It's probably at least irresponsible to not block ads for an elderly parent who's starting to experience cognitive decline.
Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5 billionth google search and won blah blah blah.
Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk so long as google et all refuse to audit and comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my laptop.
Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".
That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction:
- credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor.
- in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones)
- bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts
- crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions
- pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend
In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started.
Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.
Europe though, yeah they’re killing it.
I'm German, so I'm basing my statement on almost 34 years of living here. In case you want some more details from an actual bank, read this [1].
Basically, we don't need credit cards, not even for renting cars, because we have robust regulation and our own national cashless payment schemes plus SEPA. Direct debit is just fine for us.
Yes, but not necessarily MasterCard/Visa debit cards. Germany's Girocard for example is a national debit card scheme that does not use any of the American grifters. Unfortunately, it's being phased out in favor of MC/Visa because the EU fee cap on national schemes is much lower than for MC/Visa and so banks can make more money off of you.
We're just standing by and watch our dependence on American grifter megacompanies larger every day.
I also see more people paying with their phone/smartwatch than any physical card these days.
I have never encountered even that. My debit card also works great for in-person payments in the US, with the only exception perhaps being rentals.
This is not true.
International payments are a huge huge goddamn mess and I do not envy anyone who has to deal with their peculiarities.
And even for those who have credit cards, they are "pay in full at the end of each month" cards, not American-style revolving credit cards. And stuff like the "cashback" cards of Americans, that's also not very common here since the "cashbacks" are actually paid for by the merchant on top of the interchange fee - but there's an EU law that places a hard cap of IIRC 1% on the merchant fees, so there is barely any way for banks to incentivise people to use credit cards.
And on the bank side, here in Europe we also don't really have that "debt holders can just sell off defaulted debts" thing, so banks can't offload the risk of defaults to someone else. And if that's not enough, we also got very strict laws on who can get approved for a credit card and for which limits - stuff like 20 year olds with 20, 30k of credit card debt are truly rare unless the parents of said young people are rich enough to back such a massive CC limit.
Strong disagree, being able to withdraw cash at corner stores or pay with cards directly beats having to guess how much cash you need to exchange beforehand. And a number German banks have offered free credit or debit cards for decades.
> And even for those who have credit cards, they are "pay in full at the end of each month" cards, not American-style revolving credit cards. And stuff like the "cashback" cards of Americans, that's also not very common here since the "cashbacks" are actually paid for by the merchant on top of the interchange fee - but there's an EU law that places a hard cap of IIRC 1% on the merchant fees, so there is barely any way for banks to incentivise people to use credit cards.
True but that doesn't affect their usefulness as payment methods - EU customers can largely pay with "credit" cards just fine.
o_O
Depends on the price.
I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier.
WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook:
* https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).
(I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019)
From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying.
A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.
B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time.
Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger.
I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check, and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was a promotion the day I signed up or something.
IIRC, you had to have signed up with windows phone, switching phones to windows phone wouldn't grant you lifetime (switching to iPhone while the app was paid on iOS would; a delay on that was added to avoid abuse of borrow your friend's iPhone, re-register and then switch back).
One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to see what would happen.
It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept working, so I thought they were not serious about it. Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again after a few months but I remembered what happened before so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until maybe the time FB bought it.
I believe that if it stopped working people would have switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also had Viber and probably FB messenger too.
Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of people moved to the next one or used more than one to message different friends. WhatsApp never had a chance to earn money directly from its users IMHO.
Can I ask why Spain specifically?
The US never had a high user count, but it was chosen because US tech journalism sets the narrative. If you want people to pay around the world, convince US tech journalists that payment enforcement is on, and the knowledge that you need to pay filters through the world in a way that it doesn't by just enforcing payment in Spain.
See also: the invisibility of Nokia phones when they pissed off US carriers with SIP clients and left the US market; despite being the top selling phone manufacture of both feature phones and smart phones, there were no media stories about them.
What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.
Youtube is also moving into that direction.
Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.
The idea of paid, premium service with ads is ridiculous.
Are you willing to pay more for your subscription so that Spotify can also pay podcasters? Because that's what you are asking, it won't ever be able to dilute even more the royalties pot, you'd need to pay more for your subscription so that podcasters can also be paid.
Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.
That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive.
It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse.
If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.
Youtube music is fine-ish. Search is pretty weak and prefers recommendations over results. The controls for playlist Play, Play with Shuffle, and Play with Autoadd are fairly confusing especially between the app and the desktop version. Creating and managing multiple playlists is a frustrating experience and not thought out at all. It constantly feeling the need to change the album art on my playlists.
