But I also recommend purchasing YouTube Premium if you watch a decent amount. I find it to be a great value.

It's wild how many people unironically think "drink verification can" is in any way acceptable.

Just because someone has an internet connection doesn't mean google has to serve them videos, either.

You act like that's a gotcha when "I owe you nothing, you owe me nothing" is the state I'm arguing for.

Ie show me the ads i'm missing, and let me pay for the view. It would be what, $3|5|7/m or w/e in value? Instead they're trying to strongarm you into an upcharge of $14/m for additional services. Show me the data they're harvesting from my viewing patterns and the added revenue they're getting from that. Tie that into my "cost" each month and reducing how much i owe.

But of course they won't do that. Because this isn't an exchange. This isn't a service we're paying for, it's a data harvest where they want to have their cake and eat it too. This is scummy in the same way that my music software, Spotify, is trying to expand revenue streams and shoving more crap (podcasts, audio books, etc) down my throat.

If Youtube isn't going to try and play fair then i'd rather leave (and will) than pay them.

https://www.youtube.com/premium

And as an added bonus, if you subscribe you get no ads on youtube! :-P

I hope they get a big fat EU fine for (illegal here) joint sales.

That would only be true if Youtube proportionally split my subscription to the videos i watch.

If anything, i'm advocating for exactly what you said - more than Youtube is. Ie show me how much i owe, and then whatever money i give youtube goes to content creators and the service provider. It's proportional to the service i consume, and is ultimately fair.

Instead what we get is something (in my view) massively upcharged. Bundled with service(s) i don't use, and set at a price point that i suspect well exceeds my usage of the service.

It's no different than price points, not showing the amount of ads the market will bear is leaving money on the table.

I’m serious, but philosophically, the onus is clearly on us to get rid of our addiction. But Youtube is a quasi-monopoly of random micro-conferences. Nebula and Vimeo aren’t on the same market. So basically we specifically like Youtube. But I’d never pay Google after what they did to James Damore.

Google isn’t exactly struggling to make ends meet. They seem perfectly okay to be losing money on search. YouTube is no different.

The mail example is great. The post office has no right to withhold your other mail between someone else and yourself, because you threw away the ad flyer someone paid them to deliver.

Meanwhile, I pay for premium and still have to suffer ads, because every video has ads in-band in the content, and I have to watch youtube on someone else's device probably 30% of the time, and have my content (what I would consume not produce) censored and inhibited by bs ai "community standards" and dmca takedowns I didn't approve of, and even without ever looking at an ad, they are collecting and selling profiling data of me which I also don't approve of. So where's my option to strong-arm youtube to force them to fully meet my "terms" and get what I'm paying for? How come it's not reasonable for me to somehow make it that if they don't please ME, that their own server side somehow breeaks unless they conform to what decide is a reasonable fair transaction?

None of this "terms" argument holds up. All they have is might, not right.

I didn't have time this week to become Jeff Bezos and buy Google and fix Youtube.

And thanks for the life advice acdha, but I'm quite happy to continue 'stealing' every single second of content that I want from Google and pointing out that the platform is filled with trash, incentivizes trash, and we would all be better off if it was gone.

Not to mention literally stealing original content and granting it to anyone else who simply claims copyright without proving it or being able to prove it since it's not theirs.

Then there are all kinds of indirect ways as a consequence of their various policies and how they implement and enforce them, like showing me ads after taking my premium money, or collecting and selling the profiling data of my watch/like/dislike data, etc.

Compelling my own property to behave against my wishes is the moral failing.

https://support.google.com/fi/answer/12999259?hl=en

What's your standard then? "It's my right to get whatever content/service I want for free and without ads, and I'll only pay if I feel like it"?

YouTube is a video sharing platform. It's not sharing if I have to pay in cash or time.

You're (Youtube, not OP hah) telling me i provided $14/m in ad revenue? Of course not.

I'd insta-buy if i could just pay to skip any ads i actually would have watched. Give me a stat showing me how many ads i missed, and how much i owe. Justify the cost you're forcing on me.

Instead i'll just drop youtube and give money to some other service that doesn't feel like it's focused on gaming me.

I’d pay $100 if there was some way to legitimately verify this because it’s nonsense IMO.

How is getting you to pay a reasonable subscription or watch ads in exchange for videos you ostensibly enjoy “gaming you”?

I suspect whatever the answer we settle on, it'll be less awful than what exists now.

I want to pay for what i use. Definitely. I struggle to see how a few dozen videos in hosting fees and possible ad revenue accounts to $14/m. It's insulting, upcharged, loaded with data mining and obfuscated for extreme profit in my assumption.

If they want to use ads as a justification for paying, great - show me how much i owe. How me how much money they missed out on by ads and i'll pay that happily. That also directly correlates to content creators, which is a win win.

