> YouTube's latest price increase comes as it explores new ways to push ads to regular users
I feel like advertisements are one of those things that need more than just the free market to decide their limits. And that's because the ways of psychological manipulation are just too vast to be countered by rational human judgement.
This includes a lot of things. We have had less than 100 years to adjust to the technological revolution and rapid globalization. Its seem that we take for granted that we will adapt to a completely different world. Humans have spent the majority of our existence in a wildly different environment and our adaption to a completely new environment won't be quick nor without many lives lost and quality of life affected.
For example:
Unhealthy, addictive food along with modern food preservation is responsible for the most deaths in the US through obesity and heart disease, with obesity having a a high number of comordibities including sleep apnea, anxiety, depression, and (arguably) ADHD (further research needs to be conducted). Food in the past was limited and not available in vast excess to the average human, and certainly not foods that are extremely unhealthy and addictive.
Another example would be a higher average life expectancy. How do you deal with a population of 70-80 years olds who many can't work, require disproprotionate resources for their survival, and age related mental & cognitive decline.
What is the solution? We can wait for humans to adapt, evolotuarily and socially, which will take many thousands of years. Or we can enact political change. The issue is that we these changes need to balance the increasing power and ability of the state with individual freedoms. Along with having a lean political machine that can further change for the future. I don't see a way forward, not that it doesn't exist, but this is an environment more unlike any other one we have ever known and the next 10-100 years of the species is as unpredictable for us as it has ever been spanning back as far as the start of the agricultural revolution.
Slightly tangential: is anyone else flabbergasted at the cookie consent form on this site, and others that use the same ad network?
It reads "We value your privacy", followed by a list of 1,573(!!!) "partners" who want access to my personal data. Some of these are opt-in by default due to "legitimate interest", and I'm not sure if the "Reject all" button even applies to them. At least there is one, and it's relatively prominent.
The state of advertising on the web has become absolutely insane. The fact YouTube now also shows ads when videos are paused, and they have the gall to increase the price of YT Premium is pure greed.
Not only will I never pay for this because I don't won't anything to do that would support this insidious business model, I will dedicate my time and effort to teach others how to do the same.
Fuck everything to do with this, and Google primarily for ruining the web. None of their tech contributions comes close to negate the harm they've caused.
"Opt-out" seems like what you mean, where a legitimate interest makes them default to sharing, and you are doubtful whether a "Reject all" opt-out will affect those settings?
Right, that's what I meant. "Opt-in by default" to me means that the default is to share my data, but I can see how that could mean the reverse. Thanks.
Probably just a few ad networks which means they have to show everyone. It isn’t ’you details will be shared to all of these’ but instead may be shared
Why is this article written as if YouTube Premium was a music service? It even calls Spotify and Apple Music competitors. YT Prem for me is about removing ads from the videos I'm watching and from the interface. I don't know how it relates to Spotify or Apple Music or how they're comparable.
Because YT Music is also bundled into the price, and in my opinion it's a decent music streaming service. The big advantage of YT Music is you can find a lot of covers or mashups if you are into that, thanks to Youtube videos.
I also love covers and mashups, even guitar only or bass only (sometimes drums only) covers.
Out of curiosity, how is YT Music different to looking up music on regular youtube? (the latter is what I do). (just spent a couple of minutes googling/llm-ing but can only guess it boils down to 'background play' [hardly a 'feature' IMO] and better operability across multiple devices)
The main difference is that YT Music has different audio tracks than what comes from the videos in many cases (you can hear a difference when you click the "video" link in YT Music app, vs the Audio only). The audio only version is cleaner, and I think is more likely to come from an official source instead of an end user upload. And there are a lot more selection on YT Music (playing full albums, etc).
YT Music has a significantly modified UI. The entire UI is geared towards listening and discovery of music, artists, albums, tracks. If an artist is properly set up in the system, they will have a home page, and a list of their albums, songs, videos displayed. You can touch off a radio station playlist based on that artist, etc.
The difference in content is that many YT videos are simply unavailable inside YT Music, if they are not deemed "music". Therefore you won't be inundated by creators or comedy acts or newscasts, or anything but artists and music.
