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.
‘rightfully’ is doing a lot of lifting here.
Or you update your uBlock Origin blocklists and declare YouTube the war.
Considering a DNS block
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
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.
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.
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.
Vivaldi is proprietary garbage
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What? Who talks about X?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Aww. Are the greedy megacorporations upset that consumers are being greedy in return? Poor megacorporations. :c
All these billions in revenue are not enough :(
well i for one ain’t paying shit to google, nor am i watching any ads 👍
If it comes down to it, I have no issue just not using Youtube ever again. FireFox and Ublock are your friend.
Preach!!
This is why Google has been using their browser monopoly to push their “Web Integrity API”. If that gets adopted, they can fully control the client side and prevent all ad blocking.
Thankfully, Firefox is still a thing. If that comes out, it’s going to be a hell of a lot more popular.
… and dependent on Google ; they may either push that API into FF or push something different so bad that FF would lose even more users.
Thank fuck
Delayed… For now
Google also said they would cancel there plan to roll out FLoC after significant pushback a while ago, only to renamed it as Ad Topics and roll them out anyway when no one is looking. If Google do the same with web integrity API, I wouldn’t be surprised anymore.
To be fair, FLoC had signifient issues and could be used to fingerprint users. Google’s whole point of FLoC was to get rid of third party cookies, to stop sites from fingerprinting users and tracking them throughout the web, so FLoC didn’t really solve the problem in that regard. With Ad Topics, only a limited subset of topics are presented to the advertisers, and fake data is injected, making that fingerprinting less likely.
Still haven’t gotten any on Firefox with Ublock Origin. The usual explanation is that it rolls out in stages, but I’ve nothing weeks later.
Nah there was an article that said that it’s fully deployed now.
Your ad block solution must be filtering it out appropriately.
I’ve had to do the full purge and refresh filters thing.
I just have all my YouTube subscriptions feeding into an RSS feed. Haven’t gotten a single ad.
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You can use a rss reader app that works on the desktop like
or if you want to go all out - setup something like freshrss / miniflux on a selfhosted server.
As for getting Rss feeds from Youtube. I think there are some browser extensions you can use. If you have the newpipe app on android , you can visit any Youtube channel and it will have an option to get the Rss feed on the top right. You can copy that link to your RSS reader and it will start showing new videos.
Are you logged in to YouTube on Firefox? Anonymous visitors with ublock origin doesn’t seem to get the nag.
Yep, logged in and haven’t seen a thing.
Kinda glad my uBlock Origin is still working.
This should be illegal, actually in Europe it’s about to be…
what is illegal? Havinadblockcks, cracking down onadblocks or upping the price on the software after ““forcing”” people to move to it.
Anti Ad-Blocking Software would be (and arguably, already are) illegal as not only do ads count as a form of malware, but Anti-AdBlocks run scripts on YOUR machines without your consent, and thus are ALSO malware.
1000% in the TOS that you agreed to when you signed up, or implicitly by continuing to use the site
National laws trump TOS
The American brain can’t comprehend this
A significant number of Americans want to overturn the Enlightenment for being too woke.
I will never watch 20 ads in a 15 minutes video, it’s worse than television.
Make it a reasonable number of ads and I might consider it
Some youtubers are so greedy it’s unreal, you barely see the red line because it’s way too filled with yellow spaces
*you pay YouTube for the content they didn’t make or they turn the thumbscrews.
This is misleading : a substantial part is distributed to the content creators. Traditionally the YouTube cut is alleged to be rather low.
Because it costs nothing to run data centers, employ thousands of people, distribute exabytes of data.
enshittification everywhere.
Who could have POSSIBLY seen this coming?
Enshittification must be stopped
why is everything being enshittified this year? :(
Tech bubble is deflating, high interest rates are probably also a culprit
And the idea that a company that doesn’t grow every single year is somehow a failure, even if it is making millions or billions
You mean POP!?
I feel like a pop would be more extreme?
Yeah, no… it’s already overpriced.
Paramount + £6.99 Netflix £10.99 (standard) Youtube £12
Makes no sense… they don’t have anything like the production overheads. Stuff like Star Trek and Stranger Things are expensive. ‘10 greatest cat videos’ is not.
