I looked into subscribing because I don't mind paying to avoid the ads.

I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.

I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.

I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.

I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).

How does subscribing increase their spying? Beyond the obvious that they now have your billing address.

You can watch Youtube incognito for free but you need to login to benefit from subscribing.

You can delete your watch history after every session or have something automated do it for you. That will work fine if you only want to watch the content you subscribed to.

If you want better recommendations though you may have to tolerate some things that you may consider "spying".

You'd have to assume history is actually deleted and not just simply hidden from the user. Pretty high bar to pass given it's Google.

I personally don't care for better recommendations. I just need a functional subscription/notification system and much much better search.

You'd also have to trust that YT doesn't track you in the incognito window, given that it's still pretty easy to identify an user and you're also most likely using Google's own browser to hide.

If you really don't want to be tracked by Google, you should probably consider not using their services.

Lol how cute people think deleting watch history has any real effect.

Also cute these people think using incognito does anything to stop Google from tying the traffic back to them. They already finger print you off hundreds of parameters. Hell most people are literally using their web browser.

I'm afraid you are making a mistake in assuming that Incognito mode == no tracking. The only thing that Incognito mode does is not save any local history or cookies. This is mainly of benefit for people who share a computer and don't want the other users to see their history.

Tracking has long moved way beyond cookies and Google is absolutely tracking what you do in incognito mode and doing their best (which is highly effective) to associate the tracking data with you.

I’m happy because I won’t pay them and now they’re forcing me off the platform, win for me.

That’s a win win. You shouldn’t be forced to use the platform. And the platform shouldn’t be forced to provide you services for free

If Google didn’t have such a abysmal business model to start with, this wouldn’t be an issue.

They offered services for free without providing the disclaimer.

The attention economy is a toxic poison, I think more people than you realise are now aware of this and are less likely to pay for something Google offers because of it.

I don’t hate Google, but they’ve eroded a lot of trust.

The "attention economy" has always been there. If you truly value your time so much you should be glad to have an option to pay for ads to be gone.

So as I said, I'm glad they've given me more incentive to not use their products. It's ok if we disagree I guess.

Try youtube-dl or one of the clones.

How does this work for users that are not using a desktop OS/browser? Is there a mobile app that does this and holds the content for local viewing?

On Android, there are a number of solutions, like NewPipe (YT client) and Seal (downloader).

All of the above will be detected and blocked by YouTube.

This would mean YouTube will have to break compatibility with countless outdated Android / iOS apps, Smart TVs and other devices. Not gonna happen anytime soon.

> YouTube will have to break compatibility with countless outdated Android / iOS apps, Smart TVs and other devices

Minus smart TVs, this seems like the point of the policy change. (And even on the TVs, if they're watching without paying while blocking ads, that's purely a cost centre.)

If we enter Twitter as evidence into the record of yanking the cord on 3rd party apps getting a free ride off your company's hard work, then maybe Google has decided the negatives do not outweigh the positives.

You aren’t understanding. They can’t change the old unpublished APIs because it will break the old devices. We use those to get the videos without the ads.

What reason does YT have to NOT make changes that prevent those devices from working? Is there an avenue for these 3rd party devices to pay YT for their services? If these apps/devices are making a buck off of YT rent free, then they should be able to yank the cord whenever they want.

Your comment reads as if you feel that YT has some sort of obligation to continue letting 3rd parties make money from the work of YT without any compensation.

Device manufacturers not just use some private API or SDKs without making deal with Google. Except might be for Chinese noname brands from AliExpress.

All device manufacturers do have agreements with Google about support for their devices and such agreements can very well be for 10+ years or even for lifetime of the devices.

PS: Actually 10 years ago when Windows Phone was a thing Microsoft has tried to make their own YouTube client without agreement with Google and it was killed by Google almost immediately.

Google just dropped all third-party Google Home device support, leaving people with e.g. Lenovo Smart Displays twisting in the wind. It wouldn't be out of character for them to "alter the deal" w.r.t. all those old smart TVs and such.

Newpipe.

I’ve used it with Plex, works fine

Yeah, yt-dlp is great. It happily grabs stuff Invidious can't play. Indispensable IMO.

i don’t think it’s weird, but i signed up for the premium trial a few weeks ago and it is simply astounding how much more enjoyable it makes things. i didn’t realize just how awful things had become until i tried youtube without ads.

i know some other folks are complaining about still getting tracked or whatever, but i think the simple truth is that youtube without ads is a vastly superior experience.

