Google warns users of these apps that their experience may deteriorate soon. They may “experience buffering issues” or see errors such as “the following content is not available on this app” when trying to watch videos.
Similar to Google Search, ads have become insufferable for many users of the service. There are too many of them, they may break the viewing experience, and they may show inappropriate content.
YouTube Premium is expensive. What weights more for some users is that its functionality is severely limited when compared to third-party apps.
The cat and mouse game continues.
For those looking to avoid ads or improve privacy, here are some options for free, open source, privacy-friendly frontends to YouTube without advertisements:
You know, they’d probably get a tenfold increase of Premium subscribers if they just, I don’t know, dropped the prices a smidge and had better regional pricing. Not everyone can or will subscribe, but Google is only making this more difficult for themselves by making it such an expensive service.
I was a happy subscriber when I was paying $15/mo for a family plan for 6 people. I was grandfathered into a low rate for being an early adopter of Google Play Music All Access.
Then they decided that grandfathered plans no longer applied and wanted me to start paying $23/mo, a more than 50% increase, so I canceled. I switched to Spotify for the music, where I pay less, and just watch less YouTube since the ads are ridiculous.
If they kept it at $15/mo, I’d still be a subscriber. If they sold just ad-free YouTube for like $3/mo, I’d consider subscribing to that and keeping my Spotify subscription.
It costs $23/mo for fucking YouTube? And to get the same experience you get with a free browser add-on? Fuck all of that. Absolutely not.
Yep. Their excuse is that you also get YouTube music out of it, but there is no option to buy them separately.
At this point I have no interest in moving away from Spotify, so Google’s gonna have to play ball if they want to get me back. It’s sad, too, when it seems like every other YouTube link I visit from my phone brings up a prompt begging me to subscribe again.
lol then one day youtube music appears in https://killedbygoogle.com/
… No. It’s $15 a month unless you sign up every single person in your family. It still boggles my mind how people have grown used to the idea of using services for free. The internet isn’t free. Everything costs money, even Lemmy. YouTube has server costs. Employee costs. And dare I say it, profit margins because they’re a business.
You need to pay for services you use. I’m exhausted with online entitlement that it all should be free.
Right, cause YouTube/Google are really struggling so much that their only option is to increase prices while offering less value and making everyone’s experience worse. Maybe, and hear me out here, the massive billion dollar corporation could make less money.
How much do they profit off YouTube again?
Oh wait - they don’t. They take losses from it. A business, meant for making money, is suffering a loss to provide goobers like you content and have the goobers making that content profit enough so they aren’t in poverty for choosing to make videos for a living.
You people really throw logic out the window when you talk about shit like this. You want corporations to make less money? Go fix the fucking tax laws not bitch about average membership fees like a fuckwit.
As far as I know, YouTube does not lose money(feel free to correct this with a source) and even just from a logical perspective if YouTube loses google money why keep pouring so many resources into it? The correct answer imo is YouTube doesn’t lose money theyre just greedy pigs but Alphabet(the parent company behind both google and YouTube) makes 10s of billions of dollars in profit, they are not struggling to pay the bills hell even if YouTube was losing then money fucking good they shouldn’t be allowed to hoard that much wealth anyway, but feel free to keep being a corporate bootlicker.
YouTube has been running on a loss since they last posted their info some handful of years ago. I think Susan was being pressured by creators to be transparent or something. YouTube has expanded well beyond what it used to be and hasn’t demanded money to compensate. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and Google/Alphabet has been fine with that but clearly aren’t anymore.
Alphabet makes money in other areas, yes, but YouTube specifically is the problem child that keeps begging for an allowance. So, how does YouTube fix it? How do they save money? By kicking off the freeloaders. You watch ads, contribute your 13 cents for the day, then fuck off - or you can buy premium.
Like I’ve said before, if you hate the big companies fix the tax laws, don’t bitch about them charging you for the service you’ve been getting free of charge.
Can you look to that? They only seem to share revenue, not profit. And profit is easily manipulated. Apparently they had 29 billion USD in revenue in 2023. There was a huge growth in revenue. I don’t see why you really claim that they’re making a loss.
