this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024

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Used VPN for cheaper YouTube Premium? Congrats, your subscription has been canceled (www.androidauthority.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 171 points 6 months ago (17 children)

Blows my mind that to this day, companies don't realize it's a service issue. Like it's straight up regressed. Adobe and Microsoft used to encourage piracy to help their bottom line. Now you have stupid PMs who realize they can get a good performance review by talking about how much money they'll make/save from doing stuff like this

[–] [email protected] 124 points 6 months ago

They realize it's a service issue, they're trying to corner the market so that they don't have to care that it's a service issue.

YouTube pretty much has that market cornered. It would take a lot of capital to start up a viable competitor, especially one that didn't resort to ads and had some other kind of monetization scheme to support the sites existence and pay for all the storage servers.

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[–] Sanctus 108 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Its funny how we cant use VPNs but companies will go to the country with the lowest wages to get workers.

[–] TooManyGames 31 points 6 months ago

Companies are free to use labor from anywhere, but make sure we can't get their products from anywhere.

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[–] hark 74 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'd rather not use youtube than give them money for it or even sit through their intrusive ads. There are infinite ways to entertain myself.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 6 months ago (14 children)

I mean... that is the point.

Pay for premium, watch ads, or don't watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I’m not sure I agree that YouTube wants their platform to shrink. Even if you don’t watch ads you are still giving them your data which they can monetize.

Personally I would be willing to pay for YouTube premium but not under the current terms. 1. If I’m paying for the service they should no longer collect and sell my data. 2. Allow me to have a YouTube-only account not connected to other Google services and 3. The current pricing is a bit high.

They can offer these terms or I’ll continue to use them logged out with Adblock. Or they can continue to enshitify and eventually their platform will start to shrink which will make the data they sell to advertisers less valuable.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago

Their platform won't shrink. You and I may care enough to stop using it (very skeptical personally tbh) but 99.9999999999999999999999 percent of people don't give a flying fuck and there's more users being born every day.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago

Google should have thought of that before trying to paywall the zeitgeist.

If there's a bouncer holding culture hostage, I'm going to sneak in the backdoor.

[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe 17 points 6 months ago (7 children)

That'd be well and good if they didn't have a monopoly.

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[–] hark 8 points 6 months ago (6 children)

I specified intrusive ads. They could have non-intrusive ads, like a little banner or something. Instead they put up multiple video ads before and during videos. No thanks.

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[–] lickmygiggle 46 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've never seen a company SO devoted to get me to not use their service. $2-$3 a month is worth not seeing ads in my mind. They've made their website SO user hostile and their prices are just too damned high to justify paying them - I can just go without.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If I could get Youtube Premium for $2-3, I'd probably pay. I don't use it enough to justify spending $10 or whatever it is these days, so I block ads. If that stops working, I'll stop watching Youtube.

[–] vxx 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I would even pay the 11,99€, in fact I did in the past. Youtube's algorithms made me stop.

Spotify for example caters to my preferences. It took a bit to train it, but the weekly selection is spot on with lots of a variety, and they don't try to shove pop music or other mainstream stuff into my face.

YouTube tries to suckme into a shit hole of craziness at every turn. It tries to make people dumber.

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[–] Orfeluh 43 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can use NewPipe or Tubular for Android

Also there is https://piped.video/trending for watching in browser and Revanced on Android

And for anyone using YouTube Music there is Desktop app for Linux,MacOS and Windows https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

LibreTube is also a good one. Basically an app for piped

[–] [email protected] 43 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I keep saying it. Privacy invasive, targeted advertising has got to be barely worth the cost of maintaining it. Why else is Google trying to put more ads in places, kill ad blockers on chrome, force expats out of subscriptions, and experiment with unskippable ads if not to try and invent some kind of additional value to advertisers out of nothing.

[–] deweydecibel 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What's happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.

YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube's losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.

But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.

And this is what it looks like.

As for risking competition, at this point, I don't think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.

I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There's a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That's what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.

[–] YarHarSuperstar 10 points 6 months ago

Enshittification

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[–] Etterra 40 points 6 months ago (1 children)

NewPipe, no problems.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Tubular is better. It's a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock built-in.

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[–] MigratingtoLemmy 35 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Is there an automated bot to archive channels from YouTube and upload them to Peertube?

[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If one does that, be prepared to defend yourself against the copyright infringement lawsuit that's coming your way eventually.

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[–] aramova 15 points 6 months ago (12 children)

There are repos on GitHub that pull the videos and metadata, not sure about posting to Peerhub, though if that's possible to post via an api you could probably script it easily enough. Likely a risk of other "issues" doing so, but I'm sure some datahoarders could chime in.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Man I knew something like this was going to happen. Just be glad Google doesn’t block your access to all their services or just outright delete your account. On the bright side, you’d be set free.

[–] stoly 10 points 6 months ago

I’d have expected this to happen years ago.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Makes sense and probably all companies that do regional pricing have a rule for this, Steam explicitly states to not do this as well

You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.

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[–] ThePantser 20 points 6 months ago (11 children)

So a person is not allowed to be part of their home country and get service and then move? What if their job stays the same and they don't make any extra? Evil google.

[–] BradleyUffner 22 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

They are perfectly free to do that. They just have to resubscribe from their new home country at the new rate. Just like with telephone service or cable tv. It's not like they will get in trouble or would be prevented from moving.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (10 children)

If you pay for YouTube premium, you're a clown and you're only fueling the enshittification.

[–] slimarev92 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (14 children)

Ads are bad (I agree).

Paying for things is bad.

Then what's left? YouTube should somehow be ad free and free of cost for the user forever and ever? Who's gonna pay for the enormous costs of operating the service?

People are going to start yelling at me about capitalism and enshitiffication. Both of which cause problems, but what do you propose here? Magic?

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[–] AProfessional 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Youtube might be the literal most valuable site in my life, up there with Wikipedia and search engines.

A large part of my payment also goes to the channels I view.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I realize they charge what people are willing to pay, but can someone explain to me why YouTube costs just a couple USD a month in some countries and almost $20 a month in the US?

Are operating costs cheaper in those countries? Are they taking a loss in those counties? Or are they just price gouging in the US?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (3 children)

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That's it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it's just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

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[–] Maggoty 15 points 6 months ago

Okay? Just shoot yourself in the foot then.

[–] SkunkWorkz 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

If you have an iPhone or iPad you don’t even need to use a VPN to get cheap Premium. Just make an new Apple ID with an Indian address, top it up by buying a digital Apple Card on Amazon.in and redeeming it to your Indian account in iTunes on a computer. Then on your iPad or iPhone go to your Apple ID in the settings, log out of Media and Purchases and login with the Indian account. Then you can buy Premium in the YouTube app with your Rupees, you don’t even need to change your YouTube account.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

Less reason to subscribe then!

[–] disconnectikacio 12 points 6 months ago

Use Smarttube instead on android tv and stbs Smarttube

For android phones, tablets: Tubular

In browser ublock blocks youtube ads, also invidious instances.

[–] Alpha71 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The only thing VPN's are good for anymore is hiding torrents. That's it.

[–] DarthBueller 10 points 6 months ago

Also good for getting to pornhub.com if you live in one of the states they’ve blocked.

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