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.