On HN ? Unless you are a student you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it and if you are using it enough to notice ads it makes sense to pay for services you use.
This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.
> This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.
This is just as oblivious as the "nobody wants to work" rhetoric that's currently popular. It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.
No, the reason people wouldn't use Facebook if they had to pay for it isn't because they're cheapskates, it's because Facebook isn't offering a product that's actually worth paying for.
Netlfix et al. show that people are willing to pay for things on the internet if they're actually worth spending money on.
Besides, even when you pay for things on the internet, most companies will still show you ads and track you.
I'm imagining someone in 1990 hearing you say that being able to instantly start watching almost any music video or filmed lecture/talk ever made isn't "a product that's actually worth paying for". I would've given anything to have that.
>I'm imagining someone in 1990 hearing you say that being able to instantly start watching almost any music video or filmed lecture/talk ever made
Imagine going back and mentioning that this would also be a way for the company (Google) to snoop on your conversations and censor dissenting thougth.
A free way to stream any video sounds nice, but it doesn't once you mention the fact that it actually limits the type of content you are able to enjoy.
We should be trying to build a better infrastructure for FOSS video streaming instead of trying to rationalize shitty business models.
>any conversations that are snooped on are ones you allow to be snooped on by using a free service
I don't think the innocence of the people who don't know the difference between proprietary and free software should be the thing we attack here, specially since the company in question has gone through great efforts before to restrain the spread of the FSF.
That's debatable. Any company that analyses large amounts of data produced by you in the form of posts, likes/dislikes, follows etc are effectively reading your mind.
Someone in the 90s wouldnt have a clue about how much garbage there is to sift through, nor the narcissistic culture that all social media, but especially the type focused on videos, brings.
All the grifters, charlatans, anti-fact, political blowhard, fake, plastic, garbage that litters the whole site from left to right to non-political.
>It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.
This is why I said we are on Hacker News. People here should probably value their time more than 15$/month if they spend nontrivial amount of time watching YT, yet still refuse to pay, freeloading is a common thing unfortunately.
I think you missed the point the person you are replying to is talking about - if you are watching youtube normally and seeing ads you aren't a freeloader. They are saying those that would use apps like vance or newpipe instead of just paying for premium are the freeloaders
Ah. You’re right and thanks. I had read that post, but from the use of the trademark assumed that YouTube Vanced was some other YouTube offering that I also didn’t care about, not that it was a 3rd party app that bypassed ads.
"On HN ? Unless you are a student you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it and if you are using it enough to notice ads it makes sense to pay for services you use."
Not all HN users live in the West. I know YouTube Premium is available in some low-income locations as well, although I concede I don’t know how much they adjust the price.
So stop tracking and use good old-fashioned sleuth work like “he's watching a video about fixing plumbing, let's show him some tools or possibly DIY products for homeowners”.
People _want_ to pay for stuff in exchange for not being tracked. But the business of tracking users and selling their data is much more profitable. Even when small businesses and startups create attractive tools to gain market share, they are (sometimes unknowingly at the moment) following their main agenda which is to get users' data and sell it multiple times to other buyers.
> you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it
This is a broad assumption, what makes you think everybody on this site can afford £12 a month for something they can get completely for free with uBlock Origin and YouTube Vanced?
This always comes back. It's supporting creators as much as the pennies creators get on Spotify. Only creators with millions of views make money. The rest, if you want to support them, you use alternative channels for that. The main profit maker is Youtube in any case.
That's not true. YouTube gets 45% of the money your videos generate and you get 55%. If a viewer buys a YouTube subscription then 55% of the price of that subscription gets shared among the channels that the viewer watches.
Subscriptions are not the same as Premium. Paying for YouTube Premium basically does nothing to help creators, so you have the extra layer of Subscriptions to individual channels and YouTube get you twice by expecting you to ALSO pay for Subscriptions.
No, YouTube premium revenue is also shared to the creator. As a creator you even get a breakdown of how much you earned from ads and how much from YouTube premium.
I actually forgot that YouTube had rolled out the Join button. You get 70% of the revenue of the Channel Membership (join button). YouTube gets 30%.
Yes, people click a button to indicate start and end of sponsored segments in a video. Those time markers are sent to a DB, and every subsequent viewer will use that to skip the ad portion.
no, it's not on them, it's on you for choosing to take money out of their pocket. They have chosen the monetization revenues that they are comfortable with, circumventing the way people make money while watching their content is highly unethical. You don't show up to a local course or theatre production and use a fake credit card because you dislike the fact that they use visa.
I only use a phone for watching stuff if I don't have a monitor or laptop around. That said newpipe is fantastic when mobile is the only available platform.
The Patreon or buying merch route doesn't really work for wide scale though. I can do that for a handful of the very top channels I watch regularly but I can't chip in a buck a month for all 400ish channels I'm subscribed to. Supporting a few creators is easy but giving a trickle the a wide field is kind of the sweet spot for ads.
It'd be really nice to have a way to say spread say $10 a month among the channels I watch, with maybe some options to weight towards smaller channels too.
Yeah a way for me to not pay much, but still more than my measly ad views would be to a creator, without individually giving them a few pennies every month or a bit at the end of the year. A bit problem is this kind of micro payment is expensive to process unless you can aggregate them at the scale of a platform.
This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.