[danShumway]

Youtube actually got rid of their directly paid solution to the ads problem and now forces it to be bundled with other services, because (and I can not stress this enough) Google does not want you to pay directly for content.

Youtube Premium exists so that Google has something to point to when it wants to say that paid services aren't viable. That's why they charge way more than creators get out of ads, that's why they force it to be bundled with other services, that's why they introduce restrictions like simultaneous viewing limits and login requirements and app restrictions that make the service tangibly worse than the experience of anonymously blocking ads.

Youtube does not want you to pay for content. It wants to monetize your data and serve you ads. It wants your consumption to be a passive habit, it does not want you to be actively engaged with funding the creators you care about.

Youtube doesn't offer a paid alternative to ads. It offers ad-free viewing as a side-perk when you buy other significantly more expensive Google services.

[spiderice]

There are a lot of claims in there with pretty much nothing to back them up. From my perspective, Youtube Premium is the shining example of a "streaming service" done right. One tier, all the features. They aren't upcharging you to a second paid tier to remove ads, 4k streaming, unlock more videos, etc.. like a lot of the other streaming services do.

If I had to cancel all of my streaming services except one, Youtube Premium would be the one I keep. And that's say a lot given that it's the only one that makes all of its content "free" (with caveats of ads, tracking, etc..) for unpaid users.

[Brian_K_White]

Shining Example???? Holy shit...

I have paid for premium for years and my youtube experience is still utter garbage.

I still see ads because they are baked in every video now as well, not to mention I can't always use my account (other people's devices), not to mention my expensive Premium home screen is now blank because I don't subscribe to channels and I turned off history (neither of which are needed to be able to populate a feed of non-random stuff, since they were already doing it fine for years), and when it wasn't blank, it was utter shit the last few years showing me the same 11 videos I already saw every day), but somehow, only the last few years, somehow, before that, it was able to do at least reasonable feed of new stuff with no subscriptions and no history. And Then we have their capricious censoring and dmca strikes which impoverishes my landscape by deleting half of the actually interesting content and stunts all the rest into avoiding any possible topic that might get their livlihoods killed, because practically anything could possibly be painted as either dangerous or someone else's copyright. But the trashiest of the trash stuff, but which sells ads, that shit flows never ending. Half of my favorite creators have Kafkaesque stories like Fran Blanches. That's what I get for my Premium dollars, infuriating stories about how the people I just paid fucked someone nice and terrorized everyone else they haven't fucked yet.

The value of Youtube premium is exactly this: It's pulling out 8 of your fingernails instead of 10.

[danShumway]

> One tier, all the features.

That is literally my complaint with it, that's exactly what I said. You can not pay Youtube specifically to remove ads.

What do you want me to back up here, you're agreeing with me about what the product is: it's a music/video streaming service that contains ad-free viewing on the side. Do you want evidence that ad-free viewing through Youtube premium is worse than with adblockers? That's pretty straightforward to provide; just look at the experience of Youtube's official apps vs NewPipe, interruptions between computers, lack of anonymous viewing -- it straightforwardly factually supports fewer viewing options than adblockers do.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be happy with the service if you like it, I'm saying that if a company is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both, then they're not offering an ad-free option on its own.

And that's especially the case if the company did offer an ad-free option in the past and then stopped offering it. I think it's extremely reasonable to theorize about why a company might make that decision.

[squeaky-clean]

> is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both

It's literally just youtube without the video component. You can find everything song ever on youtube as a video. This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

> lack of anonymous viewing

How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts? They need to know if you're a subscriber or not. Even services that aim for anonymity like Mullvad require you to login with your user id to use it. Should there be a "trust me, I'm a paid subscriber" button? You can just delete watched videos from your history.

[danShumway]

> This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

I think you're oversimplifying Youtube Music (and ignoring that Youtube Premium does include exclusive content), but assuming it is just Youtube without a video stream -- does it strike you as odd at all that the inclusion of a cost-saving feature would cause an increase in the price of the service for customers? Does that make you doubt at all whether or not this product is priced around the actual cost of ad-free content?

> How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts?

There are ways to do this using things like blinded tokens, but to fair they're complicated and Google is unlikely to pursue them. It does get at the inherent tradeoff here -- the way Google has structured Youtube Premium it is impossible to use it in a privacy preserving way.

And I think even ignoring the other problems with Youtube Premium and even ignoring the bundling issues, there is a little bit of a disingenuous nature to these arguments of "don't like ads, just pay" when everyone understands that by the very nature of the product, paying does not remove many of the negative aspects of Google advertising that people are trying to avoid.

In a way, I'm being overly charitable here; Google bundles ad-free viewing as part of an extended package, but the other problem that I didn't complain about is that buying that package literally doesn't get rid of entire problem and in fact requires you to use Youtube in a way that makes the problem worse, because at least when you're signed out your data isn't getting quite so explicitly linked to you as an individual.

[riddley]

I recently ended my YouTube premium sub because they started...... showing ads.

[amrocha]

I think this is the long play that most people aren't seeing, or are willfully ignoring.

Just like Netflix did, eventually youtube will jack up the price of the ad free option and introduce ads to the basic subscription.

Enshittification ad infinitum.

[jasonlotito]

YouTube Premium is the ad-free offering that they keep adding stuff to. I've been on it since it was Red, and I've enjoyed it the entire time. The price has gone up from the original $9.99, but not dramatically so. YouTube Red originally launched with music, so that's not new, and Premium has other nice features beyond ads, like video downloads and what not. So, I'm not sure what "bundled services" were added to YouTube premium that you are talking about.

Oh wait, I can watch some movies for free, on YouTube.

Oh wait, I can share my membership with my family for less than the original cost of YouTube Red... the horror.

Those all seem related to watching YouTube videos, and not other services, so not entirely sure what you mean.

I don't know, honestly, it feels like you don't want to pay for the ad-free experience at the price point they set. And that's fine. They have a price point, and you don't want it cheaper. 100% fine, but that's all there is to it.

[danShumway]

I subscribed to Youtube Premium when it came out, back when it was still called Youtube Red. I've written a couple of times in the past about why I eventually gave up on the service. I can dig some of those comments up if you want me to but the short version is: not only am I willing to pay for content, I have subscribed and paid for content through the exact option you describe and it wasn't the cost that drove me away.

I will also point out, Youtube Premium is not primarily an ad-free Youtube service (and neither was Youtube Red, it also came bundled with Google Play Music). It is a paid video service and music service that happens to also contain ad-free viewing. Youtube Premium Lite did exist as an ad-free Youtube service. Google axed it.

They axed it because Google doesn't want that -- it does not want to have a service that is priced around specifically the cost of removing ads from Youtube. Of course they axed Youtube Premium Lite, because Google wants to have a cable package, and then to be able to point to that cable package and say "see how expensive ad-free viewing is?"

It would be a long conversation to talk about why that bundling is problematic, both from a competitive standpoint (see Amazon Prime) and from a "support creators" standpoint (the amount of money going back to creators is much lower than they'll get from direct support). But I'm going to keep going back to -- there is no option to pay specifically to remove ads from Youtube; Google killed that service and it's now only available as part of a bundling system with other services.

[joombaga]

I'd like to pay less money and not get music. Just no ads. YouTube Red launched with Google Play Music, which I enjoyed. But that's gone now, and I'm paying for YouTube Music which I do not use.