The problem is not that YT cannot make money, the problem here is that the options are that you can choose if watching video, with or without ads, for free (well, paying with your data) or pay with money and your data to watch videos with ads.
I am not saying I have some god-like right to watch videos for free but on the other hand it seems that at YT they are trying as hard as they can to make me install adblocker to be able to use their service with minimun hassle.
YT, like every other company, is learning that if they don’t care about customers then customers don’t care about them. They are making the false equation “one less user with adblocker == one more user on Premium|without adblocker”, which is obviously false. And they are forgetting that they have a lot of more or less direct competition.
Quite a statement to say that Google (YouTube) would care about customers.
They care. Problem is that they care only to be able to make more money. They are simply trying to see how much money they can make before rendering the service worthless or unusable
Do you know how little money advertisers pay per ad? I think last I heard it’s between 0.5 and 3 cents. Could be even lower. That’s probably not enough, so they sell your anonymized data. That’s not enough, so they offer a membership without ads so the ratio can allow them to get closer to break even. What’s left?
The people getting the benefits of membership without paying for it. Third party apps letting you use premium features for free? Gone. Didn’t push the needle far enough. Most of their userbase using adblocker? New target acquired.
They’re very clearly trying to get their revenue and expenses to hit 1:1 because no company that’s doing well is going to crack down on their users. Netflix was flourishing so they let you share accounts. Then, the bill came and they said fuck that. Their revenue and profits went up what, 60%? They just had to endure the people throwing tantrums.
No, they’re learning that if 5% of the people using adblockers instead get Premium, they lose less money, even if it means doing what Netflix did and riding out the storm while people bitch and moan about how their free shit isn’t free anymore. Should they help offset it by making Premium more worthwhile with features even third party apps could do? Absolutely. Do I hate having to defend a company that could be doing so much more to benefit their users but are making pretty common sense business practices? Absolutely.
It reads to me like you think these companies are entitled to a user base. They aren’t. Just because it costs money to run a service, it does not mean we have to accept the price they charge or the anti consumer practices.
They provide a service not easily replicated, hence why there are no good alternatives. They operate on a loss because Alphabet/Google can afford it. They own the monopoly because they’re willing to lose money on it. You can swallow your pride and fuck off but it doesn’t matter. You don’t make an impact. They’ll still have the userbase and you leaving does nothing but lighten the server load from people who won’t pay anyway.
You aren’t entitled to free services at the expense of others. They don’t have to let you use their website without charging you. You not using the site without paying isn’t the attack you think it is, it’s the desired outcome.
That was a whole lot of assumptions about me. That, with the emotional language being used tells me that this interaction isn’t going anywhere useful or productive, so I’mma go ahead and step out.
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So, why Youtube Premium has ads ?
It doesn’t.
Source? Me. I’ve had it for months haven’t seen a single ad.
Loads of videos have ads in there. They’re put in there by the content creators. This as YouTube doesn’t pay enough. YouTube premium doesn’t block those.
It’s strange that you haven’t noticed those.
Loads of videos don’t have those either. I watched three to four car repair videos yesterday and none had sponsored segments.
Some of my followed creators have them, but they are the minority. I’d love to see some overall stats, as my experience may not be the norm.
You know what’s really strange? That you think not paying YouTube would make it so they could give their creators enough to where they didn’t need to take outside sponsors. Almost like YouTube has limited or even no control over creators having third party sponsors but you still blaming them for it.
YouTube has 30 billion revenue a year. You make a claim about what I think but I didn’t claim it, nor did you back up that things would change.
Your claim is like the trickle down economic policy, which initially was meant as a joke.
The Internet is actually free. Services on it aren’t always. The issue with YouTube monetizing, for me, is 1) they are doing it retroactively and 2) they’re monetizing content made by others.
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I was about to pay for it when they doubled the cost. No joke I told my wife I was going to start paying since we watch it all the time. The next week they doubled the cost. It irritated me. Not because I couldn’t afford it but because they added no value with the increase. Nothing changed.
I believe there’s a sort of death-loop phenom taking place here. The enshitification, you know.
How much you think the salaries of the pencil pushers are, the ones who get paid for little else but squeezing every single possible cent out of the supply/demand curve? The corporate greedsters, err the “revenue maximizers”.
Startup founders are told: