Yes, a premium view is more valuable to YouTube’s ad impressions. I struggle to believe any of that value actually makes it into the content creators pocket.
I much prefer subscribing to a content creator’s personal patreon (or equivalent) as opposed to lining Google’s pockets.
Generally a supported of the company google, but when they hindered my adblocker, I tried to watch the ads. But they are too frequent, and occur without warning, arbitrarily in the middle of content. Kills medium like standup comedy.
And the last time I had a video on without my adblocker, an ad came on that was literally a person acting like they were a content creator. It was over 3 minutes long. I was only half paying attention (I was driving and just listening to the video) and when I realized it was wrong I thought I had bumped the phone and changed videos. It was so disorienting.
All the ads are lies or propaganda. I hate them. I actively avoid products that find a way to force their ads in front of my face.
$3/month really means nothing to me, considering I already $18.99/month for a YouTube music family plan.
My issue is them purposely attempting to make my experience worse and then selling what they have arbitrarily taken away back to me.
If you product is so valuable the only way a conpany can sell it is to attack your user’s experience so you pay them to stop it really starts drawing too many similarities to a mob protection racket.
EDIT: In order to be fully transparent, apparently inflation made a fool of me, the YouTube premium family plan has increased to $22.99/month so the difference would be $4 per month, not $3.
I use YouTube more than any streaming service and it was nice to get those perks. I am just waiting for the perks to be revoked and sold back to me one chunk at a time.
Offline and Background video play are the two main ones they tout. Which have also either been part of youtube previously or easily done for free by third party apps.
If you’re already paying for the Music subscription, it only costs that much more to have the whole family on premium music and video.
It’s actually a pretty fair price for all of that for the amount my family uses it.
I put myself, my gf, and my parents as users on the plan years ago and we all get unlimited, ad-free-ish (still have channel sponsored segments for anyone not using Vanced), streaming for less than 4 bucks a month per person.
It’s easily the paid service that gets the most use per dollar for my family.
I still wish it was GPM instead of YTMusic, because YT music still doesn’t have feature parity with GPM years after they killed it.
I was also a GPM user though I will admit everything I used has finally made its way to YTM. So I can’t complain about this anymore and it still a superior offering to the yo-ho alternatives.
The price is not the issue. $3/month is incredibly reasonable, especially given how much I use YouTube. The issue is how they are bullying people into paying it, at that point it doesn’t matter how good the deal was.
Just double checked this. Currently I am paying for a family plan which gives me 5 users and it costs $18.99 CAD. The family plan with 5 users is $22.99
I believe this recently increased because I kinda ticked off when they launched Stadia and sent all the YT premium customers free Stadias that came with Chromecast Ultras and I recall feeling like an idiot for not having the right plan and Google not being willing to switch me over and give me the free hardware.
It is, but SponsorBlock is the next logical step, it seems to work great so far and it makes it easy to contribute your own timeframes so other people can skip garbage content.
Brave has still worked fine throughout all this. I’ve been using it for a while and I wouldn’t have even known about the message if it wasn’t for news articles and Lemmy posts.
Nicer UI. Not exactly sure how the whole thing works, I think you are somehow able to enable/disable certain add-ons and from what I can gather extendes has a few more. Tl;dr: It’s better, consider giving it a try.
It was on Fdroid for me? What app store are you looking on? Also, libretube is another frontend on Fdroid. A little more buggy than newpipe, but it proxies YouTube requests if you don’t/can’t use a VPN.
Then you rewind to a part needing review and end up seeing the damn ads again. Same irrelevant ads that I cannot figure out why they insist on me seeing.
A couple five second ads I can handle. What I can’t handle are two unskippable 15-30 second ads at the beginning of every video and at 2-3 random points throughout each video without warning; especially after over a decade of pretty much never watching ads for anything.
Buying a (premium) service to get rid of something awful requires effort and resources.
Do you have the money? Do you get enough kicks out of the money you would be spending? Do you know the pros and cons of subscribing/going in a service (what will they provide for the money spent?)? Do you want to support the service - even so far to provide them money? You need to provide additional data of yourself to make the purchase and may even need to learn how to do it - are you ready for that?