Music Premium has a feature that allows you to switch seamlessly between an "Audio" and "Video" version of your track. This is not magical but depends on both existing as YouTube entities. They do often match different audio tracks to a corresponding video. And if you're coming through an official "Artist" page then it may be more likely that you discover an official track, but I've never had trouble doing that in YT itself (it's usually a matter of "always only the second link in the search results").
Some artists configure "Playlists" and/or "Releases" tabs in YT proper, but indeed, YT Music is better organized so that you can discover those full albums and use them directly as a play queue.
I am fairly sure that there is no content exclusive to YT Music, only the structured presentation. All their tracks and videos are present and accounted for in YT itself; if you share a link/UUID you'll be able to find it. Conversely, as I mentioned, if it's not "Music" it won't be offered in that app. (This classification may be surprising -- I've found musical tracks and artists that aren't in there, such as the long-form BGM stuff. YT Music is for conventionally short tracks and vids.)
YT Music has music as a first class entity where Youtube itself does not and cannot, so it has features like related music, "radio" playlists based off a track, music recommendations, playlist generation, artist pages with a top 10 song list, and other features you expect from its competitors.
Because Google Music was merged into YouTube. "YouTube Music" is in fact a Spotify competitor. My wife uses it and likes it well enough. It has some dumb restrictions though like children's music can't be added to a playlist as some sort of COPPA something. That makes making "go to sleep" playlists for our infant daughter difficult.
To be entirely fair, they did announce it well in advance and made it really easy to download your entire archive AND they made your music available in your YouTube Music account. I have a bunch of music I bought from Google Play Music and while it sucks that Google killed it, I have to give them credit for making the transition very painless. Desura going down was a lot more abrupt and disruptive.
This describes practically every sunsetted Google product I've used in the past several years. Podcasts, One VPN, transitions with Voice and Duo/Meet, and more. They've all had ample notifications, explanations, and assistance with migration. Moreover, Google's added products which I've embraced, and to date, has never killed anything upon which I relied. In fact, the linchpin apps have improved vastly over time, such as Docs/Sheets, Photos, Calendar; and I love Tasks and Keep now, for all their overlap!
Lacking a mobile contract or a SIM-capable device, I signed up for Voice in 2015, and all the changes since then have been completely understandable, since Voice is a "fake phone" number that can't be allowed on-par with actual mobile services, particularly Google Fi itself. And that's precisely why I needed it 9 years ago.
Youtube Music comes with Premium. I canceled my Spotify account when I joined YT Premium. Honestly it was part of how I justified paying for it (allowed me to "kill two birds" and drop another service).
Many people buy youtube premium because youtube music premium is included in the price and youtube music premium is a direct competitor to spotify and apple music.
Because Youtube Music is included in the price. It has a much wider selection than the competitors since some YouTube videos are included in the music collection.
Yeah, I don't think the author realizes that the main selling point of YouTube Premium is removal of ads. YouTube Music is thrown in as an extra, but I doubt many people (like you) even know it exists.
It's questionable for how long that will be the case. The web frontends break often as YT changes, sometimes to intentionally prevent their usage. Piped has been showing the message "Sign in to confirm that you're not a bot" for months now[1].
I've seen similar issues with yt-dlp, though they've been temporary so far, and the team is quicker to work around them. But it's only a matter of time until YT decides this is enough of a nuisance for them and blocks these completely. It would be trivial to do so, and workarounds could be very annoying to impossible.
I pay creators directly all the time (for all media, not just videos), so this confusingly common sentiment is irrelevent to me.
With that out of the way; I would gleefully see YouTube disappear before I paid them a cent. Throwing money at something until all of your real competition goes out of business is exactly the kind of behaviour you would expect of the type of company that then takes advantage of their new position to screw people over.
If YouTube really minded freeloaders, they would put the whole video catalog behind a paywall.
But, they won't do it, because the 99 % (source: my behind) of people who don't pay for YouTube give it extreme social relevance. If they turned the site into an exclusive, paid club, another tech giant (Amazon? ByteDance?) would roll out a competitor in a week and would take the "biggest free video catalog" spot instead of Google, and they would do it happily. The biggest obstacle to doing that and trying to compete right now, network effects, would be instantly gone.
