YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads.::Google is increasing the prices of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscriptions in some regions, right after blocking ad-blockers.
More enshitification.
I was honestly thinking about buying premium, so I would support the creators. Welp, that’s out of the window.
See if they have Patreon, or better LiberaPay or OpenCollective. If not, you can ask them to make one.
Or you just continue to block the adds.
Or how about I continue to use uBlock Origin and do neither.
I don’t need YouTube that much. It’s competing with books, more traditional TV shows and movies, and Nebula / Curiosity Stream and Wondrium / LinkedIn Learning. I guess I might miss some reaction videos, but oh well.
Get fucked Google. Glory to the adblockers.
happily continues using uBO and Firefox
Or you update your uBlock Origin blocklists and declare YouTube the war.
Considering a DNS block
Try blocking the ads.
You will block the video serving domains as well :)YT/Google aint that stupid and knows how to bundle both for your convenience.
Doesn’t work. I have network wide DNS filtering, but that alone doesn’t stop YT ads.
If you have a link to a GitHub host file for that, I’d definitely take a peak.
Otherwise, uBlock and *Pipe apps.
That doesn’t work AFAIK. It only works when the ads are served by a 3rd party.
Yep. I tried doing this with Hulu’s self-serving ads and I blocked enough domains that it just quit working
I never see Vivaldi mentioned in these. Yes, it’s chromium based, but I have not seen a single YouTube ad since they implemented built-in ad block many years ago. Without the need for extensions, plug-ins, or user managed block lists.
yeah, ive been using vivaldi and only very recently did i see my player diabled with ubo off but if i disable ubo and put vivaldi’s blocking option to just block trackers, that does the trick tho the ad starts with a black screen but the skip button instantly appears under .5 seconds or the video starts
Vivaldi is proprietary garbage
X is proprietary garbage. Any more of the cope you tell yourself to sleep better?
What? Who talks about X?
The horror. Paying for your content. Shudders
The less people who watch YouTube, the less valuable those ads are, and therefore the less valuable premium just be.
Have YouTube viewers been going up to justify ads being more valuable?
Video serving can cost a lot of bandwidth. Hence it could be sensible.
YouTube don’t even pay a fraction of those bandwidth as they run caching box on your ISP for free. ISPs won’t let any random companies run equipments for free in their network, so this is a significant competitive advantage. You’ll have to be a company as big as Google, Apple, or Netflix to do this.
They’ve already calculated, how high and in how many increments, they can rise their prices, while still coming out ahead. For every country specifically.
The stupid thing is that they could have approached this in a much less dickish manner. Seriously. First, they are making money off us as it is with their demographics and the fact they are not utilizing this cash cow as before means they have gotten too greedy for their own good, or mismanaging funds which is a completely unrelated problem. Long ads, unskippable ads, expensive premium. This is the beginning of the end of something they used to offer as free, resting on their laurels as a monopoly, like the airline industry. When they are now practically forcing the cobra effect. Eventually, it will get so silly, it will go the way of the dod like Angelfire. AOL, and Geocities. Or, soon, Netflix.
I would have started it similar to Patreon, like, “by donating $1/mo, you can support artists like this,” and incentivize the publishers with monetary gain and higher search results. Nobody is gonna miss $1 or $12/year. You multiply that by millions of viewers, that’s millions of dollars on top of their demographics. Second, they could have had a 5 second bumper, similar to PBS, like “This and other find content is brought to you by Exxon and the Chubb group” or whatever. Five seconds. Front and back. Not enough to cause outrage. Skippable, but not so annoying, everyone skips.
God imagine SML allowing Jeffy to ask if Mario is “fucking high” again?
Pretty hyped for the death of Youtube.
I’m willing to pay for content.
I’m not willing to give Google money, or any proprietary solutions.
I judge adverts to be a waste of limited human life. I hope that industry can change.
So then you’re unwilling to pay for the content
I mean, we can’t act surprised that YouTube needs to somehow afford the infrastructure to serve content? Adblockers caught on & youtube cracked down.
More technical solutions will be created in response, and those wi be picked up by a small majority causing the cycle to start over once more.
You’re getting unfairly downvoted. I agree with the negative sentiment around Google but the only semi-alternative is nebula but they obviously don’t have the same amount of content. It’s not reasonable to expect YouTube to operate for free
Thank you, the unfortunate truth is that we’re a community of people who just left a platform for their insatiable greed so its to be expected that when you say that companies should be able to make money within reason people get tight about it
The other problem is people treating small/medium content creators like they’re some corporate entity fucking people over when they’re not. The entitlement and sheer hypocrisy on this site is incredible to see. I’m specifically talking about people blocking sponsorships here.
FOSS has created this childish expectation that other people should spend their time creating shit for lemmy-type nerds for free, but that is not sustainable in a capitalist economy. Software only gets away with it because software devs make a comfortable living with enough free time to work on FOSS, or they actually get paid to work on it by some corp.
People applying the same expectation to creatives disgust me. A lot of smaller channels are not rolling in money, they’re making enough for a decent living or some side cash. And they earned that. There’s a huge difference between that and some giant media corporation ripping people off for content. Blocking sponsorships is immoral and downright criminal imo, and it disgusts me to see so many people trying to normalize stealing from other workers. Especially in our modern gig economy where many of these people turned to YouTube because they got fucked over by a recession or COVID.
Ads are annoying but I’ll deal with being annoyed if it means someone gets compensated for work that I enjoyed. The sheer narcissism of believing you’re entitled to free content from creators is enraging to be.
Youtube by itself produces almost no content. All content comes from content creators on the platform, which are getting severely underpaid by Youtube. If Youtube actually paid them their fair share, this argument would be somewhat valid.
