this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Do I hate giving money to Google? Yes. Do I watch 6+ hours of Youtube a day? Also yes. I almost always have something playing in the background throughout my day, so it's the one service I'm ok paying for and I don't have to worry about it breaking like I would with other frontends.
Yeah, but it's not Youtube making the content I guess is my problem. Everyone is mostly here because of all the Reddit crap, doing the EXACT same thing google did to videos with youtube. No one here is completely fine with a "Reddit Premium Account!"^tm^ I patron a few creators so I help with what I can, I will not join the youtube "member" additional fee. I also have been trying to branch out to creators that upload to multiple sites, it can be a little bit of a pain like figuring out Lemmy and how everything works but obviously it's better than sticking with a company gouging and controlling content on their platform for profit.
The channels you‘re watching get a noticeable chunk out of your YT Premium subscription though. I‘ve heard multiple YT creators say, that they get a lot more money from a premium view than an ad supported one (and nothing when you use adblock). And I definitely watch too many different creators to support each and every one individually on patreon/nebula/floatplane/whatever.
Patreon takes a cut of your money and gives the rest to the creator. Youtube does the same thing with Premium, plus creators receive a higher rpm from Premium viewers than they do from ads. And people left Reddit because they stopped supporting 3rd party apps. Youtube never supported 3rd party apps, plus there's no suitable alternative to leave Youtube for.
Also, I'm not completely fine with Youtube Premium, but the pros outweigh the cons enough for me to justify paying for it.
From my research, Patreon takes a smaller cut than YouTube Premium. Comparing YouTube Premium to its own ad model is a "Worst Negates the Bad" fallacy. From what I gathered (not easy to find and has changed over time) YT takes 30% from the former and 45% from latter. Seems insanely high. More than taxes. May be why so many creators need sponsors and hawk merch.
YouTube never supporting 3rd party apps seems like a negative.
Lots of suitable alternatives to youtube: read a book, listen to music, go for a walk, hang with friends, play games, etc, but to your point, sounds like a monopoly. Their search was once great, then ubiquitous, now terrible. YouTube Premium is just in the "entice users and creators" phase of its inevitable enshittification.
Don't mean to dump on something you like, just disagree with the reasoning. If you're not fine with Premium and hate giving money to google, sounds like you'll eventually seek out alternatives when they go into profit maximization mode. Hopefully enough resources will have been invested in viable alternatives by that time.
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They might not be making the content, but providing a platform for video is not cheap.
Providing a platform that allows anyone to upload a ridiculous 10 hours in a single video in whatever crazy resolution they want, for free, really is not cheap. Then the bandwidth to deliver that 10 hour video at 4K, not to mention infrastructure to handle millions upon millions of people around the world is really really really not cheap.
So its not like they're not contributing anything. Reddit OTOH handled mostly text, which is cheap. Most of everything else like images and videos were just links to other hosts that did the heavy lifting like imgur or YT
And Spotify does make it contents? They even stopped curating playlists
You have already been paying Google for that 6+ hours before even a penny came out of your account - you're just been paying in data. We have to stop pretending Google is some good guy that left an open platform in the world and just said "if you use it we'll show you some ads."
Ads aren't even the main revenue stream for Youtube, data is. All of these points about "paying for a service" become moot the moment we acknowledge the value of the data Google is farming from our interactions. This is how we're paying for Youtube. If you choose to buy Youtube Premium, understand that you're paying to not have ad interruption. You aren't paying for Youtube, because that was already happening, you're just paying for the convenience of avoid ads.
Honestly, is this true? How do you keep on top of content you actually wanna watch? I'm not sure since when but youtube recommendations have gone so downhill and a lot of the content creators I used to like don't release as much as they used to so even when I wanna browse YouTube there isn't anything I wanna see.
Over time I've curated the list of creators I watch, so my recommendations are pretty good at feeding me what I like, though I do usually have to scroll through a lot of junk. And when the recommendations aren't doing it, I'll just manually go to a channel I like and find something and the algorithm will quickly adjust.