If google could just take our money and give us videos in exchange yes.

But unfortunately, they still suck all your data and sell it to third parties.

It's even worse if you pay, because if you sign in into your youtube account on the offical app, your entire phone is now linked to your a account even if you didn't link it before, with all the data in it. If you are not careful, your entire agenda and calendar immediatly exfiltrate.

Plus google gets your credit card, which means it will now link orders and data from other services using the same card number with its partners and get even more data.

After paying of course, you still can get your accounts locked out for obscure reasons with no appeal, and despite being a customer, have zero service support.

Google is not a respectful company.

And given what we know about the PRISM program, centralizing all this data in there is not good for democracy either.

Thanks. This is exactly what I think every time someone says "just buy premium". There's a reason I don't have a Google account.

And even if you do have a Google account, you might not want to log into YouTube with it; for instance, I recall reading that logging into YouTube with your Google account required you to put your real name into it, and if for some reason Google decided that your real name isn't your real name, you could lose access to your whole Google account, including more important services like Gmail and Google Talk.

> But unfortunately, they still suck all your data and sell it to third parties.

They don't sell your data to third parties, they do advertising for third parties on their data.

I can't believe people on HN are still confused by this concept.

I don't watch nearly enough videos for that to be worth it. Probably less than 5/month. I realize that I may be in the minority, but pay-per-video or pay-per-channel is a better value prop for me.

> Wouldn’t you get the same benefit by singing up to YouTube premium?

I'm a YT premium user. I'm always shocked when I see how many ads are forced on non-premium users.

You mean the sponsored segments that creators encode into their videos? I believe I haven't seen any ads that came from Google as a Premium subscriber.

I guess YouTube could offer some way for creators to deliver two different videos to regular and premium subscribers so they could even take out sponsored segments?

Assuming this would be a non-trivial balance act because decently sized niche channels could probably make a big chunk from a big sponsor vs. free users seeing ads.