It seems like we’ve all lost the plot. We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It’s impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don’t want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it’s the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn’t have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we’ve just become unashamed of greed as a society. It’s clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It’s unclear if I’m talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I’ve been ad-free for like a decade, and I’m not interested in regressing.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive? I mean, servers and bandwidth cost money. I’m in the same boat as you where I have run ad blockers, adblocker blockers, no script, privacy enhancers, and anti-fingerprinting since forever ago.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data. If there was a balance, this is where I’d say it was reasonable. Since not reality, I’m with you, nuke them all, and just take the content.
The definition of “reasonable ads” and “just a few ads” keeps sliding. I’m old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.
Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.
Just like cable tv!
I’m willing to pay for site and services I consider valuable. Not with my data, not with my attention.
I feel this way about many sites and services. There are a few that are on the fringe of worthwhile and not willing to pay for. If it did work on paid models only, I wonder what would happen to growing services that don’t have the user base to exist on paid subscriptions alone but may be or are better alternatives to the current paid dominant providers. I.e. would this create a higher barrier of entry in a market than exists today, reducing competition and strengthening market monopolies?
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive?
I don’t need propaganda telling me to want to buy shit that I otherwise wouldn’t want to buy, no. I’ll go to other consumers (and, more specifically, people I trust) to determine what things are worth, not entities with a conflict of interest in the matter.
The whole marketing/advertising industry is illegitimate and harmful, and I’m “boycotting” the whole thing until we finish the job of destroying capitalism and it’s no longer needed anyway.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data.
The corporations are going to try to mine and sell your data anyway. Why wouldn’t they? You think just because they have a revenue stream through ads that they’ll give up another revenue stream from fucking over your privacy? Then I’ve got this nice bridge to sell you, too…
I think you’re right, I feel like I’m looking for a little good-will among our kind (bleak and probably misguided at best). Sellers and consumers need to coexist in some manner, but what that relationship should be is yet to be defined. For now, we’re in a place that needs change for sure.
I fully agree. Online ads used to be some banners next to the content you came to the site for. I was fine with that. As soon as they put it in front/in between/… the content, I very quickly got fed up with it.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not really I don’t want to view propaganda about how the new 6 wheels family killer wagon is still chill even if you’re going through the desert.
I just don’t like ads and unnecessary consumerism.
God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don’t get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There’s no color anymore. It just feels like what’s the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I’m sorry. /endrant
My truck is white because it’s hot AF outside and it there is a LOAD of difference between dark colors and white in the sun.
I feel you… the world is a sad place today…
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to “inflation.” They’ve seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all… How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.
Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It’s kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn’t self-corrected.
That’s funny, I’m testing YouTube alternatives.
Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave… and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that’s actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube’s content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you’re signed out? It’s basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.
defederated
I’m not sure I understand what defederated means in this context. Can you explain it?
think they meant to say decentralized
yes, my brain apparently couldn’t decide between decentralized and federated, so it mooshed them together
Invidious is the most obvious. Its FOSS wrapper but it also lets you watch peertube and other federated content.
They already started to fight the project last week, Google legal contacted the project owners
I saw the reply they had. Interesting point about “We don’t use your API so we didn’t agree to the TOS of your API. Also there is no ‘we’, since we don’t host invictus; simply develop it as a product”
Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.
@PhatInferno There’s Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).
Unfortunately I don’t know of any other platform that would pay creators like YouTube does which is half the reason the YouTube keeps creators.
I hate the crypto bros as much as but I wonder if there is a way to set up a federated video sharing network that has a $5 monthly fee and distribute it over the creators you watcher over the month.
I usually follow creators through RSS, so I mix and match platforms avoiding YouTube for any creator that cross posts. A lot cross post to Odyssey though so if you wanted to have like one app in addition to YT that’d probably be the way to go, or at least worth checking out.
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oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when’s a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that’ll do it, i bet
Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula
Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I’m not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.
Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there’s no way you’re going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.
