• mishimaenjoyer@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      if google made youtube premium like $3/month no one would bat an eye and sub. but they’re approaching netflix prices and that’s just way to much. i rather support the creators directly than throwing money at google who will give the creators crumbs until they demonetize them because google is doing google things. also won’t solve the privacy problem that comes with using their native site/apps.

      • R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        I think part of the problem is that they’re hosting so much more content than Netflix. It really is crazy that it’s free to upload to YouTube to just store all your videos on there. Probably 99.9% of YouTube content does not get enough views to justify the cost of storing it.

        All that being said, YouTube premium comes with a bunch of shit nobody wants so surely they could cut that stuff to lower the price (or tiered pricing for people who want it).

    • repungnant_canary@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Does YouTube pay their content creators properly? No, they have to rely on external partnerships. Does YouTube help their creators solve issues with greedy companies making copyright claims on not their content? No, they close channels because of such claims and strip creators of income they deserve. Does YouTube keep their platform secure to protect its creators? No, hackers managed to get access to the biggest channels on the platform despite YouTube being aware of the issues for months. Does YouTube at least use their knowledge from spying its users to stop bots posting comments? No, bot comments are all over the place. And I could go like that for ages…

      The fact is YouTube is a shitty platform and people use it because they have to not because they want to. Because they have a fucking monopoly! People are paying thousands of dollars directly to content creators through platforms like Patreon, because they like the content. But people are not willing to support financially the platform that openly don’t give a fuck about their users and creators (which are the only reason this platform exists) and care only about their shareholders. Because why would they pay to make the rich richer while content creators struggle to earn money for rent!

    • emax_gomax@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Google has been shamelessly destroying all their projects the last few years in a desperate fit to make money. They’ve weakened ad blockers on chrome, they’ve altered the search algorithm so random BS is mixed in with regular to drive towards sponsored content, their starting to setup browser level DRM and creating un skipable ads. None of this is for anything more than greed and desperation. They no longer see anything other than money as the end goal and don’t care if their selling a shittier product at a higher price than no one was ever even willing to pay for. F*ck google.

      • regbin_@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        YT Premium costs less than $4 for me and I also get YT Music. It sure beats paying $4 for only a music service.

          • regbin_@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I’ll stop paying when it stops working. Also regional pricing. I pay around $3.9 for Premium + Music.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      No. This is why if a service loses sight of its core value proposition, it dies.

      If youtube is actually successful in killing adblocking on their service - which I suppose a server-side timer could actually do - then they will only succeed in killing their relevance, just like so many social media seem to be doing right now.

      I pay for services like a debrid and VPN, because they provide me with the services I need. For very few dollars a month I can get 4K streaming from their servers 24/7. That is all hosting should cost. If the fediverse version of youtube, peertube, became mainstream then collectively people should have absolutely no problem maintaining those costs from the users’ side.

      Once that happens and mainstream video streaming is part of the fediverse, I think the network effect that governs social media might snowball until eventualy centralised social media is a thing of the past.

      Do not pay for youtube, whatever you do. Let them die.

      • Pregnenolone@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You think too much of the average person. This sort of thing might affect you, but it won’t affect your friend’s 8 year old brother or his parents who just want a convenient way to watch pewdiepie

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          1 year ago

          Social networks don’t succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won’t all leave right away.

          If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren’t up to their eyeballs in ads.

          We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.

          This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it’s… well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let’s just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn’t quite hit that tipping point yet I don’t think.

          With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They’re already selling views which could really sink them in the end.

      • Vlyn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You do realize the average person watches YouTube on their TV or their phone, with ads? You are not the target audience for Google.

        So I fully expect YouTube to kill adblocking at some point and they might lose what? 10% of users? Of which 5% either come back to watch ads or pay the subscription because all the content is on there?

        I’m 100% pro adblocker, the internet is a mess without, but it’s stupid to think YouTube wouldn’t cut you off the moment you don’t provide any benefit to their service (For example despite adblocking you might give Superchat money to streamers, or join Streamer memberships).

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          Audience is only part of the equation, arguably not the largest part. How many content creators use adblock? The big ones already know how completely meaningless ad revenue is because youtube doesn’t pay them enough and they are already aware of how easy it is to block ads. Also they’re more likely to be using youtube on a desktop because they use one to create, and they also are more aware of the alternatives like revanced. A lot of big creators have spoken out over the years in favour of adblocking.