I signed up when it was first announced as YT Red years ago ("Member since October 29, 2015") and whenever I use a device without being logged in or I'm on an account without premium, I cringe. I can't believe people live that way. And we watch so much YouTube in this house, it's more than worth it for me, plus more cash to the creators.

I wish I got a discount for ALSO subscribing to YTTV and Google One... that'd be nice, but I'm not parting with YT Premium any time soon. It shows I've had > 790 hours of ad-free videos.

The people you watch also make more money per premium view from what I understand

Last I heard, it was in the 10-50x range per view (premium vs. ad supported).

I watch enough YouTube for it to be a no-brainer for me, and I run an ad-blocker pretty much everywhere. Supporting the video creators I watch is worth it.

I don’t just subscribe to remove ads (yt premium is my only subscription)

It also pays the content creators I watch more money. So imho it’s a win win. No ads for me more money for the peoples content I enjoy

If you've been "poised to give them money for a while" I don't think you were ever actually going to. What was stopping you?

I mean, either way, Youtube comes out ahead. If you're blocking all their ads and not paying a sub, you're just a cost. They're cutting you.

What I don't understand is why you feel entitled to benefit from this resource without supporting it in any way.

I think you are missing the point that Youtube chose to provide this service the way it is, and we are using it as they want.

If you weren’t a paying customer, refuse to become a paying customer, and refuse to watch the ads, they don’t gain anything by having you as a user. It only costs them to retain you.

If doing something as simple as asking you to hold up your end of the deal of using their website (letting ads load for the ad-supported content) is too much to ask but paying for the website is also too much to ask, you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.

I don’t buy the argument that you were going to pay them in the future but you decided against it because they wouldn’t let you have it for free.

I had an issue with my payment for premium which resulted in temporary suspension of my service. A few days after fixing the payment issue, this news came out.

Considering this with the recent price increase, and some trouble with my family plan, my initial reaction was quite negative towards YouTube. They are setting a very clear trend against what I want in their service with recent changes (Removing downvote, removing android shortcuts and other features, aggressive copyright stiking policies, aggressive promotion of shorts, terrible recommendations).

I am considering cancelling. However, a more optimistic view would be that their ad block policy could result in lower subscription fees with more ad and subscription revenue.

That's crazy, the same thing happened to me. I was like what? Suddenly now my price has increased when I was on YouTube Red for the longest time. Considering canceling too

I don’t do the ads on desktop but tolerate them on mobile. If they push me off the habit altogether, they’ll lose that second half of ads.

I used to be fine with the ads. But two breaks for a five minute video is unacceptable. I hope they fail if this is what they think is okay.

They also advertise fraudulent stuff all the time now. They don’t care. They’re just desperate for money.

It would be silly to assign some sort of morality argument to the other half of it when they behave so poorly with the ads.

I wouldn't argue that the ads are terrible but it's what you agreed to by using an ad supported service. If you don't like their ad selection, the only ethical choice is either to pay for Premium or stop using YouTube. Watching someone's work without paying them isn't fair to the creators and it's a great way to ensure the market moves to worse content which is cheaper to produce.

I’m unmoved by the creators angle. Google exploits creators too. It’s best to just give them money more directly (like Patreon) than give Google money and hope they forward the creators a sensible amount.

If Google wants me off their service because I don’t watch enough ads, that’s their call. I’m not going to make a hufflepuff about it. But their ad game is garbage.

I’m not saying they’re great, but it’s a known quantity: you watch ads, advertisers pay Google, they pay creators. Yes, too much of that goes to the middleman but that’s a reason not to participate at all.

> they don’t gain anything by having you as a user.

Every minute someone watches them is a minute that they aren't watching a potential competitor

In this sense, having a free tier at all is effective to suffocate competition, even if most users enable adblock

This has always been the case over in the world of freemium games.

The vast majority of the playerbase (70~80%?) are Free2Players (F2Pers), while the rest are whales (paying players) and an even smaller subset of them are space whales who spend enough in a month to buy a luxury car or two.

The games go to great lengths to retain those F2Pers because they are the ones the whales and space whales play together with and/or against. No F2Pers, no whales, no game, no business.