Getting an (ad-blocking) extension to a browser to get rid of something awful requires effort and resources.
Do you know how to start using extensions in browsers and what to do if you need to troubleshoot them? Is it free (are paid extensions even a thing? I don’t recall seeing one)? Can you support someone you would want to support with a ad-blocker (some decent folks who make good content may be in need of the money they get from ads, but then again, there’s a chance you can send them money through other means)? Are you supporting a service that has an built-in feature that annoys you (in this case, providing ads for the users to see), endorsing such behavior (even more) even though you cannot see those ads yourself?
Both options may require research. Both options are influenced by other people and by their opinions. Both options have their pros and cons. Both options have consequences.
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I don’t buy any subscriptions. I wouldn’t have the money for that and I have bad experiences of them.
I can support someone with a grateful comment or sharing their content to others.
I myself stick with the ad-blocking services.
But don’t let me influence you with what/how I do it 😉 Make up yer own mind and act accordingly.
Whilst I am sure the article might be low quality ultimately, I still wish to see what other options they are advocating. This is clearly just a screenshot and only the first option for blocking ads.
Use a mental block
Close your eyes for 8s - 25 min, and pretend not to hear anything
What? I can’t hear you!
Why play one ad when you can play a dozen. Open multiple YouTube tabs at once and let the ads roll at the same time. A few minutes of noise for a whole few minutes of ad-free play
Use AdBlock Premium Plus
Of course, the best block is not loading the ads. Using the discount code AFFILIATEWHORE you can get a one year Pro plan for AdBlock Premium with six months free for just $169,- per year and enjoy the ad-free experience you deserve.
The last can’t easily be sarcasm. In app adblockers like Adguard do have a premium subscription option(I had one for a year back in the day, yes, stupid me) and I won’t be surprised if in the future some adblocker comes with such an option(should Raymond Hill stop working on uBlock Origin for whatever reason and the community couldn’t pick the development up that good).
I unironically use the 3rd option to support creators. I still use adblock if the creator isn’t monetized or it’s content that probably shouldn’t be getting monetized (eg. rips of game OSTs not by the game dev)
This is the actual “mildly infuriating” part of this post for me. Criticizing YouTube for pushing subscriptions on its users is 100% justified, but posting rage-baity screenshots of low-quality websites without any sources or context is probably not the way to do that.
The time for YouTube to ask for more money was before they made hundreds of unpopular decisions and drove away literally hundreds of creators that I liked.
Where are they now? On Nebula? I stopped watching much YouTube since couple of years, though I had a decent feed back in the day.
Ironically, I still do use YouTube Music despite it’s failings when compared to Spotify(no third party app support or shitty search results even now) but Atleast it worked for me when Amazon Prime Music refused to play in any web browser on Linux for me.
Most of the creators I liked are on Twitch now or have quit. A very small amount made the pivot to Patreon. Nebula creators are often very successful youtubers who are smart enough to make a new business, though some are academics who don’t do so well on youtube. I use youtube music too! And pay for it… And I’m invested, I want alternatives. I was about ready to download all of my YouTube music stuff and go hop onto band camp, despite that it would be many times more expensive. I just wanna be treated right.
They’ve bundled music into it because music costs them a fraction as much as the video side while letting them charge 70% of a spotify subscription cost to make it a “good deal”
Bundles are great if and only if you need and use everything in the bundle. Businesses love bundles because they know you won’t use it all.
Non-personalized ads pay a fraction of the money targeted ads can get you.
Non intrusive ads are pretty much just amal banner ads on the side, they pay near to nothing.
Youtube barely makes any money as is, if you introduce even one of these changes they are far into the red again.
Now if we also remove any tracking, then Google has no reason at all to keep it going and will just shut it down.
I despise Google too, I avoid them like the plague, my phone is deggogled and all my apps come from third party storefronts. But YouTube simply is not a profitable business without personalised ads and tracking.