          If youtube makes it impossible for creators to use their own platform they’ll leave in droves, and they will have the voice to encourage their audience to follow. Youtube isn’t the main voice on their own site, the creators are.

          Another thing this will impact is the ability for creators to collaborate, since they would have to watch others’ ads in order to see their videos.

          Once that happens, the audience will naturally follow. That’s how social media sites have failed in the past. They’ve pissed off the power users to the point they finally left, then the content declined, then users followed.

          Youtube is making the same mistake all capitalist entities do, of mistreating the people who actually make the product they’re selling. It’s a fundamental contradiction that only leads to decline in the end, it’s just a matter of when. This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, if this isn’t it, then something down the line will be.

          • Vlyn@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…

            Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.

            The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.

              • Vlyn@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer

                Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.

                whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide

                There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.

                To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.

                • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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                  1 year ago

                  I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime. Plenty of services exist that can do what Youtube does. Peertube is a fediverse youtube that is based on a P2P model that lessens those burdens significantly, and it will grow with its users.

                  The thing that makes youtube dominant is the same thing that makes other social media platforms dominant: users and creators.

                  They are squeezing those users and creators as much as they think they can without completely alienating them and forcing them to find a better alternative. Once they pass the tipping point and an exodus begins, history shows they will only worsen things and accelerate the process.

                  The thing about the game of “how much closer can I fly to the sun without losing everything?” is that they will inevitably lose. You can moralise all you want, the reality is that they are getting closer and closer to losing every day. When they get there, you can blame whoever you want, it won’t change anything.

                  • Vlyn@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime.

                    Did you just compare your small private server with YouTube’s infrastructure? Jesus Christ.

                    Google had already been paying about 2 million a month for bandwidth in 2015 or so.

                    I work for a larger company as a software developer, even with a billion in gross sales, there is absolutely no chance to provide even a tenth of YouTube’s service. Especially for free (without paywalls). The company would go bust in two years.

            • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              $20/mo would have kept me fed for the better part of a month a couple years ago. Money has almost never not been tight, often to the point of being inhumane.

              If they start forcing ads, I’ll just do what I used to do when I didn’t have home internet and start downloading videos instead. Which is nicer to be able to hold onto anyway. If someone doesn’t like me “stealing,” they can fucking pay me.

              • Vlyn@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur’s Gate 3, even I’m waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that’s just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.

                $20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we’re being honest.

                I don’t like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That’s the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we’d see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.

                And let’s be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It’s difficult to find a person who doesn’t have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).

      • focusedkiwibear@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        lol this post is nothing more than a tantrum from a leech of a service they’re too cheap to pay for and scrabbling for reasons other than said cheap-ness

        you may get likes on the internet for this wholly selfish take but we all know it’s nothing more than that.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          It’s just devastating when you invent unwholesome motivations for my words to attack as an alternative to attacking the ideas themselves.

          My ego is in tatters.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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      Personally I don’t want to pay Google out of principle tbh, the creators I support can benefit from my Patreon donations and Nebula subscription

      • regbin_@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s way too expensive and I can’t afford it. YTP is less than $4 a month so at least the creators gets at least a few cents from my views, and I watch a lot of creators.

        • ThrowawayOnLemmy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Where the hell are you paying less than $4 a month? It’s $14 here in America. Even with a student discount, it’s still twice the price you’re quoting.

      • BeeOneTwoThree@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I find this take wierd. If you do not want to support Google, stop using services created by them.

        The content creators can upload videos to multiple platforms if they want to

      • regbin_@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I want creators to get paid when I watch them but I also don’t want ads. YT Premium is affordable (it costs less than $4 a month for me) for me and I also get YT Music with it. I watch hundreds of hours worth of video from multiple creators so it’s a fair deal.

        • rabbit_wren@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Quit bragging and start sharing that code you’re using for $4/month YT Premium that the rest of us have to pay $13.99 after last month’s price hike.

        • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Woah dude that’s crazy. Anyways, I’m still going to AdBlock them and pirate yt music. Big tech can suck my

    • Durotar@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I support the sentiment, but today everything is a service that wants your money, this resource is finite. And when it comes to YouTube, it’s not even about whether you like it or not: YouTube is a monopolist.

      • Tenniswaffles@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And that’s how things die due to no revenue. Running YouTube is expensive af and the more people who used things like revanced, the worse things will become for everyone else.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          It’s funny how you put all the blame on the users and none on the people that run the site. They fail to pay creators properly, fail to protect them from copyright claim abuse, and all the while they expect those creators to keep making content to keep their site relevant. It’s going to come crashing down eventually.

