Google would really like it if everyone just paid for YouTube Premium instead.
  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    1772·
    8 months ago

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/

    Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.

    The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)

    5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.

    Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.

  • Lad@reddthat.com
    135·
    8 months ago

    It’s funny that free third party apps literally have more features and are more user friendly than the official app with premium.

    Why the fuck would I pay for less when I can get more for free?

    • okamiueru@lemmy.world
      46·
      8 months ago

      Some years ago ago, I was a happy subscriber to Google Music. But, they added it to the graveyard, and instead grafted on some music playing functionality to YouTube and called it YouTube Music. So, I went back to Spotify.

      Then I started paying for YouTube Premium Lite. It wasn’t unreasonably expensive, although it was a bit annoying I couldn’t just have “YouTube” in the household, like with Netflix. So if wife would cast a video to the TV, it would play with ads.

      It was about a year ago, when Google starting cracking down on adblockers, that they also removed an option to pay for the service. I think YouTube Premium Lite wasn’t a thing in the US (correct me if I’m wrong), but they removed YT Premium Lite, and the only option left was a twice as expensive YouTube Premium bundle that included YouTube Music.

      Tldr: fucked up Google Music, then removed an option to pay for YouTube premium, leaving a fairly expensive alternative with the pile of shit they replaced Google music with. It’ll be a rough time if they manage to force ads. I won’t pay for it, out of principle.

      Edit: I looked at the numbers again. I’d have to pay more for YouTube than for the highest Netflix tier. It’s more than Prime and HBO combined. They also don’t have to front large sums to fund risky projects. If they didn’t include YouTube Music, I might have considered it. But with it, it just pisses me off, they can go get f.ed

    • frunch@lemmy.world
      9·
      8 months ago

      I think there’s a couple things at play:

      • You know enough to find a different app and make it do what you need it to. Not a hard thing, but something many non-tech savvy people could struggle with, or more likely–

      • People often will just use what’s there. We know we have options, we are aware of the privacy concerns… but many people simply aren’t and/or don’t care enough to do anything about it.

      We spend a lot of time here, so it seems to us like second nature to avoid intrusive apps… I find in my day-to-day life not many people are talking about that kind of stuff, or don’t have much knowledge/experience in that realm. (I realize that is anecdotal).

      I 100% agree with your statements–just trying to rationalize how so many people end up using/staying with these ever-worsening services/apps…

      • FlihpFlorp@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        8 months ago

        To prove your point I am person #2, I know things liked invidious and piped exist but I just idk haven’t gotten around to it

    • Spotlight7573@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      8 months ago

      To be fair, one of the apps mentioned, [Re]Vanced, is literally just the stock app with extra features patched in and the premium features enabled for free (like no ads and downloads). It makes sense that it would be more user friendly. Allowing that modified version doesn’t get them any revenue though while still costing them to host and serve the content to those users.

      At least with NewPipe it supports multiple sites and is its own app with their own code and UI.

      • MrRazamataz@lemmy.razbot.xyzEnglish
        4·
        8 months ago

        I don’t understand this argument because NewPipe still gets the video from YouTube (primarily), costing them to host…

    • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
      14·
      8 months ago

      I pay $4/mo, mainly for YouTube music (I’m part of a friend’s family plan).

      It’s pretty convenient since you can use the background audio on an iPad as well - I don’t use it often but it’s nice when I do. And there’s no ads there it’s pretty insane seeing the level of ads when I try and use my work phone which I’m not signed into.

      Also, you can make channels within your single goggle account so I made one for my mom and bro so they get no ads aswell. They have to sign in to my acct which can feel a little sketch but I trust them since they’re just using the YT app on their TVs. They stay in their own user acct. and it doesn’t affect my history or anything

  • Ænima@lemm.ee
    118·
    8 months ago

    I’ll give up on YouTube before I give up my ad blocks or 3rd party apps. Fuck off Google.

    • Spotlight7573@lemmy.worldEnglish
      40·
      8 months ago

      That’s likely what they want. If you’re not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a ‘customer’. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you’re blocked or when you eventually stop using it.

      • monobot@lemmy.ml
        161·
        8 months ago

        Thing is you also stop sharing and commenting and engaging with other users. If it wasn’t useful they would pull the plug long ago, nothing technical is preventing them.

