A premium-lite offering is what’s missing for me to subscribe. The Australia cost of premium is at least $21.99 and there’s no opt out for the music offering which I will never use, making it bad value compared to an ad blocker.
About $12 is all I’m willing to spend per month given the much lower content consumption compared to even prime video for me, and that includes Amazon prime for about $12 anyway.
I bring this up because the article mentions Youtube seems to have killed that off, which I suspect will drive more ad blocker usage rather than more people switching to full premium.
I wonder if there's a good reason why Google doesn't offer a subscription option for YouTube alone? They tried it once (YouTube Red) some time ago & dropped it fairly quickly.
Totally uninformed speculation: maybe they found that it was their most profitable viewers that were paying for YT Red? Which in turn would mean that any subscription program would be a net loss over relying on ads for income.
You could just say "charge more" of course, but maybe that higher charge is more than those customers are actually willing to pay for YouTube?
Which in turn would mean that ads will always be more profitable than subscriptions for Google.
In this model YouTube Premium, which includes Music, might be sufficiently expensive that it ends up profitable overall thanks to the bundling of YT & Music together.
It could be an agreement with the music labels because plenty of people will use YouTube for music even without using the separate youtube music webpage or app.
Australian pricing is $14.99 per month for an individual subscription or $22.99 per month for a family subscription (I subscribe to the latter). Well worth it.
Ahh so they’ve decided to charge $20 for premium as an iCloud subscription just because somehow the near-trillion-dollar company can’t absorb a cost of doing business in terms of payment processing.
Even at $15 it’s still by far the most expensive service I’d be paying for, and I only watch an hour or two a month, so it represents pretty awful value for me. It may be different for you.
Ad blocking tools can always update too. If YouTube keeps fighting to draw more and more revenue out of its users, it only drives people to other services like TikTok, where their ripped content is ready to watch. Creators on YouTube should possibly be given free accounts, because we all know the pay for their work is not fair as well. Most YT creators don't make a dime for their work.
I use twitch quite extensively and I almost never see ads. Only maybe 2-3 per year when the cat temporarily catch the mouse, and then the mouse free itself again. No fancy setup either: just a ublock origin on firefox.
I only end up watching something on youtube myself manually if I found it literally absolutely impossible to find an article elsewhere on the subject.
Now passive media consumption, my husband does all of that for us... we have a bunch of youtubers he puts on for us on Apple TV, but I would never type in youtube.com myself and browse around.
i don’t browse around youtube. i have over the many years curated a list of channels that i follow. i basically only pick videos from the “subscriptions” tab.
YT is too expensive. Even their lite plan (last look, 12,99 / month) isn't worth it - it's a good timekiller when I'm bored, but it doesn't often offer enough value for the money they want.
I'd love to but since upgrading to the latest macOS, every chromium-based browser (Brave, Edge, Chrome, etc) gets ERR_CONNECTION_RESET repeatedly on every single network connection until they eventually go through. Some special handling of this makes Edge basically unusable in that it almost never loads, whereas Chrome and Brave will eventually get there. Despite my best efforts in search and posting online, I have yet to find a solution. Firefox works perfectly, but I would like to be able to use Brave again.
Youtube is ad ridden anyway. I am using Premium, which gets rid of the third party ads. But sadly most Youtubers (content creators) get sponsored by Surfshark and the like. Some now do two in-content ads that you then have to skip over. It's annoying, repetitive and let's be honest - extremely irrelevant.
The problem I'm now seeing is that creators have to make videos in which they either reference the sponsor a lot throughout or the whole video is centered around the sponsored content
That’s a strawman simplification. If ads weren’t pervasive to the point of overshadowing content, ridden with malware and scams, resource intensive, loud, or privacy invasive, people would tolerate them more.
The continued escalating abuses of the advertising industry made ad-blocking more common. They have no one to blame but themselves.
Video seeking as a paid feature. Don't use it personally, but I've heard Spotify has something like that implemented where you can't just skip songs willy nilly.
I’ve always wondered why there aren’t better ways to prevent ad blockers (not that I’d want that) and embedding ads directly in a video stream seems like it’d be easy and completely unskippable. Especially useful for livestream content like Twitch.
There's also video encoding reasons. Modern video compression uses p-frames, predicted frames, that are based on previous frames. With longer scenes and less movement, you want lots of p-frames for good compression.
This makes being able to arbitrarily inject an ad video at a random point hard if there isn't an immediate full complete frame immediately after. You can't just fill the video with them, as that would make compression worse. You don't want to fully re-encode the video either, that takes up CPU time.
I've run into this myself using ffmpeg to cut out clips of videos. You can use the option of "-c copy" to copy a stream without re-encoding it, and it'll pick the previous full frame and be less accurate.
There's also web reasons with CDNs. Embedding in the video stream would require serving from the same server as the video. That would raise the costs of your CDNs. With targeted ads, you don't want to show the same ad to everyone, and you don't want to be limited to ads on that server when you do an ad auction.
This was solved in broadcast a long time ago, I'd imagine similar could be done for videos delivered to web browsers, but you'd still be able to detect the insertion then I guess, so it wouldn't be very useful (unless its WideVine/HDCP or similar so it couldn't easily be seen, but eh)
17.99€/month for my family, so that comes to about 3.6€ per person.
It's a cost that in my opinion is definetly worth it. Yes, it is not 'free', but at least the option is there, it saves our mind and it helps the actual creators of the videos more than watching ads would.
Suppose their was an option to pay for your family to have an ad free experience for the whole internet. What price would you be willing to accept for that?
IMHO, the current ad based model for online content is a lose/lose race to the idiocracy bottom for all.
About $12 is all I’m willing to spend per month given the much lower content consumption compared to even prime video for me, and that includes Amazon prime for about $12 anyway.
I bring this up because the article mentions Youtube seems to have killed that off, which I suspect will drive more ad blocker usage rather than more people switching to full premium.