          Also, in matters of taste the customer is always right. If people are so fed up with ads that they adblock en masse and/or leave, then youtube are the only ones to blame.

          • Tenniswaffles@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My point in my comment was about how YouTube is expensive to run and that the more people who refuse to generate revenue for it (I feel dirty writing that and strongly disagree with it, by my feelings have no effect on reality,) then it has to make shittier and shittier decisions to generate that revenue.

            I 100% agree that YouTube should pay their creators more and protect them from bullshit copyright, but that would just compound the issue of the cost of running the site.

            What is this entitled attitude everyone has where they believe they should be handed things for free? It completely unsustainable and childish. Corporations do not do things for free, they can’t. They exist solely to generate revenue and if they can’t, they die. I generally hate corporations on principle, but again my feelings don’t change reality.

            • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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              1 year ago

              Nobody is saying they should be handed things for free, we are saying that youtube is doing a bad job and shouldn’t be enabled.

              Piracy is not a moral problem, it is a service problem. They are making their service worse with their decisions, and if it’s not sustainable long term then it will die, which I believe is inevitable at this point.

              Again, this isn’t about individual behaviour, it is about mass behaviour. None of us can control that. If youtube wants to succeed, they have to navigate the reality that adblocking will happen on their service, and I don’t believe they can do that. It’s not that it would be physically impossible, they just lack the capacity to find a solution because of how they are structured. The problem is that they will not accept a lower bottom line, they have to keep increasing revenue so they are squeezing people, and eventually they will go too far. Once they get just a little bit too close to the sun they will start their death spiral and then they’re done.

              Federated networks prove that we don’t need some central overlord to run our networks for us, and once there is a way to own our own video sharing network I would have absolutely no problem giving some money to support it. I’m not going to give money to a big corporation to enable them to keep squeezing us. They don’t make a good service, they make a shitty, awful service that we have to fight them in order to use properly. The only substantial thing they’re doing is server hosting, and we don’t need them to do that. The only real barrier is critical mass of users and creators, and eventually they’re going to push enough people away that that happens.

        • Richard@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Maybe they shouldn’t operate in the first place if they cannot think of a sustainable business model without f*ing their users up.

          • Tenniswaffles@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Basically everything within capitalism fucks over someone that’s just business as usual 8n out society. Usually to a much worse degree, think the children who likely made your clothes for next to nothing. I’m all for tearing down the system, but there’s not a whole lot as an individual that I can do.

          • Tenniswaffles@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You’ll care as more and more people have to quit YouTube or make progressively more shit content to appease the algorithm. It also makes it harder and harder for new people to start on YouTube.

      • mjs@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There’s a reason why they are the only ones. It’s very hard to scale a platform to YouTube scale. Like insanely hard and very expensive. The only other players that could take over are Meta and maybe Microsoft. Not sure if they would be any better.

        • webadict@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Is pirating stealing? Nothing was taken from YouTube. You could say it’s unauthorized access, or unauthorized duplication of data, but none of that leaves YouTube down any data.

          • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            In their defense, it costs bandwidth to Google.

            In my attack, fuck Google. Costing them money is a good thing. They are literally trying to lock down corporate control over the Internet.

            • Richard@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Right. It really pains me to see how many people simply buy into nonsensical corporate propaganda. This is a matter of our freedom and our democracy, and every single day that the mega-corporations are expanding their hold of our information retrieval and processing, we get one step closer to not being able to control what’s happening to us anymore, to tell reality apart from deception, to innovate, to build our own futures. 1984 is such a good piece of literature because it is shocking, but I find it even more shocking that we are accelerating ever more into such a future.

    • widerporst@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I’ll gladly pay for a service that doesn’t thrive on pushing propaganda down people’s throats to maximize watch time and that isn’t actively trying to make my user experience miserable by removing downvotes, forcing shorts and so on.

      I’d rather pay someone to kick me in the nuts. Sounds like a better deal tbh.

      • regbin_@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I meant that if you use YouTube a lot, it would be fair to pay for an ad-free experience.

        • Anamana@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          And you realize that YouTube will do everything in their hands to stop you from using these apps in the future right? That was kinda the point of the article.

          Making people pay (with their time and attention) while they are already paying for subscription will not encourage more people to buy premium.