So this is some bollocks. Guess I’ll be cancelling our plan since it’s only used by two of us.
Current price $17.99/month, new price $32.99/month.
If they boiled the frog better I would probably have accepted a $5/month price rise, and then another later… But close to doubling in one go is a no from me dawg.
Thank you for being a loyal member throughout our journey. We created YouTube Premium so that you could enjoy all the videos and music you love without interruptions.‌
To continue delivering great service and features, we are increasing the YouTube Premium family plan price to A$32.99/month. We don’t make these decisions lightly, and this update will allow us to continue to improve YouTube Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube. This is the first ever price increase for your subscription.
Links to cancellation etc: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12400348?sjid=6028684095030617608-AP
$400 a year for YouTube premium.
I’d gladly pay that much for a robust ad blocker!
donate to your nearest adblock developers.
i heard the ublock origin guys are having a hard time, and they are the heroes behind most people’s safe and distraction free browsing.
Got the same bullshit email, total dick move by Google and I’ll be cancelling. It’s just pure greed.
I’m be exploring the ad blocking and/or VPN options.
Google need to separate YouTube and Music.
Well aware of those apps, installed that yesterday on my phone and Smarttube on the media player, could still end up blocked by Google.
In my experience Smart Tube for my Google tv is already blocked. Updated to the latest version and I still can’t sign in with it. The code for activating the device never appears.
Google need to separate YouTube and Music.
I actually think they need to go the other way with it. Increase the value proposition by adding more features to it. Include more drive space, Google one, etc.
A lot of people are upset because they haven’t added any additional value to YouTube and are now just hiking the rents. If they threw in, more products and services to the bundle it’s a more compelling offering. I’d pay if it got me unlimited data on Google Fi, Google one with 200GB of storage, yt premium, I guess yt music? (I pay for prime music RN), and maybe some collab space/compute.
This is just the cable model. You want one channel (Youtube in this analogy) so you have to pay for the 200 channel package because that’s the only place it is even though you don’t want the other 199 channels.
If they threw in all of the things you said and still hiked the price, I’d still bail because not only do I not have any desire for those services, I actively want to avoid using many Google products as I can. The reality for me would be the same as including nothing and hiking the price, because I will still see no value from it.
I don’t want none of those “features”, I just want to browse YouTube without ads. Right now I have to choose, pay more than 100€/year to get it without trouble, or install an adblocker and also not have ads, but with the slim chance that YouTube will implement an anti-adblocker that will last a few days. I’ll just install the adblocker.
If they just sold an “ad-free YouTube” instead of “premium YouTube” for half (or third) the price I might consider it, since I wouldn’t have to worry ever again. I won’t pay more than 100€/year just so I can get a single feature of a huge pack of features I don’t need or want.
What you are describing is similar to Apple One. Music and Storage, Apple Arcade, AppleTV+, News and Fitness+. The thing is, Apple also charge these things separately too, but if you just want two of them, you can just select two of them. The bundle is priced in such a way that it is more cost effective to get them bundled. The cost of the smaller bundle (without News or Fitness+) is much cheaper than what Google is asking for YouTube Premium.
I would have no interest in Googles other services, I hardly trust them with my YouTube viewing habits. I’m not going to trust them to store my files, read my email, log my search history, even if I do pay them for the privilege.
Yeah nah buddy.
I only have YouTube Premium/Red because it came free with Play Music, then they killed that and we all jumped to Spotify because it was/is so much better and kept our subscription just for ad-free YouTube.
If they seperate YouTube from YouTube Music, YouTube Music would die in seconds. The app sucks, having it linked to YouTube sucks, they know this.
Weird. I hated YouTube music (have it since my friend let me join his family plan) until I finally tried Spotify using xmanager. I realized ytm is miles ahead of Spotify and it’s made me rethink my hate for it
What do you like about Spotify besides your friends being on it?
I’ve gotten used to the queue function which lets you scroll through your entire now playing list. I was blown away seeing that Spotify only shows the upcoming songs (at least on mobile). I’m also liking the option to switch to a music video mid song. That’s super neat.
That said, even though I’ve never planned on paying for Spotify, I can totally see wanting options to pay for things separately
It sounds like you are agreeing with me. The value proposition for any of these services individually is very low. But when combined it would be more worthwhile.
From a business perspective it would be a solid strategic move that would allow their services to differentiate themselves from competitors. Spotify can’t give you additional “Google drive” storage. It certainly doesn’t have any way to compete with YouTube. When you combine all of these capabilities and services you can make a product that warrants additional money each month
They want You to do everything Google. YouTube is the only thing that differentiates their All-in-One product from the competition. Everyone offers Music so VEVOs no value. Everything else Google offers for no monetary charge.
AppleOne includes music, storage and AppleTV+, as well as Fitness (that nobody uses, but nobody admits to not using).
Amazon Prime includes music, Audiobooks and Freight Discounts.
Xbox Gold offers games.
Netflix, HBO, etc, has no extra value except “original” and exclusive content.
Jesus, how do they justify that price?
They charge more than Netflix yet they don’t even make any of their own content?
It’s because you also get youtube music streaming included with it. If netflix had its own music streaming service bundled in their prices would be even higher than they are now.
Music might really be their main problem. Basically every video has some music in it. If not in the foreground, then in the background. Even game soundtracks in Let’s Plays are often under license. So the moment someone plays any such video, the content mafia comes around the corner with their baseball bats in hand collecting their tolls.
So I assume if they have to pay for music any way, they figured they might as well include a tailored music listening experience with Premium.
I’m always amaze by the fact that all these streaming platform do is give you access to others content ( they dont create shit), but they get to keep 98.7% of the revenue, because.
In this industry the “means of production” = “hosting and distribution platform and servers”. If you’ve got no way of hosting your content and putting it in front of people, your content may as well not exist. In much the same way an actor needs a theatre.