You’re allowed to upload the same .mp4 file to multiple websites. There’s absolutely no reason why a creator that isn’t getting YouTube ad money couldn’t upload to YouTube and PeerTube at the same time. Presumably if they’re getting YouTube monetization, they have some kind of exclusivity agreement.
you’re definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don’t have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3
I could see someone making some fork of peertube that helps creators get paid. May not be free but could get creators willing to join
if it’s not free what’s the benefit of using PeerTube? You’re basically describing nebula
Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don’t have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn’t a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don’t rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.
yup, even youtube isn’t profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it’d take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We’re talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we’re talking cloud we’re talking thousands per month.
It’s not impossible, I don’t want to get people down, but that’s the major hurdle
Every video maker should host his own peertube instance with only 1 user.
yeah but then we get a youtube esque site of nerds who love hoarding hard drives and setting up selfhosted services. Which is great, I did that, but the vast majority of youtubers don’t have the knowledge/don’t want to set that up
Which makes me wonder - was the push for 60fps across the platform a move to make competition harder?
I’m not aware of anyone that was using it as a leg up on them.
this is true. having said that - i follow a peertube-based french outfit called blast (can’t speak french, just look at the pictures). if i go to a different site (peertube.stream, liberta.vip) and look at a video, the streams are coming off video.blast-info.fr.
there’s no question video is a huge resource suck, and that nobody would want to host a lot of other people’s videos. i just wonder, if the model is federated indexes but owner-hosted video, i wonder if there’s a use case that can work at scale.
I do like the idea of having individuals host their own channels, but the bar for entry needs to become incredibly simple. Granted kids can spin up minecraft servers now, so at least that easy for online hosting. Self hosting is a bit more arduous for sure, but if people can host their own plex servers then I’d expect most video creators to be able to run peer tube - when it gets that easy.
hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they’ll get even better to where, like you’re saying, we don’t have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞
I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it’s very reasonably priced.
Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me
never heard of nebula, thank you for bringing it up :D
I’ve found Nebula to be great for a few creators I follow, but the amount of content isn’t high enough to wean me off of YouTube completely.
Unfortunately most people post to YouTube. They might not know about Peertube. So Peertube just doesn’t have the content.
Here’s to hoping as lemmy, mastodon, etc. get name recognition peertube gets their time of day too.
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From the documentation:
A PeerTube instance can mirror other PeerTube videos to improve bandwidth use.
The instance administrator can choose between multiple redundancy strategies (cache trending videos or recently uploaded videos etc.), set their maximum size and the minimum duplication lifetime. Then, they choose the instances they want to cache in Manage follows -> Following admin table.
Videos are kept in the cache for at least min_lifetime, and then evicted when the cache is full.
You basically get how it works. The tech isn’t there yet to replace YouTube.
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Peertube will unfortunately never be an answer because of the lack of way for creators to get paid for watchtime
I’ve had good experiences with Odysee. Not as much content yet, and it’s missing DIY videos, but I don’t see problems yet.
Odysee lacks of moderation. It’s full of conspiration bullshit, racist videos and horrible stuff.
this is very interesting, ty 💙
How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it’s all video content.
hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you’re likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome
I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it’s highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I’m going to end up installing it on mine, but I’m also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I’ll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).
Unless YouTube somehow starts somehow dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there’s always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that’s probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won’t know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it’s clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.
I hadn’t heard of Clipious before! What are some of its advantages over SmartTubeNext and ReVanced??
No google account
The main advantage to me is that I can work with Invidious as a backend, and whatever I configure there will reflect in Clipious as a client. So as I subscribe to new channels in Invidious, add or update playlists, etc, Clipious will reflect these changes accordingly. Advantages of selfhosting Invidious that indirectly benefit Clipious are of course built-in adblocking by virtue of how Invidious works, SponsorBlock support, and the ability to cache static assets, such as video thumbnails for faster load times, using a reverse proxy (Nginx is what I use). There’s a lot more we could dive into beyond this, such as no Google account requirement (for enhanced privacy).
