Edit: Since you guys are downvoting my post, I’ll assume my post does not belong here, because I represent a POPULAR opinion. Remember “ah yes, this is unpopular = upvote” “wait no, everyone likes nutella with butter, popular opinion = downvote”
YouTube Premium is a good deal for most regular YouTube users.
I don’t think there’s much of a debate here, yet most people seem to disagree with me
Pricing: Absolutely fair IMO. Think about other streaming services. Netflix is more expesive, even music streaming services are barely cheaper. If you can’t afford the single pricing, get a family plan, share with whoever you trust enough. How many videos do you watch in one month? How many minutes of ads is that? Likely quite a few minutes.
Who gets the money?: What did you expect? A lot of it goes to YouTube -> Alphabet/Google. Of course it does. Hosting a seemingly unlimited amount of on demand fullHD or even 4k videos and streams for a MASSIVE userbase is not cheap. Still, content creators do report that YouTube premium earnings per viewer are way more valuable than YouTube free earnings per viewer. So, I fail to see the problem.
Financially supporting Alphabet/Google: I mean, yeah, they aren’t the greatest company, I’m with you on that. If you have a problem with supporting such a company, don’t use their services. If you don’t pay for them with money, you pay with time by watching ads. If you do neither, you’re basically commiting petty theft. The victim being a “bad” company doesn’t make that better.
Using AdBlock: Like I just said, that’s petty theft and it’s not okay just because you’re doing it to a big bad company. Running YouTube costs money, if more people use it, it costs more. If nobody pays for it, it’s dead. Additionally, if nobody pays, no content creator earns money. That’s a secondary effect, as you could still pay creators directly.
Paying creators directly: If you do that, good on you, good on the creators. If everyone uses AdBlock with that, say bye to YouTube. Creators will use another hosting platform, either like YouTube (rinse and repeat) or selfhosted.
Content creators host their own content: That would be so so bad. The overlap of “content creator”, “able to selfhost” and “willing to selfhost” is small. Anyway, even if everyone pulled it off, most would go out of business for sure. Also, have fun browsing videos if everyone selfhosts. We’d need a global platform for browsing now:)
YT premium paywalls features: Yes. So? Heard of Bitwarden? People love that company for their generous services. Even they paywall features like TOTP and emergency contacts. Paywalling features is normal. In fact, it’s to be expected. Just because something was free once doesn’t mean it should still be free. Just because a part of it is free doesn’t mean everything about it should be free.
The YouTube App sucks / YT Music sucks: Nobody forces you to use it. But if you do, clearly you see some value there. Pay for it in some way if they request you do so.
Tell me why I’m wrong.
Linus? Is that you? /s
No matter how moral you think it is, simple supply and demand says that if people aren’t paying for it, that it’s not worth that much.
If you’re a creator and think your videos should be worth more then set them to premium only and/or make them only available to patreon. That’ll tell you if the market says they’re priced competitively. Otherwise they are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them - which even for people like Linus Tech Tips is essentially nothing
I’m not sure if Linus Tech Tips agree with me, but from context, I’ll assume so. Anyway, the free market isn’t a real argument to me. All it tells me is that YouTube and most big creators have a solid business model.
My argument consists of basically two aspects:
Paying money for Youtube content is better value than watching ads for YouTube content. Your time and to an extent mental state is, for 95% of users, worth more than that money.
Not paying money and not watching ads is not sustainable and morally reprehensible. Their service doesn’t finance itself if nobody grants it any income. It they demand a compensation for their goods and services, you are to either compensate them or forego the offer. You cannot just assume that a bunch of other people compensate for the lost income through you. It morally doesn’t work like that. If you do that, you better be okay with financially stablr people stealing in grocery stores too.
I mean you can believe paying is better than watching ads for your own experience. But the morality argument about whether they make their money through ad revenue vs subscriptions is pretty dubious.
I think you misunderstood. Them making money trough straight payments AND through ad revenue are both completely fine incomes.
However, there is no morality in denying them both while still benefiting from their goods and services. You’d support my argument if it was about some local busines. For some odd reason this shifts peoples perspecives. Someone offers something and says “hey it’s not for free, but I won’t actually know if you paid or not” (well YouTube does know, but that’s secondary)… It’s not right to deny them their pay. There are no consequences to it, but you know that it’s not sustainable if everybody thinks like you.
Right, but your morals aren’t the same as mine. I personally don’t find enough value in content on YouTube to justify the cost. So I’ll watch with ads because that’s how much value I personally put in it. I don’t personally care if that’s not moral in other people’s eyes, it’s available to me, and I’m not going to feel bad for doing it.
If it was only on a pair subscription I wouldn’t watch at all. It could be argued that them getting anything from me is better than me not watching and them getting nothing.
Watching with ads is completely fine. I just cannot justify watching 15-30 seconds of ads for a single video (it’s probably more nowadays).
I actually did say just about that in my post, so I don’t see how you disagree with me.
But if I subscribe, I don’t see ads, they don’t get ad revenue; they get subscription fees. I don’t subscribe, they get ad revenue but not subscriptions. Its not both, there is no denial of pay
IDK maybe I’m bad at english or something, but this is exactly my point. Either you pay, or you watch ads. Both is okay, they get paid. I just don’t think YouTube with ads is a better deal than Premium, due to the amount of videos and therefore ads a regular person watches on the daily.
Maybe so. If both are ok, then what’s the claim of immorality?
I would agree it’s just a better experience for me personally. If I use a product extensively I would prefer to pay for it to remove the ads. But it doesn’t affect the creator’s compensation so far as I can tell.
Immorality only lies in circumventing ads via third party solutions. By that, you don’t follow the contract, you have no right to consume their content, then.
Actually I have every right to consume the content because I control what’s on my screen and I never agreed to their terms of service. God bless the basic human rights we have in the EU
I am under no obligation to do anything and am simply exercising my human rights as the owner of my device and freedom to tailor my own experience on the internet.
You have been severely brainwashed by corpos which is not my problem. You can keep whining about this as much as you want to and it won’t change reality, hun
I think you misunderstood. Them making money trough straight payments AND through ad revenue are both completely fine incomes.
However, there is no morality in denying them both while still benefiting from their goods and services. You’d support my argument if it was about some local busines. For some odd reason this shifts peoples perspecives. Someone offers something and says “hey it’s not for free, but I won’t actually know if you paid or not” (well YouTube does know, but that’s secondary)… It’s not right to deny them their pay. There are no consequences to it, but you know that it’s not sustainable if everybody thinks like you.