Youtube doesn't f*** care. Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Oh, they only upload on our platform? Thought so.
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.
It's just a matter of time before YouTube introduces ads to Premium, which is why I won't be paying for it. It would be one thing if YouTube had a history of respecting their users/customers and continually delivered more value, but they've failed on both fronts. I don't trust them to not make the deal worse all the time.
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?
They should disable this for people who use Premium. Although I'm happy to now know why my YouTube fell to bits starting on Friday... I uh.. pay for YouTube Premium so they shouldn't care.
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.
I also pay for YT Premium, but I have a gigantic complaint that it doesn't actually make YouTube completely ad-free. There are still the ads that the content produces insert themselves.
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 actually got rid of their directly paid solution to the ads problem and now forces it to be bundled with other services, because (and I can not stress this enough) Google does not want you to pay directly for content.
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.
I must have been hit by this change this week, got hammered by ads and got angry. Signed up for youtube premium. Sorry everyone, I'm ruining this experiment.
Please pay for YouTube Premium if you can afford it and watch a lot of videos. It's not cheap to stream and store the insane amounts of data they handle and I think it's a genuinely fair price.
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.
As someone who only uses YouTube for music I'm glad that embedded ads are not a thing for music channels. YouTube Premium is worth a thousand times more than any Spotify subscription.
There's a lot of people here who act like the only ones annoyed by this are people who refuse to pay for YouTube premium. But here's the thing... /I/ do pay for YouTube premium, and I still find this annoying. Here's why: I'm not always logged into my personal Google account on a device, and I don't necessarily want to log in on some devices to my personal Google account, but I still need or want to use YouTube. YouTube /is/ a wealth of information, and it's worth paying for, but that wealth of information often extends into topics which are, for instance, relevant in the workplace, but I am not going to login to my personal account on a work device.
Increased ads affect everyone, not just people who don't pay, paying only limits how it affects you in /some/ ways, but not completely.
I pay for Youtube Premium specifically because I DON'T WANT TO WATCH ADS.
Ever.
I hate ads with a passion.
I get the fact that content creators need to make money, but there needs to be a better way.
Youtube needs to give content creators a way to put ads in their own content in a manner that gets automatically hidden if people pay for Youtube Premium.
Worst case scenario, I would even pay for a higher tier of Youtube Premium that let me hide that type of sponsor ad.
1) Don't want Youtube to connect me to my real identity.
I browse incognito, or using alt IDs.
2) Many creators I follow are demonetized.
Why should I reward Youtube ?
If I want to pay, I would rather pay them directly.
It's their content that I watch.
3) I have seen a Ton of financial scams for targeting poor people using the names of Credible Top Brands in the country .
The fact that Youtube approves such shady Ads doesn't feel right to me.
What's the alternative ?
Instagram Reels and TikTok already rule short form videos.
If they can introduce a better Search Experience and a Long Form Video product, there will be a credible competitor to Youtube.
YouTube Premium is literally the service HN wants: honest payment to support a Google service costs and creators publishing on it. It's a sustainable service which actually earns more for creators than ads and data mining (at least according to last CPC values I've seen for video ads).
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.
I mean if YouTube wants to block ad blockers, that's unfortunate, but I also understand the motivation. But here's the rub. Youtube premium is still not available globally. I had a weird workaround that I used a long time ago through google play but when my current credit card expires, I won't be able to use that method again and all the benefits of my membership will go away. That really sucks because I actually enjoy the ads free experience and the fact that I can pay for it.
I don't understand how a giant company like Google hasn't figured out global availability of a service like this. Especially given that videos can be geo locked if needed.
Maybe this is a hot take, but I'm perfectly happy to pay for YouTube premium. It supports the creators that I watch and I don't see ads. I'd like to think that it also covers my usage of the service. For the value I get from YouTube (and YouTube Music) it seems like a no brainer.
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.
I refuse to watch ads and would sooner change my lifestyle to exclude watching TV or youtube than watch ads. It is blatant psychological manipulation. Fortunately there are technological means to avoid ads and get to watch the things I want to watch, so I will continue to do that for now.
I like youtube premium because it is ethically correct to pay for the cost of the content I watch + a reasonable profit for everyone involved, and youtube manages to be a highly centralised location for everything I care about video wise and I spend about 20hrs a week of watch time. I'm not paying for a billion different services Disney, HBO, netflix, blah, blah just to watch maybe a few hrs of content a month on each (at most). The value proposition of all streaming services besides youtube premium is atrocious.
Popular opinion: Youtube premium is laughably overpriced (in the UK anyway) due to bundling with the totally unrelated youtube music service.
The premium cost of 11.99 GBP per month gets you:
* No ads.
* Additional music service I don't want.
* No additional made-for-youtube video content that I'm aware of.
* The app removes one user-hostile non-feature: it no longer refuses to play audio while in the background (iOS).
* The app gains no new features, The iOS system wide Picture-in-picture that every other video service supports is still blocked, including from the Safari browser.
Considering that I get the only features I want in desktop Firefox for free, it's incredibly poor value and badly marketed. They could get perhaps 2 GBP a month for no ads, but their other user hostile behaviour on iOS and that price makes it a joke.
The ads are so intrusive, frequent and low quality that I just stopped using youtube on iOS completely. Good job.
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.
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