Lol. You want to pay what you want to pay.

> show me how much i owe

It’s not complicated. $13.99 for a subscription to YouTube Premium in the US.

https://www.investopedia.com/youtube-premium-now-costs-usd2-...

Do you go to the grocery store and say, “Show me the baker’s salary as well as what the wheat, yeast, salt, and water cost and I’ll pay that happily?” No, you pay what they charge for bread or you don’t buy bread or you steal the bread.

And remember that YouTube Premium includes other benefits like downloading videos: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en so it’s not a 1:1 exchange of the money they’d make from ads.

Lol you understand, you're clearly avoiding the core idea.

> Do you go to the grocery store and say, “Show me the baker’s salary as well as what the wheat, yeast, salt, and water cost and I’ll pay that happily?” No, you pay what they charge for bread or you don’t buy bread or you steal the bread.

The grocery store isn't offering a free product with ads vs a paid subscription, using the missed ads as justification for paying. The grocery store isn't forcing you to also buy steak if you want to buy bread. The grocery store isn't offering a single tier price, subsidizing those who eat a lot by those who eat a little.

In the grocery store if you listen to a little, you pay a little. With Spotify, i can subscribe to a single service without upcharging to the $30/m unlimited podcasts (though that's changing it feels like, and i'll cancel them too). In the grocery store, if you buy a product you like you support that content creator by the amount they agreed to.

By justifying paying for missing ads they put a relationship between ads and the "cost we're stealing". So i'm offering to pay what i'm "stealing", but of course that's no where near enough because there's no way the handful of videos i watch a month equates to $14/m.

Look i agree with you in principle. Believe it or not, i'm not justifying avoiding ads and "stealing". I am however, saying everything Youtube has done is scummy and i'd much rather see content creators move to something that is inline with both the creators and the viewers. Where data isn't harvested in mass. Where outrage algorithms don't reign supreme.

I'm not paying Facebook anymore than i'm paying Youtube.

edit: Keep in mind i pay for a lot of services. Hell i pay for my search! You know what my search does? Be honest, transparent, and clear in the relationship between what i'm buying and what i'm getting (Kagi, btw)

> So i'm offering to pay what i'm "stealing", but of course that's no where near enough because there's no way the handful of videos i watch a month equates to $14/m.

You don’t set the price (and you know you don’t yet you offer anyway)!

And the price literally does equate to $14/m if you watch those videos without ads. You can use whatever logical argument you want to convince yourself otherwise, but the numbers are right there.

If you block ads on YouTube and you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, you’re doing something you know you’re not supposed to do. Twist yourself into a pretzel to explain that it’s technically not actually stealing, but it is what it is.

Pay $14/month, watch ads, or stop watching YouTube if your moral outrage at their scummyness is that high. Or do whatever you want because it really doesn’t matter.

Yea, i literally said you understand.

As an aside, i really hope Youtube finds a way to block all adblocks. I want more viewers for competition in the subscription space to exist.

You do. Ascribe a value to the data you give up to them by consuming content on their platform. They do.

It's kinda cute how much you care about the profit margins of a company when it will (likely) never benefit you. Maybe you should setup a donation fund for Alphabet in these hard times.

I mean surely you would personally give them at least 20 USD considering how badly they are being wronged, maybe 100 if you are feeling generous.

Do you really think Google just set the price arbitrarily? That would be surprising.

My impression has always been that ad free tiers are actually less profitable for video providers.

No, not arbitrarily. But that $14/mo bundles in the price of other services as well, namely Youtube Music. Youtube Music doesn't cost Google nothing, so obviously $14/mo isn't what they're getting from people in ad revenue. A comparable music subscription from spotify costs $11/mo, so subtract that from $14/mo. $3/mo is a fair estimate for what they expect to get for showing ads.

I'd be interested to see those numbers. More importantly though, i don't want to pay more than my share if we're actually talking a fair trade of services here. If the justification is cost of video hosting vs ads i'd see, then it should be variable.

Also, it's including a service i have zero interest in. So upcharging alone is insulting.

Google actually had a system like that in the past, but it wasn't for Youtube, it was for other ads around the web. I used it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not speaking authoritatively.

I'd pay $2/m, or even $4 bucks, for ad-free Youtube, but I'm not buying an additional music service I don't want or need.

I’d happily pay for just no ads.

Related parallel thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881771

There are others though.

https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

What the hell. Is this an entire OS?

So it uses redis and elastic search in the backend.

It definitely isnt lightweight, but I like its interface the best out of all solutions.

This is the script: https://github.com/danisztls/yt-assistant. AFAIK the same can be done with a single line yt-dlp command and you can do the same to download all videos from a channel.

It’s not even the biggest reason why PP is my least favorite streaming platform, since I have a workaround (cast from phone, which for some reason works).