People’s relationship with YouTube is weird. I guess cause it used to be free the expectation is that it should always be free but back in the day the content wasn’t worth paying for.
Well I paid for the ad free subscription but they sent an email that that doesn’t exist anymore and my subscription will cancel itself this month. Guess it wasn’t profitable enough… And that stinky move is why I won’t pay anymore.
Take googles 60 billion profit and stop complaining. But unfortunately that’s not reality.
The growth of YouTube’s revenue has always been steadily climbing. But it’s far too slow to be a competitive investment. It’s only like a percentage or two per year, that’s not a rate that investors want to see. So yeh Google is putting like a couple of percent more ads on YouTube every year that is necessary to stay somewhat relevant in the market.
Of course there is a limit, at some point you can’t put more ads into your system. I think they feel they are at that limit, and they are, it’s getting insane with the ads. . They try to get some percentage of people to stop ad block or some percentage to subscribe.
But it’s just delaying the inevitable demise. At some point they are out of people to milk for money, so growth will stop. So investors will pull out and YouTube will stop existing. This is just how it works.
Stop feeling bad. Someone or something will take its place. It will start small and grow and grow until it also dies. They could have 60 billion profit ‘forever’ but that’s not how capitalism works. Capitalist are going to capitalist and there is nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t matter what business model, or user experience, or quality. No capitalist cares. You and I care, but you and I are just secondary, afterthoughts, inconveniences. They just want us to do as they say, play the game, and stop complaining…
But it’s already a business that is making money and turning a profit for Google. And when I say Google I mean Alphabet, but that’s just set up to obfuscate, so Idc.
The could make everything above 1080 quality subscription only, or charge uploaders for the storage. This would probably also cut down on the low quality spam Channels that only exists for ad revenue…
Make the ads less awful is one way. Figure out a better way to analyze the video so you can put the ads in reasonable places, or let the uploader specify ad breaks. Limit the length of ads. Prevent repetitive ads within a certain timespan. Let users block particular advertisers. If the ad experience wasn’t so terrible, I wouldn’t block them.
Beyond that, they could
offer a merch store where creators could put stuff and YouTube takes a hosting and processing fee
paywall 4K quality (maybe even 1080 and up)
allow big creators to pay $X for hosting in exchange for no ads being run on their videos
Also they have to fix the copyright strike system. They could even make money off of it by charging claimants for copyright claims and holding the money in escrow until the review is completed, with that money going to YouTube if the claim turns out to be fraudulent or being refunded if it’s legit.
I completely understand, hence making a joke about Google’s pedantic argument by referencing a satirical cartoon bureaucrat who cares more about technicalities than lived experiences.
Google argues that functionally, “blocking ads” means no ads are displayed, and functionally, paying Google’s ransom also means no ads are displayed, therefore the two are interchangeable. Whereas the rest of us can plainly see this is a debate over principles rather than outcomes, and the way something is accomplished does matter. Especially when the article we’re talking about is intentionally designed as click-bait and doesn’t list the one thing they imply will be in it: ad-subverting plugins that don’t pay Google.
I got a Chromecast tv 4k specifically because there wasn’t an LG WebOS version of SmartTube. I love it for other reasons mind but the increasing of ads on the tv app least year broke the camels back
I didn’t even want to block ads when I started using SmartTube years ago. I only started using it because the official app kept stopping to buffer every few seconds, even though every other app worked fine. Reminded me of RealPlayer, lol. SmartTube worked perfectly as a replacement. I like the clean UI, too.
Every now and then i accidentally open the stock YouTube app and the changes it’s had since I installed smart tube makes me very glad I did. The best part of smart tube is the customisability of small things like scaling of specific elements of the ui.
Personally I use revanced & pay for a subscription.
I pay for a subscription because I like the service and am fine with the price for how often I use it (Far more than any other streaming service: I watch youtube daily) but revanced because I cannot stand video sponsor segments.
same here! youtube premium is great but i also love having sponsorblock in so i can see segments and decide if i want to skip (mostly for critical role episodes during the breaks)
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