> Instead i'll just drop youtube

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”?

The data of rich profiles is enormously valuable to Google. They allow Google unparalleled ability to target ads elsewhere, too. That's the game.

OK, but they make YouTube. They make the rules of the game. Pay for it with $$$ or by watching Ads, don’t watch YouTube, or pretend there’s some kind of morality in stealing it.

"Stealing". Bless you, not giving up data while accessing something public is not stealing. Defending yourself against surveillance is morally unambiguous. Society as a whole, across the entire world, needs to start talking about how we support these services in a post-ad-revenue-model world.

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

Like I said. Consider yourself a hero for fighting the good fight or somebody who’s convinced themselves they’re entitled to something they didn’t pay for. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

No one is convinced of that (well, in my thread at least), quit strawmaning.

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.

> I want to pay for what i use

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.

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

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)

No, I understand your core idea, I just think it’s nonsensical and very entitled.

> 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.

> No, I understand your core idea, I just think it’s nonsensical and very entitled.

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.

> I want to pay for what i use.

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

They gotta realize its a bigger game then, they don't get to be the only people making selfish rules. As long as people can create tooling to separate the wheat from the chaff, that's what people will be doing. If ads were considered fully benign people wouldn't spend time making, sharing, installing tooling to bypass them. Since google et al has accepted they will continue to do the unpopular thing, they shouldn't act surprised that people try and make things slightly better for themselves as they are able to.

why should I care about """stealing it"""? I don't have any Alphabet stock, I am not employed by Alphabet, in any case they can afford to run Youtube at a loss or just shut it down.

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.

> You're telling me i provided $14/m in ad revenue? Of course not.

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.

> Do you really think Google just set the price arbitrarily?

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.

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

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.

What kind of asinine pricing plan are you proposing. Just pay the $14 or don’t. Your proposition would be a development nightmare with its complexity.

Yea, my issue is that it's bundled with other service(s) i don't use. This fight is about ads, so i'm replying in-kind.

>I'd insta-buy if i could just pay to skip any ads i actually would have watched.

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.