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
You must log in or register to comment.
$400 a year for YouTube premium.
I’d gladly pay that much for a robust ad blocker!
At this point, everyone should invest a fraction of that into automating youtube downloads. No ads, no buffering, and $200 will get you eniugh hard drive space for years.
I just use newpipe
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.
You might not have the latest version, that was a known bug and fixed yesterday.
I was able to sign in yesterday after updating.
As @[email protected] said, there was a second update (so, two in total) very soon after that “bug” (YouTube code change, is my bet).
Maybe double check you have v19.63 stable - the first attempt (v19.63 beta) didn’t fully fix it for me.
Been working fine for me since then.
I’ve been using newpipe for android for several years.
It’s great. One thing I’ve learned about these apps though is that they’re brittle. Expect them to break, sometimes several times a month. That said, there’s never been a case where I’ve noticed it break but a patch wasn’t already released. The thing is, repo’s like f-droid often aren’t up to date. Much better to get the release from the source.
Yep - I don’t use F-droid. Obtainium FTW.
newpipe is lighter and i like it
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.
Bloatware is not going to help the issue.
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.
deleted by creator
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
I’ve ditched Spotify a few times, purely for financial reasons since I’m already paying for YouTube Music, I always get frustrated and re-subscribe.
With Spotify I can switch between my car, my phone, my desktop, my loungeroom, my shed, anywhere I’m signed into Spotify, without having to start the song or playlist again. I’ve read YouTube Music working on this and it might be enough to get me to switch.
I don’t care who else uses Spotify.
YouTube Music doesn’t have a dedicated Android TV app, there’s no background playback on either of my media players and I don’t care for video clips.
You can also see all upcoming songs, and rearrange/remove them if desired, with Spotify. Maybe I’m not understanding your 3rd paragraph.
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
I don’t want cloud storage. I want ad-free YouTube. And the price is not fit for what they offer (they are a damn content hoster and not motherfucking Netflix).
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?
deleted by creator
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.
No, it was honestly just a replacement for google play music.
My point was: they likely have to pay for licensed music to the content mafia, so they cannot really offer anything without including music in the pricing.
Not apologizing for them: they’re assholes. But I expect they have more traffic. Still not saying they’re right.
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 fully agree and still think that regulations to a degree do impact the ability for others to join in spaces. The world is full of nuance and as always it’s a bit of A & B and C through fucking Z as well in small amounts.
Convenience has let people grow complacent to companies doing whatever which gives us now when the reaper has come to collect and wants more money since they have nothing else to focus on.
But think of it also as making a hotdog. There are rules that are super necessary and helpful. You want it made with good ingredients and not rodent and in a kitchen that is clean and inspected every so often. But imagine if they made a requirement for size and shape, stated that each hotdog must be measured by an IR camera and nuked by gamma radiation to be sold. Suddenly the only people that can sell hotdogs retail are ones that can afford plutonium and very expensive equipment.
Not a huge issue cause those hotdogs last longer and are reliable but there was literally a law saying all platforms must be responsible for every single comment on their platform and several of them said they would turn off comments.
With server costs, bandwidth costs, registration and more eventually the people that can afford to meet those minimum requirements are the ones who already have the money to do so. The walls get built and those inside make sure they stay safe of others impact.They can only do that while people have no interest in leaving the walled garden, and they assist in building them. It seems to just be how people interact with their world. Ignorant. And I say that without prejudice cause it lets them be happy but the horrors will come out of nowhere to them.
Fair, I also didn’t realize that I was replying in an Aussie specific community, so this part:
but there was literally a law saying all platforms must be responsible for every single comment on their platform and several of them said they would turn off comments.
makes it make more sense to me why you said that in your original comment. Over here (US) there is very little regulation of these platforms. Basically, they can’t knowingly host CSAM, and they have to respond to DMCA requests. The DCMA is basically just “take down copyrighted material when a right’s holder complains.” We have a carve out called section 230 that really lets companies not have much responsibility for the content they host. So in the US’s case when it comes to these things going back to the hot dog analogy, our tech companies only responsibility is along the lines of not explicitly encouraging employees to allow rodents, or even to police for rodents, it’s basically just if the right people report rodents they have to do something about it.
So in the case of YouTube, for example, I and most other people who know how to build websites can make a site that hosts video fairly easily. Because regs here are so lax, all I really need to do is explicitly state that CSAM/copyright materials aren’t allowed, do a shockingly small amount of work to automatically take it down when reported. Laws over here aren’t really the barrier.