Heck, they don’t even pay a good fraction of their bandwidth because they put caching box in your ISP location to reduce loads. This is a huge privilege as ISPs won’t let any random companies run equipments for free in their network, which is one of a huge barrier for any YouTube competitors.
They might be allowing them to run the boxes for free, but the ISPs are saving money on bandwidth, too.
Get enough users for the ISP to care and they’ll work with you. Otherwise, you probably don’t have all that many users to begin with, so the overhead that maintaining and distributing these boxes would create wouldn’t be worth it anyway.
Youtube expenses is revenue share with creators and hosting untold hours of video, over 500 hours uploaded per minute, that others just don’t have to deal with.
It “makes sense” in that, unlike those two, YT has to deal with thousands of hours of video being uploaded to their servers every minute. What they don’t pay in streaming rights, they pay in storage and bandwidth costs, plus a couple of peanuts for “moderation”, which is probably more expensive in the long run
you forgot to add spotify which is about 12$
YouTube Music is included with YouTube Premium though so no need for Spotify if you have YTP.
yes. thats why i was saying they forgot spotify price in their calculation its still pretty ok price for ytp in relation to spotifys new price jump.
Ah I see, fair point
Depends on how much you use it. I watch Youtube pretty much every day for at least an hour, while using Netflix or other streaming services about once evey few months. I use Spotify every day too, just because I like their app more in some ways.
If I had to choose, I’d swap my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions for YouTube. I think I watch YouTube videos about three times as much as Netflix and Disney.
Well it also includes a streaming music service which are normally $10/m on their own.
I already pay for Spotify. They knew exactly what they were doing when they lumped that shit in YouTube premium
They should offer it seperately.
IIRC, YouTube Music is also offered as a standalone service, Atleast in some countries. However, the difference b/w YouTube Premium and just the Music service comes out to be miniscule, so folks just pay for the former.
No, I want Premium without Music. It’s not offered anywhere.
Same thing with Amazon. I want Prime without Prime Video. It’s not offered either.
Oh, I understand now, especially the second one. The only thing from Amazon’s product line worth using to me is the Prime delivery service. I can’t give two hoots about their Prime Music( which I lost respect for after it denied to run for me on any browser on Linux for some reason) or Prime Video.
I can’t see the value in using youtube for music… it’s not like I can watch music videos in my car. That’s worth $0 to me, and I imagine the majority. Spotify is better… or apple music if you’re on the fruit side.
Youtube music doesn’t have music videos, not sure what you are talking about. It’s just a clone of play music after they shut it down.
Fwiw, it’s not videos, it’s a Spotify clone.
If you’ve already got a solution for ad-free music in your car, sure, obviously. Not everybody has that though.
uBlock Origin and ReVanced users: I missed the part where that’s my problem.
i know my problem: besides im almost immune, my family isnt, my devices connected in the same network could be affected by a malware sponsor on 1st search result, besides im the one who got to fix anything that could go wrong in their devices, etc
It’s good that there is at least one person in a family that can fix electronics. It’s worse when there’s no one. I think the majority of malware coming from ads (and persisting on devices) is in those families that lack that one techy person.
Do you feel better after making fun of people who use other devices and not just a smartphone and browser? There are a hundred news that aren’t your problem and you don’t comment there, but you make sure to come in here and “rub it in” to people who care about this, by not providing an actual solution.
Very noble.
Sucks for them. This is what happens when you buy into the corporate, locked down, sanitised and monetised walled garden.
Privacy first and FLOSS software have been out there the whole time for people willing to invest the time (and money, but often it’s cheaper than the commercial option) to learn them and gain those benefits for themselves.
But if people want a device so they pick up the one with the shiniest marketing and then wonder why it’s shoving ads down their throat, well, that’s what they get for not researching the options. There are alternatives, they’ve been posted many times over in this thread and similar ones.
So you’re openly hating on people for being normal, without offering a single alternative of a video platform that’s not all of those things that you labeled as evil.
There are alternatives, they’ve been posted many times over in this thread and similar ones.
The alternative to shopping isn’t shoplifting. The usual things that people list are client side apps that circumvent intended operation of the platform, reaping as many benefits without paying the cost. But hosting isn’t free. Running a business isn’t free. And hating the people who literally subsidize your unauthorized use of the platform is hypocrisy.
