If you have a VPN with a Ukraine location, you can set it to there and purchase YouTube Premium for ~$2.70/month. That's what I just ended up doing. I use Mullvad as my vpn provider.
Premium actually gives more money to creators you watch on YouTube than ads do. It's win-win IMO. Save yourself time, give them more money. Also comes with YouTube Music which is quite good (arguably worse than Google Play Music was but eh)
If someone on the internet says they want money to hand it to individuals in need I believe them. Especially when it is a global, for-profit, money-printing monopoly power like Google, who have repeatedly demonstrated through their actions as an organization that they are nothing but honest, upstanding, and true to their word, fully deserving of our trust (and money).
How much do creators actually get from premium subscriptions? All you're doing is repeating some empty marketing mumbo jumbo. I've never heard a creator say anything about the "youtube premium" income they've gotten, pretty sure it's not even broken down that way for them and google being able to bundle in a music streaming service just further affirms to me that they do not need my money.
I'd much rather directly support creators that deserve it trough patreon or ko-fi and pay for spotify premium instead of giving google any of my money
I'm not a creator but a while ago there was this creator who was widely applauded on HN for their transparency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34225192 Scroll down a bit and you can see Google shows that they made $27,099.86 from YouTube premium.
Creators get even more money if you instead donate to their Patreon or click the big "Thanks" button under the video to contribute to their channel directly. Best part is you don't have to turn off your adblock!
Thanks, but I don't need luck since I mainly watch videos from the same channels. Throwing each some spare change now and then is not hard.
I reckon you don't subscribe to premium because you think every random channel of every random video you happen to watch deserves your money? I certainly don't feel bad when my adblock prevents me from wasting any more of my time when I click on a clickbait-ty Linus Tech Tips video.
My problem with it it's that demonetized channels don't get money from premium viewers. If a creator gets demonetized because of advertisers guideline, why go out of your way to punish him by removing premium monetization as well?
While I understand your point, I still wouldn't give money to a company with such privacy violations. If YouTube had a subscription option where YouTube only used my watch history to improve my suggestions, then I'd gladly pay a subscription for it. But in its current form, I either give money to Alphabet while they continue to track me and sell my data to advertisers, or I just block the ads myself to avoid giving them money. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay for the product and be the product.
It's sad that the creators have to get caught in the middle of this, of course, but they can be supported through other platforms, like Patreon, ko-fi, etc., which kinda solves the issue. Or better yet, a YouTube replacement, like Nebula.
If YouTube wants to block me from viewing a video that has ads because I use an adblocker, fine. But if they start blocking me from all videos then they best start paying everyone who has ever uploaded a video that has a single view. Let's not forget that nobody is going to YouTube because of Googles content.
I mean sure, I am fine with any service I am actively using either charge me money via subscription or monetize is some other form. If I don't want that to happen, I'd not use that service.
If the costs of managing HackerNews is so high, sure let them sell ads or offer a subscription service. But if you are comparing HackerNews hosting costs to YouTube, you need a reality check. HackerNews probably costs less than 1000$ a month to host, everything included. I am sure YouTube spends more than that every second buying new storage servers.
I don't think most people realize the scale of YouTube - it's offering anyone on this planet to upload as many videos as they want, in resolution as high as 8K, while also offering the ability to monetize their content for creators. I think that is pretty damn impressive. I use YouTube often, and I am totally fine with them making money off my data via ads (when I am not paying for YouTube premium).
What's the principle? I should get anything I want for free as long as I can get away with it? I shouldn't have to pay for anything if I don't want to?
Genuinely curious what the principled argument is here.
Unless they totally remove the ad-free tier, I don't see how this is different than any other price hike. Or do you think that companies shouldn't have the right to hike prices?
We had the "old" internet and we had ads... a text banner here and there, and then an image or maybe a gif banner on the other side. Noone really cared, sites got ad views, users got content.
Then ads moved to flash (security issues), popups, popups when you close the first popup, video was added, with sounds, two banners became 20, fixed location floating divs were added, and in the case of youtube, a 3 minute video of something contains 3 minutes of ads.
So yeah... they had a chance, went way overboard, and now they complain that people block ads.
> We had the "old" internet and we had ads... a text banner here and there, and then an image or maybe a gif banner on the other side. Noone really cared, sites got ad views, users got content.
The "old" internet was also run by hobbyists without a profit motive, and did not have sites that hosted your videos for free. A few static banner ads might be able to keep the "old" internet afloat, but it certainly would not be able to keep today's internet afloat.
The "old" internet was full of people fighting hot linking because a JPEG being embedded on a popular forum took down your website for a considerable time.
Then the internet ran on an investor bubble that let companies serve content at a loss in hopes of a future acquisition.
Now ads are proving to be the only reliable way to get income out of videos. There are affordable options out there, but because these services were once free everybody feels like they're entitled to free hosting and media.
and the ones, where you click on a link, it openes in a new tab and the original tab gets replaced with an ad.. so you close an ad, and lose all your "back" history.
Also, real-life ads need regulation too... like some limits of X square meters of ads per 1 km^2 of area... preferably X going slowly towards zero.
Let content creators figure that out with their audiences. YouTube should just be a batteries included public video hosting service, with video creators as the customer. Creators with video views passing a threshold would need to pay google or have their videos downgraded to 240p, then temporarily disabled if they continued not to pay. Users would get some amount of space and bandwidth as part of a free tier to help them get started. It'd be like AWS but for video content creators, instead of like a shitty cable network.
Can you imagine some small time Roblox Youtuber blowing up and ending up with a sudden bandwidth bill in the hundreds of thousands? Popups with "this month's watch count has been reached, please ask @contentcreator to pay for more views"? Making uploaders pay would absolutely destroy the platform.
The only person hurt under that scheme would be just that, people who go viral out of nowhere. Other users could re-upload the video to mirror it though, so there's an easy workaround.
Seems like a small price to pay for a YouTube with integrity that respects both creators and viewers and treats both fairly without trying to exploit anyone.
But if a creator I like gets a big bill, I’ll take their video and re-upload it without their permission to mirror it and cut down their bandwidth bill.
I’m fine paying for content (I subscribe to Nebula and Spotify, for example); I am not fine paying to enrich organizations that engage in widespread surveillance and ad technology. Ads make the world worse. Creators make it better.
Google’s problem is that their mission statement is fundamentally misleading. They aren’t here to organize the world’s information and make it accessible, they are here to maximize ad revenue. The information thing is a means to an end. For them, ads are the point, because content doesn’t generate revenue - ads do.
That’s a fair position, but shouldn’t you simply shorten it to not using YouTube? Your activity helps their ad system and using it tells creators that they get more views by putting things on YouTube.
So because a company sells ads and you don’t like that, you refuse to pay them to not see ads?
Only ensuring that they will try to show even more ads since not enough paying customers exist?
Don’t you think that maybe if all the people in this thread being really righteous about not paying and “ad company“ or to actually pay it might show them there’s a better way?
They're a "give away a product for free for 15 years to gain market share then act indignicant when people won't pay whatever price you ask" company. I think that's what people don't want to support.