Watch how they steadily increase the price now (which they’ve already been doing)
It went up like four bucks this month for me this past month. I feel like I am in a no-win situation. I want to support the authors of the videos and music I like, make the platform sustainable, and I hate ads and data harvesting. There doesn’t seem to be reasonable way to satisfy all three objectives (or even two).
I’m mostly in the same boat with supporting the creators, however I don’t really like Google to be honest. I end up supporting creators outside the platform, such as via Patreon or by watching on Nebula. Most of my YT consumption is done via NewPipe, Piped and Freetube
There’s a little part of me that likes the fact that YouTube is burning a hole in Google’s finances tbh lol
Patreon for the ones you really like, and substituting watching my own content on Plex is how I’m weening myself off YouTube.
Unfortunately, anymore, even if you pay, companies (especially googie) are STILL harvesting and selling your data… I don’t know if there’s a way to avoid it without either unplugging entirely or going full in on dark web and anonymous browsing techniques, and even then, your data will still be harvested from other people in your life
If it wasn’t as freaking high as it is there would be a lot more premium users. Every other streaming service is full of professionally made movies and TV shows. YouTube is absolutely chock-full of berate crap where they’re barely paying anybody but the top 1%. It’s a grift. It should be priced with the absolute cheapest services out there.
The price makes a little more sense if you factor in it also includes YouTube music, which puts it more on par with a premium Spotify subscription, with the benefit of no ads on YouTube. Which is basically how I got YouTube premium, I was already paying a monthly fee for Google Play music as it was at the time, and the upgrade to add YouTube premium was only £2 extra a month.
Sure but a LOT of us don’t want the music service and have never used it once. People like me aren’t costing them a penny on music and if they offered a plan without music I’d jump in an instant.
I was in the same boat for ages and was happy paying as I kept the original rate. Then they bumped it by almost 50% end of December. Quit before the change took effect and have been using ad block ever since. The ONLY thing I miss is YouTube music as I’ve gotten too lazy to rip the remixes/soundtracks that aren’t on other streaming services.
While YouTube doesn’t commission, much, content it does store disproportionately more data. A streaming site has maybe 1,000,000 hours of content. That amount of content is uploaded to YouTube every day. It’s a totally different business model.
And, I don’t think I should be the one paying for that.
They should charge minor storage fees to the creators and uploaders. You pay to put your content up there if people watch it you get paid back as many multiples as necessary. It would be a fantastic method to reduce the amount of trash video stored up there that nobody ever watches.