As such, I believe Google's appetite for jacking up the subscribers' price is much larger than their willingness to gamble the site's social capital. YouTube is massive in terms of its cultural impact over the last two decades and I am not saying Google isn't stupid enough to risk this legacy if they were really hurting financially, but I can't imagine the current circumstances with the current percentage of ad-blocking and the current ratio of subscribers to non-subscribers or the loss Google incurs running YouTube (which I am not even sure there is any anymore) are even in the same numerical system as the values it would take for Google to consider doing anything real with the so called "freeloaders".
That's fine, just know that you are not as ethical as
paxys and I. Both of us use Microsoft Edge with all tracking/ad/popup blocking turned off because we believe in supporting every website and ad network that so graciously provided us content to enjoy.
For me it is the only way to enjoy YT because regular videos except streams use to freeze for me in browser from time to time recently even with enough number of frames cached.
I had the special intro rate of 9.99 for Google Music Family which eventually extended to Youtube Premium and then became Youtube Music.
Last year google decided "fuck loyalty" and hiked the price to 22.99.
Same with Google Apps for Business. What used to be free now costs me $75+ per month and I can't get out of it because I have older family members with large amounts of data that I can't move to another platform. I also can't just upgrade one users account (as was possible before) but instead I need to pay for the more expensive package that has more storage for all users.
I am not sure what would make someone expect something like "loyalty" from a corporation. They will lie to you just like any other exploitative narcissistic psychopathic cluster of people, until the second they don't need or want you anymore.
Corporations basically a manifestation of what people all across the globe and all throughout time have all identified as various forms of malevolent entities; effectively endless bounds to do harm and effectively zero accountability or consequences. Corporations are essentially parasites on humanity at every single level, from what is kind of like parasocial relationship by proxy that people have largely dependent on or from their connection to the corporation, to the vapid also parasocial identity that many build around their connection to corporations, to the heinous crimes the "corporation" commits on a global scale, often totally around the objective of sucking resources and wealth out of a particular place and/or people.
Back 20 years ago it cost companies more to aquire new people than to keep existing customers happy. Hence "grandfathering" people was common. Loyalty paid off.
I have a netflix account that is older than the founding date listed on Wikipedia yet I pay exactly the same as someone who signs up today.
I shouldn't tell them this but I'd keep YT Premium at double the price. I'd give up every other video service first. That said, I don't love the idea of paying much more for an unchanged product - I'd expect new features, improved options in the client apps (subscription groups would be epic), and larger payments to the creators I watch, ideally.
> I shouldn't tell them this but I'd keep YT Premium at double the price. I'd give up every other video service first
Why? What is the incredible value you're getting out of YouTube? Genuinely curious, because the moment uBlock stopped working, I just stopped using YouTube and haven't noticed.
It's the only platform with content in every niche.
Netflix, on the other hand, has maybe three niches: documentaries, high production reality TV, high production fiction movies/shows. And that's after scrolling for 20min debating which one you want to watch lest it be a dud after you invested 30min of your time.
On Youtube, I consume everything from debates to conversations to the news to police body cam footage (guilty pleasure) to gaming reviews to "upcoming RPG games 2025" to Let's Plays to Starcraft 2 tournaments to video versions of podcasts to interviews with an expert about cardiovascular disease to old seasons of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares to scary story montages for falling asleep. And that's just from me scrolling my homepage while writing this. And I can consume most of that while running around the park with my phone in my pocket.
There's just no contest when it comes to which service I'd cancel first vs last.
YouTube has tons of content that isn't borderline brain damage (it has tons of that too though, no doubt).
Other streaming services guide all their content into a wide-audience general-public-friendly funnel. You are not going to find hour long specials on Fourier transforms or technical analyses on the Hubble tension. YouTube also has tons of low-production quality, high informational quality content that doesn't exist anywhere else.
I can't speak for everyone but I found Sarada Herke's series on Graph Theory to be incredibly illuminating and I haven't really found anything of the same quality elsewhere. Combine that with the fact that YT has the Strange Loop video archive, the Perl Conference, MIT OpenCourseWare, talks by Guy Steele, Gerald Sussman, Dan Friedman, Damian Conway, Rich Hickey, and so on, and so forth... even if we only look at educational material and ignore entertainment it's a vast treasure trove. Sure: some, if not most, of that stuff can be found elsewhere but there is value in having all of it available from a single source.