One area where the SmartTubeNext and YouTube ReVanced combo has the advantage is the convenience of being able to cast from your handheld device to your TV. Clipious/Invidious has no casting ability. But I can totally live without that.
We’ll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I’m super happy about it.
Okay but I don’t understand. Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don’t know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I’m kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it’s the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.
Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it’s going to happen eventually
The problem isn’t so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they’re playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.
This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.
Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?
If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.
But… we’re not there.
Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don’t watch any streamers or youTubers, it’s just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the ‘features’ as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go…
I could live without youtube for sure, I have more of a Reddit problem than a YouTube problem… but it seems they fixed that for me.
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
I’d happily pay for the content on youtube, if the user experience was not as miserable as it is.
Search is basically non functional, sort by oldest is gone, search in channel is only available on desktop not on mobile, filter videos by date range is not possible, video quality is mediocre, everyone and their dog makes titles that leave no clue at all about whats actually in the video because “they do better for the algorithm”, if you want to actually read the comments or video thescription on mobile you’ll have to click “show more” and “expand” until your finger hurts, video caches only a few seconds ahead, which makes watching on flaky connections miserable, video quality defaults to 480p even on gigabit internet, subtitles have become almost completely useless, etc., etc., etc.
If they would actually care about the user experience, I’d pay. Instead they just make the ads as annoying as humanly possible, in the hopes that users pay just to get rid of the annoance, instead of paying for an actually good service.
This is crux of the issue. The whole websites interface is structured around ads. If you pay to get rid of them, it’s still structured around ads from its most basic level, so much so that simply getting rid of them doesn’t fundamentally change the experience.
I pay for premium and the only reason is because I watch a lot of youtube on my TV. However their app is terrible on cable boxes. I’ve had 3 different brand boxes and they all have the same issue. If you rewind the video it stutters while playing from the buffer until you get back to live.
And it’s so annoying if you have a ton of channels you are subbed to. The algorithm will only show you videos from like the last dozen or so of your subs that you watched videos from. Then show me tons of videos I have absolutely no interest in. Or tons of videos on the same topic that are basically just plagiarized from each other.
I’ve found youtube has gotten really, really good at recommending me stuff over the past 2 years. I’ve gone to great lengths not to mess that up once I noticed that. I also like how youtube now shows me 0-10 view videos since I keep clicking on them. Most are trash but very occasionally youtube finds an incredible video. Basically like tiktok but without that annoying short form content interface and I get to choose to view it.
I’ve got thousands and thousands of subscriptions to channels over the years at this point. It’s impossible to manage. I’ve no joke probably cost them in the thousands at this point.
I don’t watch youtube on a TV but I do believe there are ad free solutions if the TV runs some form of android, besides premium.
Wonder how long the ad-free non-premium will last. I predicted in the 2030s like 5 years ago, but with how quickly platforms are cracking down on “leach users”, it’s probably in the <5 year span at this point. Enjoy it while it lasts.
This may be a silly question but why don’t you just use a Chromecast?
Or a Fire TV Stick with SmartTube.
My problem is that the money given to Youtube only very marginally gets to the creators…
The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I’ve listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn’t getting paid for their content, they won’t be able to sustain it long term.
One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?
I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.
On the other side, as a user, I just can’t browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.
But to be honest, I don’t see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can’t pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.
and I’m testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!
If you serve me Ads that lead to scams and malicious websites, you don’t reserve my ad revenue.
I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
- I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
- I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
- A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
- The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
- Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly winning is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with paying for what you consider to be value. I pay for Nebula for similar reasons. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with free services including modest ads to cover their costs and even make a profit.
I do have a problem with ads that have gotten so aggressive that the free experience becomes unusable. For many providers, I feel like they have lured in content creators by promising free access and then changed the bargain after the fact by making the free tier intolerable.
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rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It’s a win win
Alright, let’s say I do that. I’ll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I’ve watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows… about 100 different channels.
