t have algorithms for both silos without separate accounts.

For a while it was comical because there was some 10 minute magic threshold, and so many videos danced around and around to get to that 10 min mark. I agree through, I HATE it, I've started always trying to find written articles and reviews to shortcut this misery.

TikTok is capitalizing on this too - going to be much easier to digest a ton of tiktok then a ton of long meandering youtube videos.

This is why I love LockPickingLawyer. Generally never more than 3 minutes long. Yet by confining himself to such short videos, he has to maximize the time used.

As a creator it takes a ton of time to do editing on something 15 min vs 2 min. I would much rather created a series of 2 min videos.

This is one of those fun things that you might shoot yourself into the foot by trying to estimate.

Piss a user off once and you may have a much harder chance of bringing them back. Sure, you can use the fact you drove away user X in your model for how much to annoy user Y, but that doesn't un-piss-off user X. Sooner or later, there might be a significant number of users X!

For instance, I've specifically avoided "real TV" cable packages even when I can get them for cheaper than streaming TV because my use case (sports playoffs and such) is on and off, and Comcast et al have successfully trained me that it's extremely unpleasant to cancel wired cable TV, so I'd rather pay more for something less obnoxious.

It's easy to be both "data driven" and foolishly short-sighted.

I just pay to remove them. It's pricey, but there is fabulous stuff on youtube I find no place else, and something for the whole family to boot.

You can remove the ads but not the fluff content that pads the videos to make them longer. How about a subscription for concise and direct content?

YouTube shows you the parts most users skipped: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9314415 (That link is for creators, but the graph overlay is shown to everyone.) I can't imagine a better tool for doing exactly what you're requesting.

This is only available to the creators, isn't it? I don't recall ever seeing this as a viewer on YouTube. I have seen it on some...less savory video sites.

That YouTube link says that it's available to viewers, and I've certainly seen it before. Perhaps there's some A/B testing still going on?

The stuff I watch is repurposed public tv from around the world and doesn’t include that, yet.

I think it's great that they let the content creators decide if they want to include their own ads or not. You can always skip their ads, and some of the better channels have a progress bar for the ad portion.

I've noticed that the first ad is often unskippable and the second ad will be 5-second skippable for me. I wonder if you exit YouTube when you see the 2nd ad if the ad system will learn to give you less ads?

The problem is that youtube doesn't have effective competition in its niche, so most people don't have anywhere to go (tiktok and tv overlap a bit, but for lots of content types they dont)

Non-video content is also a Youtube competitor in many genres/content types. Usually the ads for it are way less annoying, too!

I think it's heavily weighed by type of device, more than an user. I pretty much never get ads at mobile, but get them all the time on TV - both via app on smart TV, and PS5.

ad fatigue is a feature column, this is just learned directly as part of training watch next and ads serving.