I disagree, i think they’re getting a fair cut? A channel as large as LTT has stated that YouTube ads make up nearly 30% of their revenue.
30% isn’t a ton, but when you consider that they can add brand deals on top of that (which they get 100% of) creators can walk away with a decent chunk. Additionally, when you look at the rev split it’s actually the creator getting 55% (45% in the case of shorts). Bigger channels probably get better deals too, as is the case with Twitch as well.
IMO this all seems fair, puts a heavy reliance on Google which is a just criticism however to ignore the costs of storing immense amounts of data (500hrs of video uploaded/minute), making it available, and the infrastructure associated (bandwidth, global cdn, etc) is not
One of the most popular on the platform is by definition an outlier
Did you read the rest?
Also, yes it’s an outlier but the only example i have on hand of a YouTuber sharing their revenue streams so
Only big creators will get brand deals, that’s the problem with you making assumptions based on LTT. And that’s why I think people are enormous hypocrites for blocking sponsorships on smaller channels. Until we live in a socialist utopia, dealing with a 30 second ad isn’t that fucking much to ask to compensate someone you just used for entertainment.
Where was Google’s concern for paying for infrastructure in the past? Google choose to bleed money which made it harder for smaller competitors to compete and take a share of the users, and now Google wants to have their cake and eat it too. Too damn bad.
I am unwilling to pay for the content while Google is where the content is. Odysee seemed shady to me so I stopped using it. Floatplane is proprietary and I’m trying to kick the nasty habit of using proprietary software, I don’t want to start using new ones. I used to pay to listen to a podcast but I got tired of the content. I donate to Wikipedia.
YouTube has been in the red since day 1. Now Google wants their payback. OK. Seems fair. But I don’t have to participate.
Everybody acting like Google is taking away a basic human right, or somehow “taxing” them is getting exhausting.
Facebook is up to even more shenanigans, proposing to charge users to keep ads off the screen. Again, fine. I don’t have to use FB.
“But muh free content!”
It was very damned long ago that “content” was what you could see at the movie theater, see on your 4-channel TV selection or grab at the library.
/old_man_rant
Google offered content for free and so played a part in making generation(s?) of users expect content for free.
I used to watch films in cinema before they started playing them on TV but now I 99.8% don’t care about them, or shows. I use Crunchyroll for a couple of anime but most of my content is only on YouTube.
YouTube has been in the red since day 1. Now Google wants their payback. OK. Seems fair.
It’s not fair, it’s literally illegal under antitrust law. The DOJ has been accused of “taking a nap” and not enforcing those laws for 20 years… but they’re awake now. Which is probably part of why Google is suddenly changing course. They’re involved in a few antitrust investigations as it is and don’t want any more.
You can’t run a company at a loss leader until nearly all your competition is dead and then start charging more than customers are willing to pay (or showing more ads than customers are willing to watch).
I’m happy to pay for video content - but I won’t pay the prices YouTube is charging and their ads are even worse.
It’s not fair to pay money for services to a company involved in unrelated lawsuits? Does the antitrust investigation negate the expenses associated with running the operation of serving you content?
Are all competitors dead? You can switch to watching TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, for random user generated content. You can go to nebula if you want YouTube style documentaries. You can go to any movie platform if you want to watch random stuff. They are all either in the red, backed by VC, waiting to do the same thing, or serving aggressive ads, or selling your data, or costing money.
How much people are willing to pay is irrelevant in the context of fairness. Fairness is about a company breaking even. Customer readiness is however relevant to business, and in this case I’m afraid that the evidence is against you - after countless similar complaints in the past, people haven’t left the platform, and people have signed up to pay.
Paying for services is normal. It’s unrealistic not to. It’s unproductive to pretend otherwise.
Payback is fair? Even though these very digital megacorporations are just now facing antitrust lawsuits for very good reasons? The only argument for having to use these platforms as a content creator is reach. But if Google, Amazon, Meta, etc. only got their market-dominating positions by illegal means, nothing is fair about wanting payback.
I am paying money to people creating content for me directly, even for some YouTube channels. If I were to abide by Google’s rules, I’d have to pay double. For the infrastructure & the people actually producing the content. Sorry… Why would I? I will not pity a monopolist because of their lost profits as long as I can circumvent it somehow.
Floatplane is owned by a YouTuber more about capitalism than tech at this point
Look at nebula, the creator owned network (from what I’ve heard about it)
Then don’t watch the content. But in lieu of a open source, non profit, market dominating video platform thus means not watching videos.
Even if that open source platform existed it would require it to be more or equally profitable for creators to reach a point where people upload to both platforms.
I’ll keep watching the content, thanks.
For youtube revanced, use revanced manager
There are so many ways to watch YouTube without ads on all devices. I don’t see ads anywhere in my house. And when I like a creator so much, I support them directly. Fuck Google. If they were reasonable with their prices/practices and paid people more I’d buy premium.
How to avoid ads in YouTube on Fire TV Stick?
Smarttube Next. Easy to install, too.
After writing that I comment, I looked and downloaded SmartTube. Is Next one better than that?
There are two version. One is beta and the other is stable. I have both for no particular reason, just wanted to have them. Beta may get some new features before the stable one, but they both do the same.
Install “downloader” from the Amazon app store, then use it to Google and download the smarttubenext APK. Downloader is a web browser the fire TV stick that has a cursor. Fire TV stick runs on Android, so side loading is good on it. Make sure to enable install from “unknown sources” in the settings of the stick.
Thanks a lot. It’s pretty nice. Had to enable developer options first.
No problem, I hope you enjoy it. Also, I apologize for forgetting to tell you about the developer options.
Aww. Are the greedy megacorporations upset that consumers are being greedy in return? Poor megacorporations. :c
All these billions in revenue are not enough :(