Most creators worth watching will be making their work available beyond Youtube, and if they aren’t then it’s worth contacting them.
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?
Automatically? Not trivially
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.
Because they’re paying for the content?..
Cute.
Not if you don’t have enough subscribers. Then YouTube makes the money.
deleted by creator
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?!?
Edit - just seen this lmao - https://mander.xyz/post/5718061
As an avid YT watcher: lots of high quality food and cooking shows, music and concerts, science channels, space and spacefaring channels and of course regular entertainment. Enough to fill your whole day, if necessary. With no fucking ads at all. I love it! ❤️
deleted by creator
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.
I use it every day. I watch videos that are i on a specific topic, and YouTube has lots of them. For now, my uBlock in Firefox works. I will not pay for Premium if they block me
It’s times like these when I’m glad I refused to even log into Google to view YouTube, let alone buy subscriptions. I also refuse to view downloading content (without logging in) that’s freely available to be viewed as piracy.
These subscriptions are undoubtedly a rip-off. For those saying creators get a “cut”, there’s a reason why sites like Patreon exist. It’s substantially better for creators if you subscribe to them directly that way and get your videos from Patreon. Same with Nebula etc. If I really had to pay then I’d do that (and do already for some stuff that was never on YouTube anyway).
You can get enough subs for the price of a YT premium to get plenty of content to watch, even if you don’t want to subvert Google. So there’s zero reason to throw money at them for this. None at all.
I am not saying I like YouTube, but they are actually one of the best when it comes to paying their creators.
Pretty much every popular creator from other platforms (like tiktok) goes to YouTube once they are big and want to earn money.
And yes of course they earn more on Patreon, but if I recall correctly most YouTubers get most of their money from YouTube, because they have their biggest audience.
De-monitisation is a pretty huge problem for many though.
TikTok’s biggest problem is that it pays people through a very limited pool of money that shrinks the more people become a part of it. It’s pretty good pay if you live in a poorer country but it’s pennies if you live in a developed one. Twitch is better but still lags behind Youtube. Facebook is said to pay as much if not a little more than Youtube but it’s also much easier to get demonetized or have your content removed on there than Youtube.
I’m curious what’s driving this revenue rush at Alphabet. It almost feels like something internal, like they’re trying to make it actually self sufficient based on cloud pricing.
It’s not just Alphabet it’s cloud based companies across the board and basically VC money is drying up because it can be secured on 0% interest loans anymore
Alphabet would be less impacted by interest rates or VC money since they’re a megacorp. I’m curious if for them they are afraid of not being competitive enough if they get trust busted.
I’m wondering if they’re looking for more money to dump in the AI war going on right now.
It’s happening across a lot of industries, especially tech. During covid line went up very fast. Post-covid line stopped going up fast, but companies are desperate to keep it going up fast. Otherwise it would count as a slowdown in year-on-year growth and we can never ever have that (/s).
Companies then: Let’s make money!
Companies now: Let’s make more money faster! Our graph of profit must concave up!
Companies 100 years from now: Let’s increase the rate at which the rate at which our growth in profit increases increases!
They want the derivative of the derivative of the derivative of the derivative of the derivative of the derivative of the derivative of the derivative of the function of money over time to be positive.
companies want to maximize profits
I’m expecting YT to be spun off/sold within a year or so.
I don’t think it’ll happen willingly. They don’t want it to be a drain on their cloud business and they don’t want it to use AWS either.
I can’t blame them. The fight to block adblockers is an expensive one, and they went all in on the fight. /s
Asshats.
E: adding the sarcasm mark, in case it wasn’t obvious.
Revanced project, smart YouTubeTV and/or Smart YouTubeNext, ublock origin, and xManager for Spotify.
I have an android phone and an android TV so I see no ads. However I have an iPad which I take away and the ads make me sad.
Is there any way to adblock YouTube on an iPad?
Safari has the hyperweb extension that does a pretty good job for me!