Let’s ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I’d have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let’s do math together:
- Subscription: $12.48 (the extra $0.48 is applied at checkout for the 4% VAT)
- 4% VAT (rounds up): -$0.48 ($12.00)
- 1.9% + $0.30 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.53 ($11.47)
- 45% Platform Split (not rounded!): -$5.1615 ($6.3085)
- 100x split: $0.063085 p/channel
Ok. That’s ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. Now, I don’t know about you… but I’m kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let’s go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:
- Not-Subscription: $12.48
- Rounded up: $13.00 (the donation has to be evenly divisible by 100)
- Per-creator donation: $00.13
- 4% Local Digital VAT (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.12)
- 5% Platform Fee (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.11)
- 5% + $0.10 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.11 ($0.00)
In other words: I’d be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the “no money” problem, there’s also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. We also conveniently ignored the challenge of individually navigating numerous currency conversions…
Let’s be honest and come clean with each other now: you weren’t being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I’m certain that you don’t actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
We watch a vastly different amount of videos online I guess. I was thinking 10 or 20 people at most. But even with 100 people, if somehow you wanted to donate to every single person, the solution is simply to donate yearly rather than monthly. (Seriously tho, not judging your lifestyle, but 100 channels? That’s a lot)
You are making a lot of assumptions with your argument.
In your current model, a considerable share of your subscription money goes to the platform (in this case, Alphabet), rather than directly to creators. While this is indeed a reality of the current system, that doesn’t mean it is the most effective way to support creators, and it is this point that the suggested model seeks to challenge. Direct contributions, even if smaller in size, have a larger portion reaching the creators.
Also, your argument assumes that you donate an equal share of revenue to every creator, but that doesn’t always make sense. You have the Power of Choice: In the current model, you pay your subscription fee and have little say over how it is distributed. In a direct donation model, you have a greater ability to vote with your wallet, supporting the creators who you feel truly deserve your support.
I’m certain that you don’t actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
No, I don’t, I donate more than that, and most of the time without third party platforms that take their cut, but look I agree, it’s not practical for every individual to distribute $12 among dozens of creators around the world. But, if a significant number of people were to adopt this approach, the collective impact could indeed be substantial.
Also, patreon and similar platforms are only used for convenience, and are not the end all be all, for instance liberapay takes no fees (with the exception of the processing fees that are charged by the payment processor).
I’m also a YouTube premium user. I realize there are other ways to get around the ads, but I prefer supporting the services I enjoy using.
I subscribed to a paid version of YouTube Music many years ago, and at some point, due to some changes by YouTube, this automatically converted into a Premium YouTube membership, and I’ve been somehow locked in at $9.99/mo since then. Thankfully, my wife doesn’t care about watching ads, so we don’t need the family plan. That being said, even if I had to pay full price, and even if my other family members wanted Premium, I’d still pay for it. It’s 100% worth it from my perspective, for all of the reasons you mentioned.
I second this. Probably the best $15 I spend for my family every month. No ads for kids watching YT on their own is nice peace of mind for me and my wife.
And because I already pay for it, we’ve slowly all migrated over from Spotify to YT Music and been surprisingly happy with it.
How is it $15/mo for you? When I look at a family plan it’s $23/mo. I’m using Spotify with a student discount right now, but my wife and I accidentally kick each other off from time to time and it’d be nice to not have to worry about that. $15 would be worth considering since we just freed up some money by cancelling Netflix.
I didn’t know that you also get higher bitrate with premium. That might change things for me. Most of the time I watch YouTube on a desktop where I can use uBlock but when I watch on my iPad the ads get really annoying and I have already thought about getting premium just to get rid of the ads while watching videos during breakfast. Having higher bitrate would be a nice bonus.
Eh, I’m not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you’d have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement – youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.
On the other hand, ads suck. I’d have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.
What I find most annoying is that it’s still not possible to get Premium Lite (Premium without music, offline and background play) because I already have Spotify and don’t really need background and offline play. 12 EUR/month is a steep price for just removing ads.
