Youtube Premium exists so that Google has something to point to when it wants to say that paid services aren't viable. That's why they charge way more than creators get out of ads, that's why they force it to be bundled with other services, that's why they introduce restrictions like simultaneous viewing limits and login requirements and app restrictions that make the service tangibly worse than the experience of anonymously blocking ads.

Youtube does not want you to pay for content. It wants to monetize your data and serve you ads. It wants your consumption to be a passive habit, it does not want you to be actively engaged with funding the creators you care about.

Youtube doesn't offer a paid alternative to ads. It offers ad-free viewing as a side-perk when you buy other significantly more expensive Google services.

> Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It's not a service it's a hostage negotiation.

To which my response was that it's a commonly accepted business practice to create free and premium tiers (it's so common it even has a name: "freemium"), and that this doesn't remotely constitute "gatekeeping" or "hostage negotiation". And it is common for companies to switch models over time, starting out with free in order to spur quick growth and then figuring out monetization later. Make no mistake, YouTube was originally losing catastrophic amounts of money, and what has happened to it is the only path that was even viable. You either need a lot of advertising or a substantial paid subscriber base in order to not suffer huge ongoing losses and be forced to shutter. Just ask every newspaper ever.

I just don't see what YouTube has uniquely done differently vs any other company that has a paid tier or that has grown over time and needed to find additional ways to make money because it turns out that you can't turn around a loss by scaling it.

I don't live advertising either. But I accept that it pays for the vast majority of the content that I consume online.

- YouTube does not produce its own content, nor does it pay licensing fees.

- a premium account is for a single user only, no ‘who is watching’ profiles, meaning you need a subscription for each individual.

- there is still an insane amount of ads in videos.

- you get a bundled music subscription, or can choose to pay less but then it has arbitrary playback restrictions.

- even the lite tier is at least or more expensive than other mainstream streaming services (besides Netflix), which don’t have the same drawbacks.

YouTube and the people making videos on YouTube are ad supported. If you don't want to pay, it seems awfully entitled to then complain that you can't get unlimited ad-free content, regardless of whether that's been possible historically.

And yet, it seems like the author of this piece still feels entitled to complain about being asked to pay the price of service and these comments are full of people advertising products that still use the service without paying the asking price. It's like demanding that music authors just send you MP3s for free without paying for it at all.

I personally hope that more companies allow me to pay for their services instead of being plagued by behavioural ad tracking.

If everyone just constantly tries to circumvent YouTube's evolving adblock-detection methods, at some point YouTube is going to do something drastic.

There's no way of knowing what they might resort to, but usually efforts to thwart the pirates end up hurting the legitimate paying customers instead.

There aren't many online platforms/services that I think provide enough value to justify their own existence, nevermind sending them money on a monthly basis. YouTube Premium though is most certainly one of the exceptions.

Not even touching on the uploading and live streaming aspects, just the fact that you can stream full HD content 24/7 to multiple devices, embed the videos on other websites and it works perfectly with essentially zero down time is incredible. Paying like $10 a month to avoid any advertising at all PLUS access to their music streaming service... subscribing is such a no-brainer to me.

There is no free lunch. At some point you have to pay people for their work. Not paying is slavery. Either pay with your attention span or pay with money to get an adless experience.

The Premium plan gives you more features (and a music streaming that would cost you 10$ in and of itself if you were to use another music streaming service).

I am glad Youtube takes this issue seriously.

Paying for things you use is how you signal you like the product. The insane contortions people resort to in order to justify piracy boggles my mind. You either pay by watching ads or you pay the premium price. No one is entitled to YouTube. YouTube has to be paid for in order for it to exist and the creators to make stuff. That is the reason to pay for premium.

But it sure seems that you're trying to rationalize your unwillingness to pay for something and it does sound very entitled.

I'm not blaming the creators. I get it. They aren't making enough money from YouTube to avoid having to do their own promotions. But that means that YouTube is not giving me what I'm paying for. I'm paying for an ad-free experience and--because YouTube doesn't use my money to compensate creators well--I'm not getting and ad-free experience.

YouTube, while still a valuable resource, is way less valuable to me than it was even a few years ago. Broken/distracting search, real thumbs-down removed, videos defaulting to 480p on a high speed connection, ads everywhere, their algorithm being hyper selective of videos with MrBeast-face thumbnails... and they want me to pay for that shit?

I am paying for Premium because I like YouTube but don't want ads! Stop trying to do something different. If I wanted that I would be paying for Netflix.

They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user.

In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.