I lived without a TV for a couple of years, around Katrina time -- I experienced that disaster only through radio broadcasts.
Later, I had a Blu-ray player and a combo monitor-TV where I watched OTA broadcasts after the Digital Transition. About 9 years ago, the TV broke, and was deemed unrepairable.
I chose not to replace any TV and I decided I was way better off without Jay Leno in my ear every night, and trash like Degrassi in my eyes every week. For a while, I was. I didn't play discs anymore, either, so my consumption of video content went down, and I was really immersed in interactive computer stuff.
Gradually I found myself to be a YouTube addict, and I've gone all-in with it. Over the years, the stuff they've added has made it a one-stop shop where I never miss TV programming.
At this point, YT has free films (just watch ads or pay Premium), it has on-demand streaming for rent or purchase, just about any major film you can name. They have TV-style packages offered. They are a gateway to other streaming services like Paramount+. There are even silly little minigames now. Mostly, though, I love music videos, and I curate dozens upon dozens of playlists for my tastes and moods. (Beware: user playlists are a legacy feature, and seem to get more inconvenient over time.)
YT has worked hard to become a hub for all things streaming, even as Netflix and competitors splintered into every studio's balkanized app. For someone like me, it's really a relief to just be loyal in one service, and not go chasing content over a dozen paid services or something. Being a low-income cheapskate, I mostly put up with a deluge of ads, because that's how folks get paid these days.
Nothing too complex to it, I just follow several hundred channels, many of which I watch almost every video from because I like the topic, the person/people, etc. It's much like someone who might be attached to their Netflix sub because they love all the shows on there - that's how I am with YouTube. Not everyone is into it and that's fine. I'm not into Netflix.
I, and probably everyone else on my family plan, watch more YouTube than anything else. That isn't saying much for me because I very rarely watch TV shows or movies. I haven't watched Netflix in ages, I just keep it for the family members who do. My kids use mainly YouTube and Crunchyroll, sometimes Disney+.
I think they're right though. When I sit down on the couch and turn on my Roku or Apple TV, the question is whether we want to open Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Peakcock, etc. They absolutely are competitors even if they have different video content.
So much so that once I got Youtube Premium, I cancelled two streaming services after realizing how much we watch it.
> So much so that once I got Youtube Premium, I cancelled two streaming services after realizing how much we watch it.
That's exactly my point. For YouTube-type, independent creators and instructional content, there is no substitute. If you want to watch a drama or comedy, you have a lot of options. This is not scientific, but I know an increasing number of people who don't watch "traditional" media at all and look entirely to YouTube for something to watch, especially if they prefer non-fiction.
YouTube Premium was already quite expensive. They increased my family plan from €17.99 to €25.99. This is almost a 45% hike! Compare to Netflix which is €13.99.
I only pay this to skip ads, but a lot of content creators still have their own ads on the videos. There doesn't seem to be enough value to justify such price hike. I am likely to cancel my subscription.
It's wild how greedy google has gotten with Pichai. Nearly all of my friends who worked on Kubernetes since 2014-2015 have left google with their RTO requirements since 2022-23 where they told everyone they could work remotely now they're actually checking attendance. Advertising over peoples paused videos now? I can't leave Youtube paused in one of my rooms and go to another room and use the internet without 1080p-4k advertisements stealing my bandwith when I'm specifically not using it?
I wanted to leave to go to twitter to work on distsys stuff prior to Elon..
At this point, YouTube is just an advertising channel to serve programmatic ads and for creators to sell or promote products to their audience. The content is over-optimized and too commercial.
Why would anyone pay that much just to be promoted to, when they can access a production-quality curated library on Netflix, Paramount Plus or Disney+?
It really depends on what you are into. YouTube is the biggest player (by far) in the higher-level-STEM-video category, which I think many on HN are into. Other big streaming services won't release content if it shoots higher than a 10th grade level.
There is Nebula and the like, but even that is still missing a lot.
I'm all for paying for things instead of paying for things instead of ads, but someone enlighten me, is youtube not profitable these days as is, even premium isn't paying for itself? Moreover, even paying for youtube premium, you cannot avoid all ads (for example, sponsored segments).