The alternative to shopping isn’t shoplifting. The usual things that people list are client side apps that circumvent intended operation of the platform, reaping as many benefits without paying the cost. But hosting isn’t free. Running a business isn’t free. And hating the people who literally subsidize your unauthorized use of the platform is hypocrisy.
We all know that Youtube need to get rid off of AdBlockers because they want to make more money than what they are making now. If they just need to cover business costs they could just make the service subscription only, make the fee high enough to keep the site running and earn something and allow to see only the first 10-15% of each video to not subscribed users and forget all this charade about AdBlockers.
We all know that Youtube need to get rid off of AdBlockers because they want to make more money than what they are making now.
Making money by charging for completely optional services is not only not wrong, but the very reason why we have most of the good stuff that we have.
If they just need to cover business costs they could just make the service subscription only, make the fee high enough to keep the site running and earn something and allow to see only the first 10-15% of each video to not subscribed users and forget all this charade about AdBlockers.
Awesome! Submit your resume or send it as a proposal. If they didn’t think of this first and discarded it because of reasons that you haven’t considered, this might be an opportunity to benefit everyone.
We all know that Youtube need to get rid off of AdBlockers because they want to make more money than what they are making now.
Making money by charging for completely optional services is not only not wrong, but the very reason why we have most of the good stuff that we have.
And who said it is wrong ? I only said that they want to make more money, not that they cannot make money.
If they just need to cover business costs they could just make the service subscription only, make the fee high enough to keep the site running and earn something and allow to see only the first 10-15% of each video to not subscribed users and forget all this charade about AdBlockers.
Awesome! Submit your resume or send it as a proposal.
Not interested, I leave it to you ;-)
If they didn’t think of this first and discarded it because of reasons that you haven’t considered, this might be an opportunity to benefit everyone.
The reason is that this way they would make less money while keeping the service in the black, people would realize that, after all, Youtube is not that important part of their routine, and the total number of users would be lower (by a long shot probably) so even less data to harvest and sell and less return in Ads. After all who would watch 2 minutes of ads in a 2.30 minutes long video ?
Imagine Google doing it and then saying “we restructured out offer and this yeas we are 30% below the last year analysts’ forecasts and we think that we will cut the earning by half while keeping the operational costs below the X % of the total profit”. The next day the shares would be trash and all the management would be fired.
The reality is that once you are quoted in Wall Street (but it is true in every other place) you always need to grow. The problem is that you need to grow faster than your userbase could grow so no way to add X million new users (eyeball to watch your ads) every year: at some point you would run out of people (or of people who would accept, which is the same)So the only thing you can do is monetize some more of what you already have. The only reason Youtube want to get rid of the Adblockers is that this way they can say to the advertisers “we increased the number of viewers of X % so you should pay us Y % more” so they can reach what the Wall Street analysts’s forecasts were and the stock price increase. Nothing else, no server or bandwidth problems. Only stock prices.
Stock prices are one element of what makes business possible. Youtube would not even exist without this mechanic.
It’s like complaining that people have sex.
It’s a core facet of running a business. It’s a requirement and an expectation. This is part of “keeping the lights on”.
Your comment certainly provided “an actual solution” in a “very noble” way
Umm, actually it did. The solution to a problem is to first acknowledge it. The problem is being an asshole that can’t let a day go by without rubbing something in.
The YouTube problem? For me it’s not a problem any more than anything else price-related. It’s interesting to see who is affected by the change and whether it impacts actual customers. What’s not interesting is seeing a long string of whinging and schadenfreude from people who strongly believe that it’s wrong to pay for services and who have not spent a cent on this. That’s ok, believe what you want, but don’t be an asshole about it.
Yes
it’s going to be your problem soon regardless of your idiotic optimism
Read the article that has been posted under the linked comment!
For whatever reason Google has decided not to push forward with the current Web integrity standards. That doesn’t mean they’re giving up, doesn’t mean they’re committing to an open web, they’ve delayed a bit, and they’ll push it out under a different name, slowly. It’s not going away, it’s delayed. We need to work hard now to maintain an open web forever, and we need to work hard everyday