I think YouTube should take a similar approach and try to extract more from high value users to cover the costs of low value users. It’ll be easier to get a few thousand extra dollars from a music fan by bundling live interaction/events into YouTube than squeezing more ads into the bottom 1%.

> Every minute someone watches them is a minute that they aren't watching a potential competitor

Actually, they would prefer if all of the ad-blocking, refuse-to-pay customers would spend a lot of time on their competitor's websites.

In that case, why don't they allow competitors to host their videos?

I took the parent's comment to mean they would rather 'free' viewers leech off other people's bandwidth, as if they're not Premium and not watching ads, they are just consuming bandwidth and costing resources.

If they go to a competitor and block ads and consume bandwidth, then they are actively costing the competitor rather than costing Youtube for hosting.

Youtube allowing competitors to host would just consume youtube's bandwidth but with the 'views' also going to the competitor's domain (so the competitor could then potentially get additional sponsor support for having 'eyeballs' on their domain).

My point is that they intentionally obtained an effective monopoly on content, so it's weird of them to complain about too many people wanting to watch content there.

How exactly did they obtain a monopoly on content? They don't name most content creators sign exclusivity agreements.

I said an effective monopoly. Most people who create a video will automatically upload it to YouTube without even thinking about alternatives.

Ehh the problem with this is that I don't block YT ads (I watch on a tablet), but I am still constantly bombarded (and I mean that) with full-page click-through ads, banners and in-feed blocks trying to get me to buy Premium.

YouTube, I'm watching your pre-roll and mid-roll ads like you want me to, so leave me the fuck alone with this premium shit, I'm not interested.

So it's not an "either-or" scenario.. If you are using the ad-supported experience, they still disrupt it (many times a session for me) with UI-interfering elements to try to convert you. And that sucks.

You can still block ads on a tablet if you use Firefox (Android only) or Brave.

That’s a big IF

Nobody prevents you from doing so…

What? Buying an Android tablet only to gain the ability to block ads?

Yup, nobody's stopping you, except yourself.

You are literally correct, but spending money on a whole new device just for this single feature doesn’t feel sound. Especially when under a budget.

So while you are correct, such investment would be irresponsible (in my case). In other words, responsibility is what’s stopping me.

I use vinegar on Iphone and it blocks youtube ads in safari.

They're advertising their own product on their own platform. What's wrong with that?

I never said that them advertising their product was the problem. Please read more carefully.

If they advertised it with regular in-video ads like the rest of the ads, sure no problem, I am used to sitting through those and I accept ads as part of a good free viewing experience..

But they constantly interfere with the standard UI layout and experience to push these repetitive intrusive ads on me, that I have closed probably hundreds of times.

They should know by now that I am not going to sign up for it, so why continue to degrade the experience for me, when I am watching their ads as a free user?

They don't do this on the website so don't tell me "that's part of the trade" because it's only in the app they do this so aggressively and repeatedly.

>... you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.

No, I want an experience that commits to showing the ad(s) up front and not interrupting the video with more ads in the middle.

I use YT primarily for music. I don't mind letting ads play at the beginning. It's when they inject them into the middle of a song and, suddenly, when I'm jamming out, RIGHT at the peak of the track when I'm having the most fun, two more ads suddenly start blaring, and I'm forced to let the first one ride for 30 seconds.

There is some music that you just can't easily access anywhere but on YT for a variety of reasons. It's what keeps me using YT, but that approach of ad injection is bullshit.

Edit: Concert videos, too. Their algorithm will slap ads in the middle of a song, rather than in between them. I absolutely would not mind an ad here and there between songs, but noooooo.

> No, I want an experience that commits to showing the ad(s) up front and not interrupting the video with more ads in the middle.

Of course you would, and of course YT and its creators earns significantly more if they show ad in the middle. Not 100% sure, but AFAIK content creator could disable ad in the middle if they want to.

>... creators...

Most of what I'm talking about are concerts and music uploaded to YT by fans.

It absolutely does not cost them to retain you. That’s a joke. The current model completely offsets the number of users with ad-blockers by such a margin it’s silly we’re even talking about it.

The only reason we are talking about it is because shareholders want the money printer to go brrrrrr. YouTube IS profitable. Can we stop pretending one of the richest companies in the world needs me to stop blocking their ads for any reason other than greed?

And that principle is what most people balking here have a problem with.

They gain a lot thanks to network effects. Non-paying customers contribute to viewing numbers and engagement (likes + comments + subscriptions). But most importantly, they bring others to the platform by sharing links to videos and discussing them with others.