Sponsored content doesn't really bother me, I usually skip it, but I watch some of them depending on the creator.
One reason (other than just money in general) that it's useful for YouTubers is because it's pretty easy to get demonetized depending on what kind of content you make.
Ad situations like "the publisher payed me to play this game" is usually fine with me too if the game is interesting and the content is good.
YouTube is profitable, but Google isn't content with profitable. They want profit maximization, which is a bad thing. I feel like the world would be a better place if we had something like eBay but for companies: just like the seller gets the SECOND highest price bid, companies should also be content with the second highest level of profit maximization, defined in terms of percentile...
The only amount of profit that is acceptable is more profit. $5B in profit is utter failure if you made the same amount last year. For a long time now companies will do anything to be MORE profitable.
There is also projects you can run in your local network that skips the segments when playing youtube videos on chromecast. Using the same crowdsourced data from SponsorBlock. The one I use: https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip
I think the average number of minutes per user must be increasing. Creators get paid by watch time, so premium would need to scale with watch time in order to remain lucrative.
it might be profitable but they figure they can make it more profitable; there has been a lot of inflation in the last few years and every other video subscription service has been hiking up their pricing recently
All streaming services are going up. The other day I received am email from Hulu stating their pricing was going up another dollar for ad free Hulu from $18 to $19. I realized I haven't used Hulu in about two months so I cancelled it with the reason being too much money. I then had to click through two more desperation pages "We'll give you a whole year of 2.99 Hulu if you stay" - No. "How about a whole Disney plus package for the introductory price of" - No.
At this point I have no more streaming services. Talking to friends about it and they use vance for youtube and illegal streaming services. I don't think I know anyone who pays for youtube. These companies are only hurting themselves by jacking up prices for what little content they offer.
What will be next? Introducing ads to premium users? I remember when I signed up to Amazon Prime and expected the movies to be ad-free. Haha, how naive I was.
So google is the new Microsoft trying to bundle their way to market supremacy to murder competitors. I wonder if they just figured they’d calculate in the fines they’ll get for misuse of monopoly already and just don’t consider the cost high enough to care compared to the gain they’ll have from taking over music streaming.
What would it take to have some p2p video streaming service to rival Youtube? Say that everyone reserves some space, compute and bandwidth on their phones and computers, what kind of figures are we talking about to make it work at Youtube scale?
Once they finally break ad blockers I might be willing to pay 10 or something just to get rids of adds on video. But I doubt they offer anything that sensible without music or other useless crap.
This Reddit post (and some other places) claim creators get paid 55% of the subscription price. If true, then yeah creators would get paid 30-50% more from these users.
You can make the same argument that companies should pay their workers more because in theory they'd be nothing without them when the truth is there's other workers out there to take their place if the current ones don't like it, and that goes 10x for creators, most of who get into it out of passion first making them easily exploitable and replaceable due to this supply/demand power imbalance.
Life is unfair and business is never about doing what's the fair or morally right thing to do, but doing what's the best for your shareholders.
Youtube only cares about creators if they're whales like Mr Beast, LTT, MKBHD, etc otherwise they don't give a damn about you, and creators still flock to YouTube because there's nowhere else for them to go to.
>The higher subscription fee applies to both individual and family YouTube Premium plans. In Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, YouTube's Family plan will cost €26 from November, up from €18 — an increase of €8. The individual plan is also getting expensive by €2 to €14 in these countries.
Two euro!?! I mean... I subscribe because I think it's a better deal than spotify even if the app is suboptimal, because I want the content creators I visit to get paid, but I've been paying about $14 for years. How in the hell were they only charging two euro.
1) replace spotify sub, but right now playlists and likes between youtube and youtube music gets disgustingly intermingled
2) replace patreon sub, determine exactly how much of payment goes to which producers. I don't want an even split, I want my favoured producers to get significantly more $$$. Better yet, I want to make sure I never give a certain cent to some producers. Like if 50% of fees is going towards producers, I want to pick who to support.
I feel like advertisements are one of those things that need more than just the free market to decide their limits. And that's because the ways of psychological manipulation are just too vast to be countered by rational human judgement.