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by squeaky-clean
975 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.