See [1]:

> In 2013, the boss of Time-Warner (which owns HBO), Jeff Bewkes, declared that piracy was: “Better than an Emmy” because more people watching the show inevitably led to more people deciding to pay for subscriptions.

[1]: https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...

Public goodwill is a thing. Also, their offer was lackluster. But with Youtube Music being a part of Premium and getting better and better overtime, more and more people are actually on the lookout for signing up. There's also a psychological aspect of it. Remember how it feels when you're just about to do something and someone told you that you have to do it? Taking the agency and initiative away tend to annoy people and have an adverse effect on the task. You might not be personally affected by it but it's a common thing.

> more and more people are actually on the lookout for signing up

Supposedly they have over 80 million subscribers so they're definitely not hurting[0].

I am interested in seeing what happens if/when over 50% of users in the US subscribe to it. Advertisers are losing out on probably their biggest consumer market: people with enough money to handle a $12/mo subscription. Perhaps advertising income will start to shrink $12 for each user that subs to Premium?

0: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/youtube-music-and-premium-...

No, they're just going to move the goalpost. Once everyone is on board with subbing to YT, and they have enough revenue. They'll reintroduce ads because that's just leaving money on the table.

>you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.

yes.

> If you weren’t a paying customer, refuse to become a paying customer, and refuse to watch the ads, they don’t gain anything by having you as a user. It only costs them to retain you.

It helps yt achieve their mission /s

Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.

We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.

My $25/mo for life youtubetv subscription is now up to $80/mo. I'm regretting that now, but also kind of stuck because I have family members on the account.

I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.

Totally different service, also what does 25 for life mean? Did they promise that somewhere?

I don’t pay for it because it’s pointless when you can use an ad blocker. This change would flip the situation.

Mate, Youtube have existed for almost 2 decades and you probably used them for most of it. I have used it to watch countless hours of lectures, talks, interviews and entertainment. You probably have the same experience of it for the past 2 decade too.

If you are not going to pay for THAT, you aren't going to pay for ANYTHING. Just admit you want free stuff. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that Youtube is somehow responsible for hosting all these for free.

Google set the standard for free online videos. It's what they used to aggressively drive other competitors out of the market. Now they want to reap the "benefits" of market dominance.

Yeah, I had this discussion with someone recently. Companies of that size can drown out competition for years, decades even, by operating at a loss (or just not making much profit at all) because they have numerous revenue streams and the pre-existing highly-profitable sources can subsidize the not-so-profitable new one. Once you have a nice big customer base, tighten the screws and wring money out of the users now that they are captive. The rate at which that process occurs varies, but it's basically inevitable, especially for publicly-traded corps.

There are tons of Youtube competitors that you can use right now. You're not though, because Youtube is better.

Yes, because they can afford to operate at a loss to starve out those competitors....

Noone uses youtube because "it's better"(in what way even?). Everyone uses youtube because it's pretty much the only place for pre-filmed video content these days. If all content creators I watch moved to other sites, I would watch them there. I don't 'watch youtube', I watch people/channels that I follow. They've built a monopoly and now they're abusing it. I would gladly pay some low yearly subscription for Youtube without ads, but their current price is borderline insane, especially since most people won't use most of the features offered, all we want is an ad-free experience, I couldn't care less for Youtube Music. Until then, I will continue watching it via 3rd party sideloaded apps on my TV and with uBlock in web browser. Stop white-knighting corporations worth billions of dollars, they don't care for you as much as you care for them.

> Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while

Pay for it or don't, but what is this nonsense about being poised (for a while) to maybe someday possibly consider thinking about purchasing the service?

It's $13. (In inflation-adjusted terms that's $7.12 the year I graduated high school.) What in the world are we talking about here? Buy it or don't. What is there to think about?

I just checked it's $15.99, which is a no go for me at the moment. If they offered a lower cost tier without YouTube music I would do it. However I use pandora (plus), I have for over a decade and have all my stations setup how I want them so I have no need for YouTube music. I mostly use the app anyways on my phone or tablet, so I still get ads. So it's not a big deal, but I do feel that $15.99 is to much at least for me at the moment, considering I pay for pandora and a few other streaming services.

Some people have been known to temporarily "move to Turkey" during signup.

That gives you an annual individual plan for $15usd p.a.