Memes

I will pay for premium when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities. Since they won't change, I won't pay.

"They do want to pay for premium! They just don't understand what a great value it is! SHOW THEM THE AD AGAIN! SHOW THEM ON EVERY VIDEO SO THEY WILL UNDERSTAND!!! "

Not to be rude, but I'm struggling to believe half the comments in this thread are legit. Do you really mean to tell me that Lemmy, a platform notoriously populated almost exclusively by anti-corporate tech people that really value FOSS and privacy –hence the reason why all of us are here instead of Reddit– has this many users thinking it is a remotely acceptable idea to pay for a Premium service for one of the most invasive companies online?

I think most of us understand the many underhanded techniques used by Google to achieve an almost monopolistic control of some aspects of the internet, but when talking about YouTube, suddenly all the logic is reduced to "if you use a service, pay for it, or else let them show you ads"?? what????? Also, what's with comparing adblocking to stealing????

My own answer to the topic of this thread is that no, I won't be paying for YouTube Premium anytime soon, possibly ever. Google has betrayed my trust many times in the past, and on top of that I don't consider adverts as a legitimate source of income, so I will block any and all ads everywhere without paying an extra cent.

"But if you keep using their service, so you need to give them some form of revenue! Otherwise you just want free stuff!" I only keep using their service because Google has spent many years dumping on other platforms so that YouTube is –almost– the only platform that still exists where all the good creators are, so I will begrudgingly watch them on YouTube because there aren't any options. But I will resist Google's many insidious attempts to monetize me to the best of my ability while doing so.

That said, it's really dishonest to claim that people who block ads on YouTube just want free stuff and don't understand that services have a cost. Personally, I pay for Nebula because I do support the project and the creators involved. But YouTube won't see a cent from me, not with my consent at least.

Reasons not to buy premium:

• Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
• Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
• YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTube’s copyright claim system wasn’t so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. https://youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
• Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
• Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.

The problem is that they actually don't mean that. And truthfully I don't mind the idea of paying for video hosting, that shit's expensive, but YouTube is going about it in the worst way possible.

Im not holding my breath for someone to start hosting petabytes of videos for free. I don’t like ads, so I’m just going to pay.

1 Ad - Fine. 2 Ads - Ok. 3 Ads - Closed YouTube.

They should include sponsorblock with youtube premium, I won't pay 12€ per month to watch more ads than on free tv. Youtube doesn't even make their own content. 5€ max for youtube would be okay with no ads.

I had YouTube when it was YouTube red and I was a part of a family plan with my friend for a couple years. I split the family plan with a few people and ended up paying $3 a month. Eventually he moved across country and YouTube said that since we didn't have the same IP address that I could not be a part of the family plan so I ended up signing up for my own account. At some point I was trying to pay off my debt so I cancelled all my subscription services. YouTube premium included. I started watching YouTube and then I saw it. An ad. Something I hadn't seen in years. It was the most annoying thing ever. I couldn't believe that people put up with that. I was so annoyed by the ads that I looked at how to obtain YouTube and YouTube music for free without ads because I needed to save the money and the ads were so intrusive that this was what I was going to do and that is what I still do to this day.

I pay for a premium account and I get more value out of it than Netflix or any other streaming service.

I pay for YouTube Premium. I didn't really want that, I just wanted YouTube Music, but it didn't make sense to just pay for YT Music. I don't want Spotify and Amazon Music kinda sucks so YT music worked best.

YouTube premium has millions of users and it makes them literally billions of dollars. There is no boulder.

I read everyone bitching about the ads but I don't get them, and I have access to an awesome music streaming service too.. you know, cause I have premium..

Google really is the king of "you don't REALLY mean 'no'. Try again."

Time to switch to private invidious/piped instances been using it myself with Yattee app on iOS

YT Premium is the single most valuable subscription service on the net right now. Don't regret mine a bit. I listen to hours and hours of YT Music a day, and I watch probably a few hours of YT content a night as well.

mpv + yt-dlp Enough said.

ITT: "it costs more than 5 bucks a month!" yeah, if you don't share with friends with family, it does. Also, music service included, deduct your spotify payment.

"You can just block ads" You can just miss the whole point.

"I rather support creators directly" I'm happy you do that. YouTube hosting is not free for Google/Alphabet, pay them too, or you'll have to teach each and every creator how to webhost + help em search a "real job" because selfhosted won't pay enough. Also, good fun browsing videos then.

IDK man, paying for YT Premium really isn't that bad. Assuming you already consume YouTube content, that is. And I'm pretty sure that's like 98% of first world population between 4 and 70.

Blocking ads on YouTube is no sustainable solution. Hosting Billions of Gigabytes of on-demand content is SUPER expensive. Like, it actually costs money. Other, wayyy smaller indie creator on-demand video platforms charge 5 bucks a month, but i'ts okay if they do it, because they aren't big bad Alphabet.

If that's your view, you don't have a problem with pricing, you have a problem with morals. And if you still do voluntarily consume YouTube content in private, with or without ads in any which way, you inarguably have a huge problem with your own morals.

YouTube premium is a good deal. It's priced very well compared with competition, it actually does pay indie creators and it let's you access to features that many users really do use.

BUTBUT THEY ARTIFICIALLY LIMIT FEATURES FOR NO REASON WITHOUT PREMIUM. I mean, it's subscription software and streaming, what else would they do? Every for profit subscription software provider and their mother does this. I develop hospital software and we literally do exactly this. If hospital A has feature x and hospital B also wants that, we don't just hand that out for free even when we just have to add it to their system in like 10 minutes... what did you expect? They already use our software (like you use YouTube), we don't have a huge incentive to just randomly add features if nobody paid for it. If we do, be happy about it, send me a gift card, if we or they don't, that's just business.