You pay to not be annoyed. You're not paying for a "premium" product in any way.
I believe they are rolling out audio ads.
Absolute bullshit.
Hacker news has 5 million monthly unique users [1].
Given how hacker news constantly complain about google’s decline and the constant virtue signaling on the need to pay for software, you would expect a sizable chunk of the users (the vocal ones, at least) here pay for Kagi. And yet we are here. GP is absolutely right about it being all-talk.
So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"
I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.
What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.
I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.
1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors.
2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise.
3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements.
I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.
Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars.
What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.
With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue. E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would still not be close to the price discrimination possible via ads.
I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when they were not paying for WhatsApp.
And honestly, what you could make from users through ads is not what I care about. You are making zero from me through ads because I block them everywhere and that is not negotiable. A reasonable price would be costs + modest margin not how much you could grab out of my pocket.
I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to.
If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.
While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.
Now whether someone who is putting out an opinion should care about getting paid is another thing, but it kills your video traffic usually too.
Yup, and, for those who don't know, you can toggle an option in your Google account settings to do the same for your recommendations in search and for any Google-served ads you will see on all websites.
Disclaimer: I tried that with the ads, and ended up reverting that setting after a few days. Even if my personalized ads were hit or miss, non-personalized ads were just nightmare fuel of the most random things ever that I absolutely had no interest in and felt actually annoyed upon seeing.
If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.
There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.
I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.
Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.
It is though. Videos with "limited ads" (as it's technically called in YouTube Studio) applied to them still get paid out of Premium views.
But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.
As for content, it depends what you're looking for. For me, I'm mostly into maths and physics and there are so many channels and lecture series that were immensely helpful. For example, I recently went through this playlist on Lie Groups [0].
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_4R2IuNuuRgJb00X2J53Iq9...
That being said, lately YT has way too many ads for my liking; thus I am using Reddit more and more for these things.
People are curious creatures indeed.
The truth is that Youtube is a parasite. They don't create free content, they have inserted themselves between regular people creating free videos and you and are demanding that you pay them for access to what would have existed without them.
From the viewers' side, there was no place to go and browse videos, you were limited to short embedded clips or had to download the entire file first.
Youtube was a game changer when it first appeared and Google hadn't yet acquired it.
It's more money. Why would they refuse more money? It's so fucking frustrating too.
I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties.
> who actually pays for YT Premium.
Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?"
Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.
I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.
Probably not watch.
I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.
When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.
Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.
Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.
They don’t create nor curate much content.
I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.
Little did we know how far YouTube would go for them.
Learning on YouTube 10 yrs ago meant supplementing your guitar skills cuz you didn't have a teacher. Or learning how a compressor works so you can use it yourself in music. It was always supplemental tidbits from numerous creators that helped me hone skills. Learned a ton about tools and woodworking too, but it was always me working for awhile then going back to get more information. Much more difficult to do in like, biology(probably don't have a bio lab) or a high risk repair like plumbing.
Pretty much any computer skill is going to have a cache of resources where filtering out trash is going to be the harder part. There are fantastic coding and modeling guides from very experienced people. Most financial things you should be very wary of except top professionals with proven credentials.
Asking a community who their favorite creators are can be a good place to start.
I bought one 14 part video course and the resources/assets it had were more valuable than the info. I exercise caution with that stuff now.
And I entirely agree YouTube asks too much for premium.
Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.
I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.
I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.
Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...
I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.
Or do you mean how Google implemented its ads?
Additionally, a related negative side effect is consumerism.
But since I have the option to not pay, I don't. If it was paywalled I'd be willing to pay probably 3-5x what a normal streaming service charges though.
There's no desktop app for YouTube Music for starters.
I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway.
So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.
FYI you can also do this with Spotify[0].
Local files work fine if you're always playing music on devices you own and that have local storage. But if you're using media devices like a Chromecast (unless you're casting directly from a device that has access to the local files), or on machines where you don’t have sync privileges—like a work computer—YouTube Music will work, but Spotify won’t.
I dont like that while the ad revenue barely extracts a dollar from me, my subscription suddenly expects $10-30 per month regardless of my usage.
Thats not "we need to charge you to continue our services", thats "we need to charge you and then 20x times again just because we can".
So I don't think solving such complex problems within a welfare system is a solved problem at all.
In Sweden we pride ourselves in health care for everyone. But we are quite bad at buying software systems for our welfare institutions.
The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.
And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.
All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.