Edit: hyperweb does a bunch of stuff, eliminating youtube ads is only a fraction of this extension
You can install Firefox on iOS, and install ublock origin
Edit: apparently not
You cannot
Firefox on iOS is just a reskinned safari, extensions are a no
oh damn, didn’t know that. I just knew that Firefox was installable on iOS, and extensions work great on Android, so I’d assume it’d be the same. But you’re right, apple locks browsers into using WebKit. That sucks
Piped frontend via the browser
Late, but maybe nextdns. I haven’t actually tried with YouTube on an iPhone/ipad, but I know they integrate pretty easily on Apple devices. Fairly customizable too with a free tier, just need to make a profile.
Won’t block YouTube ads.
Get an Android tablet lol
I went down this route because I had an iPad 9th gen and I wanted to get more away from Apple for various reasons, ended up getting a Samsung tablet and don’t feel much better off at all. Granted, it’s an entry level 8" $200 tablet, but the touch screen is much worse (the bezels are so thin it’s difficult to hold without touching the sides of the touchscreen), the interface is way worse in my opinion, and while I’ve adb’d the shit out of most of the crapware that comes on it, installing a custom ROM voids the one year warranty and I know how my luck is, that the damn thing will die a week after I flash it, so it just feels even less private than an iPad.
I actually bought it to watch YouTube and read articles in bed on something that was bigger than my phone but smaller than my current 10.2" Apple iPad, and I find myself just using my phone more anyway because it’s so clunky.
Maybe better quality tablets (even the Pixel Tablet) are much better, but I really think the state of tablets on Android is terrible, whereas the experience is fairly polished on the side of Apple (although it took them another year to add features like the new lockscreens to iPadOS). I miss the days of when my Nexus 7 was current, and it worked really awesome for a good price.
Don’t forget NewPipe
Careful with NewPipe, lot of Malware infested versions floating around on the internet
You can go to fdroid for a trusted source https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
Hadn’t heard of x manager, thank you! Super giddy right now, I’ve been using modded versions of the apk for years but a few months ago my go-to stopped working and haven’t found a viable replacement until now. Really godda give them props I’m super surprised at how easy that was lol
Also I’d used revanced but quit when the original got buggy. With how crappy their ads have gotten now I’m going to give the new version a shot thanks for mentioning that as well
imagine paying $204/yr instead of taking 20 seconds to download ublock
how do i watch youtube without ads on a roku/chromecast? pihole? plex?
edit: i found https://github.com/iBicha/playlet so far. havent tried it
Google have just started blocking all ad blockers, hence being so cocky about jacking up the price now.
uBlock Origin gets around their efforts.
*$396/yr
word yah. i was more making a stab at OP for even being cool with the prior 17.99/mo price
For reference this is about $20 USD
I did not pay attention and thought it was in USD already. Inwas shocked someone would pay nearly $40 a month.
Semi unrelated, but I had no idea that we started using only one strike through the dollar sign more frequently as of recent. I have always written it with 2 and am shook.
Probably because it’s less noisy in small text
For now…
I’d pay $50 or maybe up to $80 usd a year. But $20 a month is insane. I’ll just run blockers
Honestly, I’d be fine with even 20. Much more than that and I’d be questioning it pretty hard. I watch YouTube tons and know how goddamn expensive cloud bandwidth is so I’m biased
Nah, Google should be investing in new codecs for compression and trying to find other means to costs down.
I am spending less and less time in youtube and more time on the alternatives anyway.
All prices seem to be going up around the board. I just got an email saying my Turkish Family Plan (via VPN) is increasing from TRY ₺59.99 to TRY ₺115.99. That’s $3.29 to $6.36.
I haven’t received the email but I guess I should expect that price hike. Thanks for the info
nearly double the price for the same thing! this after disney raised prices, max downgraded service and kept prices the same, and disney is about to finish buying out hulu in order to, I’m sure, raise prices. Yarr!
People saying I’ll cancel will not cancel. I’ve seen so many corp simps in the last few years that I lost faith in humanity
But it’s on the internet, it must be true!
So many Google bootlickers in these threads these days
I’m indelibly attached to Google and I hate it.
The power is in the hands of consumers and not the other way around. All we need to do is educate the consumers and see how fast google breaks.
I haven’t seen any in this thread or any of the other social media conversations I have online.
Maybe I’m bubbled but everyone seems to be shitting on Google. Can you link me to 3-4 of these bootlicker comments please? I’m interested in what you’re seeing
“I will never set foot in this shop again!!”, a customer said to me when we couldn’t refund her thing because she broke it and it was her fault.
A couple of days later…
Enshittification of youtube is definitely progressing very rapidly.
