I can’t be bothered using their crummy, janky, overburdened web interface even with ublock clearing most of the dead wood away. I’ll download to view offline using a non bullshit media player instead.

So crazy people just accept ads

I feel like YouTube is one of a few subscription services that deserves my money.

I count my lucky stars I’m grandfathered in to the old Google Play Music + YouTube Red/Premium rate. I can’t imagine watching YouTube without it.

The rest of us will have to settle for imagining.

Same. I used to pay for many (YouTube, Hulu, HBO, Amazon, Twitch, Paramount, Disney, Crunchyroll, Netflix, probably some I'm forgetting) but now I'm just down to YouTube. The rest all managed to do a worse job of conveniently delivering content I want in a convenient and easy to use way than pirating but YouTube has a good selection of content I want in the easiest way to find it, has no trouble delivering said content across all my devices (even 8k HDR in a web browser), lets me manually select the quality, and isn't outrageous for the content hours/month I get from it.

YouTube TV is a bit of a joke though.

How has utuve tv turned into a joke? People used to rave about it.

It launched at $35/m but now up to $73/month for the base plan, despite having ads. That's $876/y before you even get to the "addons" like sports and HD. About the only reason it can be worthwhile these days if you're going to get raped on a sports TV package anyways so might as well do it via YouTube where it's actually probably not yet as bad as the local cable company and a bit more portable.

Honestly, no it doesn’t. Google pays creators a pittance and their practices around copyright and monetization are beyond exploitative.

Most creators make their money from sponsorships and stealth marketing, product placements etc, or regular marketing because they might have an actual paid service to offer.

2 trillion dollar company doesn’t need your $9.99 a month

Nah, but once in a great while they manage to make (and not cancel) a service actually worth the $22.99/m (price of Family for me). Most subscription offerings don't come close to meeting that bar, some I feel like should be paying me instead of the other way around with how difficult and ad ridden they make the paid service.

I don't measure my justification of subscriptions from the company's value; I measure it in value to me. We've really stretched the envelope of this virtue, to the point where 3 ads before a video and ad-priority UIs are becoming more and more prevalent AND justified - because people using free services for 6 hours a day can't understand that they should probably pay for the obvious value it's bringing them on a day-to-day basis.

Elgoog feasts upon souls like this one. Mmm, delicious, tastes just like chicken.

Yawn. While you remain ignorantly poised about your freeloading on products in a post-adtech internet, you'll only find your free plans more bent over a barrel.

How much of your $9.99 does a content creator actually receive? I much prefer to block ads, and donate or buy merch from the creators who I follow with intention. I reckon that the $20 or so that they receive directly vastly outweighs the amount they would get from ads or a Premium sub, even after several years of dedicated viewership.

Or at least it would if it didn't bundle YouTube together with YouTube music

I used to think it was bit much until I started paying and for the price you get all youtube, music, podcasts and more across devices and so on with no ads. For the price - it's actually somewhat reasonable considering I don't need any other subs for this content...

Please share some rules for the commoners