I just have to figure out how to implement sponsor-block, to remove the "this video is sponsored by shadow raid vpn" messages... probably can be done with ffmpeg :)

    yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove default

not that you shouldn't use yt-dlp, because it's great!

and yes, as others mention - you can have yt-dlp use sponsorblock to cut out the ad sections too.

1) Don't log in to google, block ads. Data collected by google is lower value, resulting in less targeted internet-wide marketing, including on youtube itself when you clear your browsing session.

2) Log in. Lose time to ads. Trying to avoid this may put your entire google account at risk. Also, you gain highly targeted marketing thanks to higher quality data collection. Youtube's viewing suggestions are targeted, limiting discovery, and may become highly pigeonholed over time.

3) Pay for Premium. All the same as 2) but with less ads.

As a consumer, logging out of google and blocking youtube ads has been made by google a better experience than their own premium product. Only the producers of the majority of youtube's product are required to consume what google is doing.

Twitter is pretty much useless unless you have an account, can't even see replies anymore.

Mix well with Tailscale (or your mesh VPN of choice) and enjoy.

1. https://invidious.io/

2. https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

I would have been okay with paying for a subscription if it was to support the website or its creators – but I take manipulation attempts very badly.

Do you think Youtube wants creators to do that? Youtube doesn't get a cut of that revenue, whereas Youtube does get a cut of regular Youtube ad revenue and Premium revenue.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Youtube, and am just speculating here.

Perhaps Google should think upon how things ended up this way then?

Like, there are some pretty clear problems with Google's approach to (at least) YouTube, and they don't seem to really want to fix them...

Are you suggesting that Youtube squeeze out more money per view than it's currently doing? How do you suggest doing this? I guess one way would be to block people from using adblockers...

If the creators need their income to be resilient to demonetisation, they're forced to use options outside the Youtube system. Sponsorships, etc.

I wouldn’t even notice the subscription costs, but at this point Google has only succeeded in alienating me. I have disproportionately negative feelings about this.

I personally don't even remember what ads are like on Youtube and have zero idea how they've changed since the Youtube Red days.

I'd subscribe to YouTube premium if it didn't bundle a music subscription and associated cost.

According to this article, when Youtube red was introduced in October 2015, it was $9.99/month. It's now $13.99/month. That's a 40% increase. If you adjust $9.99 in October 2015 for inflation to September 2023, it's $12.93/month. So inflation-adjusted, the price increased 8.2% from 2015 to now.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9566973/youtube-red-ad-f...

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=9.99&year1=201...

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Youtube.

* Increases in income of the population then vs now, which would be good for comparing the economy then vs now (e.g. median income then vs now)

* Increases in income following cohorts, which would be good for see how on average individual people's income has risen due to both the economy and gained experience (e.g. 25 year old in 2015 would be 33 now, and thus likely make more money both due to population-wide changes (e.g. inflation) and due to having more work experience)

* Increases in income of a few individual people (the example you provided)

For the first one, this page[1], says that in 2021 dollars, the median US household income was $68410, and in 2022 (also in 2021 dollars) it was $74580. So adjusting those back to their in-year dollars, that would be $61,426.62 in 2015[2] and $86,662.50 in 2023[3]. So adjusting the Youtube Red/Premium price change, to those numbers, results in Youtube Red/Premium decreasing price by 0.7% once adjusted for the US population's medium household income.

For the second one, I think adjusting for that would should the price decreasing even more. Because each individual person's experience increases, so you would expect an individual's income to increase more than the population's income.

For the third one, I don't see how it's useful to look at a few examples. One person's income might have doubled, showing the Youtube Red/Premium dropped drastically in price. Another person's income might have halved, showing Youtube Red/Premium increases drastically in price. Another person might have become unemployed, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price increased by infinity %. Another person might have gone from unemployed to having a job, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price decreases from infinity % of income to non-infinity % of income, so basically a decrease by inifnity %.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=68410&year1=20...

[3] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=74580&year1=20...

Google Play Music didn't remove Youtube ads back then. Youtube Red wasn't created until 2015. So you're comparing the price of something that didn't remove Youtube ads to the price of something that does remove Youtube ads. That's not a fair comparison.

If Youtube Premium had FEATURES I cared about, I would pay for it. I refuse to pay for the privilege of basic information hygiene.

https://i.imgur.com/wqE2QJ2.png

One can only conclude that some executive at Google is still dead-set on making YouTube Music happen, and YouTube Premium will continue to suffer as a result.

Oh, they did something with it – cancelled it. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...

I would also be incentivized by the ability to control how much of my money goes to each creator.

Google is fully in the right for blocking ad blockers, banning users, or whatever. Might even end up having some profitable years for those bans.

Yeah, you might be losing the game, you are winning the game as well.