Fair enough, you need to look out for you. If the money would be missed, don’t pay the bridge troll. Block ads and be free.
FWIW: YouTube Red was basically what you’re asking for and it cost the equivalent of 9 EUR/month. Red wasn’t available in Europe so this is a moot point, but that’s the rate that YouTube previously valued itself at as a standalone product if you’re curious.
They had a pilot project in benelux and nordic countries called Premium Lite for 6,99 EUR/month
Oh! I’d never heard of Premium Lite so I thought you were speaking hypothetically. TIL.
Yeah, that is a lot lower. If they offered that option I’d definitely use it over the $12 one… but I suppose that explains why the pilot never took off, eh?
Probably yeah, such a shame really
If you watch YouTube videos on a small smartphone screen, sure, the bitrate does not matter that much. But whenever I watch it on my 55" 4k TV I cringe every time the image gets a bit busy and suddenly there are blocking artifacts everywhere
That’s reasonable. I’d be fine paying but I just feel like the cost is too high for my usage. I don’t use YouTube enough to justify the cost. If they had like a lower tier where for 5 bucks a month I could skip x ads or ads on x hours of videos I’d be a subscriber already.
At least with my subscriptions I’ve been noticing an increase in sponsored segments. And you know what? I don’t mind. It’s much less jarring when the “host” is also doing the ad and pretty much just works it into the video. People have to make money, and this old-school approach works for me. Reminds me of ads in old TV/radio shows. And it doesn’t suddenly change the scene and quadruple the volume along with seizure-inducing backgrounds.
If you did want to skip sponsored content within videos, try using SponsorBlock. It’s an extension that skips ads, transitions, and other annoying segments within videos based on user submitted timestamps. Pretty much every YouTuber I’ve found with over 100K subscribers has already got segment timestamps on most of their videos. It really makes watching videos more enjoyable
This. Not that I pay for YouTube Premium, but I’d be annoyed if I got ads on top of that (regardless of whether it’s from YouTube or the creator).
We’ve been watching an old TV series called “One Step Beyond.” I actually like the Alcoa ad that runs ahead of the program. It’s written specifically for the program and runs as an introduction. They use “One Step Beyond” as a phrase highlighting their ability to innovate and in contrast to the “One Step Beyond” our normal existence as portrayed by the upcoming episode.
I know I’ll tire of it eventually, but for now I’m enjoying it much the same way I enjoy listening to a piece of music multiple times or rereading a good book.
Yeah I wouldn’t hate this quite so much.
But then the creator gets the ad revenue instead of the platform, and they just can’t have that can they.
One of my fave podcasts is hosted by an intelligent, genuine woman who happens to have a very soothing voice. She covers topics that matter to me, and as a person who has sensory issues, the fact I’ve never found her jarring is rare. I wish I could pay to skip the ad service she uses, because I’m just trying to be calm and peaceful and learn something that’ll improve my life when some prat jumps in and starts yelling at me about a casino or some irrelevant trash.
Bring back creator vetted ads. At least they’d be (hopefully) more relevant and fit the tone of the media I’m choosing to engage with.
If they really block adblockers, I will subscribe. To Nebula. It’s got everything I want, adfree (including sponsored segments), extra content and is cheaper. And the content creators get a bigger share of the money.
Honestly, others do have point when they say we are basically leeching off of the platform. I honestly don’t think I’d mind paying for youtube, I currently don’t because it kind of just got ingrained in me that youtube was “free”. I think the ad supported model is fundamentally flawed though.
Platforms will always want to make it worth it for advertisers to work for them. With the huge trove of user data that sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. have they will use that to leverage personalized ads that will feed your brain with garbage all day and coax you into buying shit you don’t need or sometimes even falling for scams.
I’d honestly like it better if these sites just straight up charged you right out of the gate. Maybe on top of that we could have sites be interoperable, like the fediverse, so it’s not necessarily what the site offers but how they offer it to you. Making you want to pay for an experience that you truly can’t get anywhere else.
