When you block ads on YouTube, the ads are deleted. This has the problem of not giving creators money, forcing you to actually spend $10/mo or whatever the average Patreon subscription is. What if there was an option for an ad to play in the background while a black rectangle covers the screen while temporarily muting the browser tab? (Since the ad still plays in the background, the creator still gets money, allowing you to be a freeloader) edit: peertube has no ads
I don’t know how popular this take is, but I pay for premium and feel like it’s worth it. Granted, it’s super cheap in my region and I get the student discount on top of that. I’m not a creator but last I checked, premium revenue is a little higher than ad revenue and isn’t affected by demonetization.
There are multiple factors that convinced me to get premium and ads weren’t one of them, since I’ve been using ublock and Vanced/ReVanced for years.
Content on the internet hasn’t been free for a long time. It’s been funded by shady and user-unfriendly means like ads, harvesting data and affiliate links. It’s just that the money from these sources has started to dry up recently and people are panicking. I think the web monetization api has great potential if made easily and widely accessible, since I’m sure that a significant portion of people are perfectly willing to pay a little bit monthly for a better experience and to support the content they consume. I’m looking at using it in a project of mine as well.
Premium is mostly exempting you and the creator from completely artificial problems Youtube chooses to impose otherwise.
Yes. This is 100% true for youtube and really any proprietary service with paid tiers. The greed is obvious and premium is only a little better than the alternative because creators are still being screwed over but slightly less. I only partially blame it on a large amount of people getting used to free content. But until there’s something clearly better, I’d rather do this at least since it’s still a net positive. In the meantime, I’ll participate in FOSS communities and try to contribute to alternatives so that it doesn’t stay this way.
I partially agree with you, but hosting and serving video is expensive on that scale. The cost of that has to be covered somehow, and for those who don’t pay directly ads are generally the only way currently available. And companies don’t want their ads associated with some kinds of content, which makes perfect sense. Would you like it if your name was associated with pornographic depictions of carebears?
Video is a massive amount of data just compared to images, not to mention plain text.
cf Cory Doctorow’s theory of Enshittification
Agreed. Considering how much I use YT, and how much high quality content I find there, the price for premium is incredibly low. I would definitely pay multiple of it if I had to (maybe I shouldn’t give them ideas though…).
I’ve been considering paying for Premium, for largely the reasons you mention.
One question I have is, as a Premium user, do you have to disable ad block/uBlock on Youtube so that YT can track which videos you watch and pay the creators accordingly?
No, I still keep ublock enabled and still use revanced on my phone (RYD, sponsorblock, qol improvements). None of these actually prevent youtube from tracking your view, since the view counter still goes up and the video appears in your watch history.
Good point! Thanks for the info!