So as per any capitalist industry, those that own the means of production (I.e. google with YouTube) exploit its workers (content creators) to generate profit in the same way a steel mill owner gets to keep the profits from his steel mill despite the fact that the owner never creates any steel ingots themselves.
Yeah people don’t notice that the Internet used to be like going over to a friend’s house who had the cool stuff which over time became niche shops.
Rules, regulations and restrictions, slowly put up more and more stops for simple small people to enter the space and left only large companies in it’s place. Some of this by consumers own demand for more.
So here we are, the Internet just the next space for capitalism and having every last scrap of revenue squeezed from it while those with capital complain they need the next big invention to exploit as they run out of space and room to grow and things to consume. Each day pushing more towards their pockets and less towards the rest of us.
I just want small curators back. Small groups filling niches instead of massive “creators” who simply consume as much as possible to regurgitate it back at their audience.
I think you’re mostly correct, but I slightly disagree on this part:
Rules, regulations and restrictions, slowly put up more and more stops for simple small people to enter the space
I think the reality is that convenience simply trumped out. As much as we can see now that allowing the internet to coalesce into a handful of silos, or often only 1-2 silos as is the case with Youtube, years ago the major value they provided was that you could simply go there and find the content. Reddit’s demise reminded me of this more than anything else. I was a daily visitor for quite an array of topics for over a decade. When they decided to fully fuck up the site and I left, I found myself having to think about which of those content sources I wanted to replace and what I’d want to replace them with, and as much as it would be cool for that all to just be “lemmy” the reality is that I now am looking at far more RSS feeds, discord servers, mastodon servers, etc.
I also think that there is a phenomenon that is a bit more insidious at play, and that’s that most of these services are funded by VC or these massive companies and don’t make money for years or even a decade or more until they’ve consolidated the market to basically just them and they can charge whatever they feel like. Youtube follows this pattern. Even after Google’s acquisition, it was quite a while before YouTube became even break-even as they gobbled up the market for this type of thing. VC/Google can sink billions into infrastructure without turning a profit until the market is basically just Youtube, and then all of a sudden we get Adblock crackdowns and near doubling of Premium rates. The only place that might compete with Youtube at this point is probably Apple or Amazon mostly because they’re the only companies that can say “we’re going to lose hundreds of millions or billions for at least a decade.”
Ultimately, I think this is going to be the major lesson from about 2000-2020. As consumers, we should be extremely mistrusting of businesses where we can’t understand how they make money, because usually that just means that the way they make money is to basically monopolize the market and then really fuck us.
I will not justify the price increase of this post, but the high margins kinda do make sense to me.
The average profit that youtube makes on a gigabyte worth of video data, is much much lower than that 98.7%. There is such a vast amount of random crap being uploaded, that the content creators that actually generate views, hence revenue, must bear a huge sinkhole of costs for youtube. The same holds for Twitch: streams with only a handfull of watchers cost Twitch money. But it is a double edged sword. Because the reason these content creators are as big as they are, is because they could start from nothing, and upload for free. The big guys support vast amounts of amateurs trying to become big. It is probably one of the most socialistic models we have in our current capitalistic market.
That being said: Youtube is getting shittier in an attempt to sqeeze this model for extra profit.
There is such a vast amount of random crap being uploaded, that the content creators that actually generate views, hence revenue, must bear a huge sinkhole of costs for youtube.
There are better ways around this than by doubling the price for everyone and continuing to allow unlimited BS uploads for free. They charge $1.99 for 100GB of storage for email and photos. I guess it never occurred to them to include a minor barrier like this that most legitimate aspiring content creators would be willing to pay but would stop randos posting 10 hour long videos in 4K.
Exactly. This is why people defending YouTube are full of shit.
YouTube is trying to fuck everyone over first instead of investing time and effort into but making their platform a cesspool.
Start by removing the Nazi assholes and stop allowing everyone to post for free past their regular 15gb limit.
The current model means the cost of youtube and YouTube premium will just go up forever and price increases will be a monthly thing.
Interesting problem. Is it possible to trim copyright and pointless content, e.g. children’s movies, entertainment shorts with less than a certain number of views, which can be used as pointers to redirect to the original content?
These platforms are basically just one step removed from pure landlordism. Same goes for Uber and similar shit. The platforms themselves are usually cheap to maintain, the exception here might be Youtube since it does gobble up a whole lot of bandwidth and storage but come on nobody streams $10 worth of bandwidth a month.
The platforms themselves are usually cheap to maintain
?? video is extremely intensive in terms of storage, bandwidth, and compute needs. There are also very few people in the world who know how to work on these things so they’re expensive to hire. These platforms are anything but cheap to run, there’s a reason they all go all in on ads and subscriptions.
I’m reading this thread with lots of people saying they keep paying for premium because they watch so much YouTube, and fair play to them, it’s more convenient to pay
But what the fuck are people actually watching?!?
I watch a lot of long-form video essays about politics, economics, media analysis, and societal stuff like that, sketch or video game comedy, and some random hobby stuff, all by independent creators. I also watch stream vods on YouTube. Oh and asmr to fall asleep. I don’t want to watch ads obviously but it would be much more expensive to support everyone I watch on patreon, even if I only gave a dollar to every one. And I do want to support them financially because a lot of that long-form stuff literally takes weeks or months to make.
This is what I don’t understand either - as someone who stopped using Youtube the day that they brought ads in (except for watching embedded videos elsewhere as they don’t have ads), I haven’t been exposed to the long-form enshittification others have experienced and so maybe that’s why I don’t get it, but who is using Youtube for hours on end and what are they watching? Is it just conspiracy theorists falling further and further down the rabbit hole? I really don’t know.
