Oof I think this service is only worth it if you have a family plan and everyone helping. That is how I personally make it reasonable in terms of pricing.
Would be great if I could just pay for no ads YT without YT music.
In fairness, the amount of YT that I watch on TV/iPhone makes it worth the cost, but any increases and I’ll probably just cancel and watch less YT, which isn’t a bad thing.
Or maybe just look at getting one of those Turkish subscriptions for like £2/month
I don’t think it is possible anymore. If you’ve signed up in the past you’re fine. However, you now need a payment card from the country in order to purchase.
A lot of streaming services are cracking down on workarounds it seems. Many have stopped accepted disposal debit cards as a means of repeatedly getting free trials.
In fairness, the amount of YT that I watch on TV/iPhone makes it worth the cost
Yeah, my take was "the good I get out of YouTube is worth that, so if I'm in a situation where I need to pay that, I'd pay it".
For me what I don't like is that I haven't seen anything about Google not using it to profile me. If I get an account with Google, pay them, then they have not just the usage data, but it linked to financial data, which makes it a lot easier for them to build a profile. And that I don't want.
Google provides some good services, and they are services that I'd be willing to pay for, but I don't want to be paying the bill and having Google building a profile on me. Maybe some people don't care about that, but I do.
Hell, even if Google were to say "we won't profile you", I'd have no way of knowing that they wouldn't change their policy in the future.
I have never subscribed to any video service where the service provider knows what I'm watching and has my financial data. The last service I got was (traditional, no provider-provided box) cable video service, about fifteen years back. All the provider knows there is that I got the basic cable package.
The closest I ever came was being in the random sample for a Nielson Ratings poll, which I did not respond to (and in any event, I am sure that they do not profile individuals, because their sample is too small to make doing so worthwhile).
I switched to revanced and overall it's been great. Occasionally I'll get ads in the main YouTube dev but never mid roll or pre roll ads which are arguably the most annoying ones
I only use revanced because I consider picture in picture and playback with screen off a basic feature, and removing it to monetize inherently immoral.
The fact it comes with everything else is bonuses. I’d pay for those bonuses, but I won’t if they try to cheat me beforehand.
I use yt-dlp to pull down YouTube videos, and have ad blockers on my web browser (I didn't actually realize that YouTube even had ads until what was apparently years until after they'd rolled out, was stunned when I used someone else's computer).
However, I would assume that if a significant chunk of people go that way and YouTube decides that they're losing out on sufficient ad revenue and/or profiling data doing this, that they're going to start blocking those. I would guess that they can make life unworkably difficult for any third-party clients connecting to their service if they put their minds to it.
YouTube probably doesn't care about SponsorBlock, because they aren't getting a piece of that money. Heck, they probably benefit if it encourages advertisers to go through YouTube rather than content creators on YouTube. But the profiling and the YouTube-displayed ads are probably something that they are going to care about, if push comes to shove and the impact on their bottom line is large enough.
And one more point -- I can believe that the Threadiverse could potentially displace Reddit. Usenet was distributed and was once the norm for Internet forums, and something like that could be the situation again.
But the bandwidth costs of videos are a lot higher than the bandwidth costs of forum text. I am not convinced that PeerTube or something like that will necessarily work at the scale of replacing YouTube. At the least, it's going to be a rather larger chunk of money that has to come from somewhere than is the situation with forums. Someone is going to have to be writing checks, at the end of the day. Maybe it doesn't have to be via watching ads or users getting profiled, but the money's gotta be coming out of someone's pocket.
YouTube also has some of its content creators putting material up to be paid. Reddit doesn't -- well, didn't, as it looks like now they're exploring that -- have that commercial model, where they try to pay people who create content. For YouTube content where the creator is doing it with the aim of generating income, any hypothetical YouTube replacement would need to generate money to cover not just bandwidth costs, but also paying content creators.
NewPipe is also a good alternative if you want to cut Google off your data, it doesn't use accounts and instead subscriptions are kept locally on the device.
I don’t comment at all, so NewPipe gets most of the functionaloty I would ever want from YouTube. Plus, it also helps by not having personalized reccomendations to keep me stuck watching it.
Yeah, there’s no reason to pay for Premium unless you have an iPhone (and hopefully even that will change once the EU drags Apple kicking and screaming away from their App Store monopoly.)
How? I had the same plan and got an email saying they wouldn’t honor the grandfathered plan and I was still being upped. I think they gave me an extra month or two at the lower rate and that was it.
I have the $10 price from Google Play Music and just got an email saying they were jacking my price to $14, but because I’ve been such a long-time user they’re giving me until December.
Objectively, Youtube Premium is the one streaming service that I actually use... with youtube dlp because actually I can't stand the interface at all anymore; but even so, I use it and I feel ok about paying for it.
Ah, we have Waterworld. In HD. Ya... there is an island still, we call it Spotify on our boat. We couldn't do without our shanties... But we do have a sea cave ready tho, when those Privateers become greedy.
I’m not outraged at all. Just more perplexed as someone who doesn’t pay for it, since increasing price doesn’t incentivize me more to get it. Not sure why in terms of features it doesn’t have something that might make it worth it for those who haven’t bothered like return of YouTube dislikes and bringing back the ability to group channels together. Which really helps when you have an overactive channel that is putting out too much content and suppressing your smaller channels which leads you to unsubscribe from them.
Once they got rid of channel groupings was when I started using YouTube logged in less and less and now I use newpipe which does have channel groupings. Oh another thing is no control over stuff like youtube shorts. They really should give paid users an ability to block that off and auto convert short videos into normal videos so it isn’t looping without video controls. Other than ads it just feels lacking in additional customization for what is called a premium service. Even control over thumbnails so it replaces them with a screen cap from the video should be provided for premium users. YouTube is such an obnoxious delivery system by default. Provide ability to block channels too.
In fairness, it’s not just 50 cents per day, it’s yet another streaming service that’s increasing prices.
And it’s all well and good saying “you don’t have to buy it”, but these streaming companies are starting to get aggressive with squeezing money out of people.
Google in particular is trying to crack down on ad blockers, and trying to force more ads at the same time.
There's a lot of fatigue going around with everyone trying to sell you on their subscription service, "it's only x cents a day" becomes much more annoying when every facit of life also apparently needs to cost you X cents
Add comment