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
          5·
          8 months ago

          kind of, i still use youtube normally without issues with firefox + ublock.

          they didnt succed in kicking me out just yet

  • 0x1C3B00DA@fedia.io
    1011·
    8 months ago

    It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.

  • i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    88·
    8 months ago

    Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.

    • kautau@lemmy.world
      371·
      8 months ago

      And all of those come down to money

      Search shows you random videos because “the algorithm” is hoping to drive you through to videos that are the most monetized and the most likely to keep you on the platform based on their data

      The shorts thing is because they can pack more ads into 15 second bits of content while using less bandwidth and they’re hoping to hijack your attention with an “endless stream” of short clips a la TikTok or instagram reels

      The video bandwidth drops to low every time because they’re hoping people will still watch, see the ads, and not bump the quality up, saving Google on bandwidth costs

      The live streams thing is just more advertising revenue again

      • tyler@programming.dev
        161·
        8 months ago

        None of that applies if you’re a paying customer like me, and I see all the same bs. So no, it’s really just bad design, it’s not trying to do any of the stuff you mentioned.

        • kautau@lemmy.world
          10·
          8 months ago

          Even that’s just a monetary decision. They are choosing not to spend money to build a custom “premium” experience for paying customers and instead just stripping ads, keeping the existing engagement/monetization driven UI in place. A customized UI takes more dev time, costs more in engineering labor, etc

      • i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de
        4·
        8 months ago

        The live streams thing is not about advertising. Problems like putting the hearts button on top of the chat instead of next to the chat or having the chat cover up the entire left side of the stream every time a single message is sent are just because they don’t care.

    • datavoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
      211·
      8 months ago

      As soon as I have to see shorts, YouTube is dead to me. I hate the format with a passion.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      8 months ago

      bizarre restrictions around background play

      there’s nothing bizarre about it - the free version is shitty on purpose

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    82·
    8 months ago

    Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!

    Host them yourself to watch them locally.

    Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!

    We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.

  • Shurimal@kbin.social
    56·
    8 months ago

    Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”

  • Mango@lemmy.world
    43·
    8 months ago

    They’ve been trying for a minute. Must be different now that they’re saying it!

    Checks notes

    Nope, revanced still works.

        • huginn@feddit.it
          19·
          8 months ago

          I think Google engineers drag their feet on this.

          Like - Google’s pre-installed corporate Firefox and Chrome both have ad blockers. Ublock origin is installed by default on Firefox (I can’t remember what was installed on chrome, I only used it for the work suite/cloudtop and did everything else on FF).

          Nobody I worked with at Google liked ads… But I didn’t work at YouTube. So maybe it’s different there.

          But I suspect the engineers are doing it just to show management that they’re doing something but it’s half hearted.

          Real efforts and real threats of it getting locked down, sure, but half hearted effort.

      • fossphi@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        8 months ago

        There’s already a patch for comments in the release candidate for the new version

  • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
    38·
    8 months ago

    As soon as 3rd party clients don’t work as they do anymore, I am stopping going to YouTube. Simple as, I know it doesn’t matter as a singular thing, I am just one user. Was the same with reddit, now I am here but reddit is still going (how well we don’t need to debate now).

    • penquin@lemm.ee
      11·
      8 months ago

      You’re not alone. Don’t think that. A lot of people will do the same. I’m right there with ya. Fuck YouTube

  • Adalast@lemmy.world
    414·
    8 months ago

    Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: “Let the market decide!” The market: “We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it.” Companies: “Waaaaaa, they are fighting us.”

      • Adalast@lemmy.world
        10·
        8 months ago

        “A company should be able to decide not to do business with individuals for ideological reasons.”

        Twitter, Facebook, etc. start filtering misinformation and banning offenders.

        “Mah freedoms are being infringed!”

  • Onihikage@beehaw.orgEnglish
    351·
    8 months ago

    The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.

    Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.

    Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.

    YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.

    Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.

    Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.

    It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.

    • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
      10·
      8 months ago

      Ofcourse you always get youtube music with the subscription, which they claim ads extra value. But I dont want youtube music, I already pay for another service. So for me it would be a waste of money

      • PsychedSy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        8 months ago

        I pay for the family plan and they use google music. I use pandora because my station is older than my 16yo niece that’s on my yt plan.

  • sweetpotato@lemmy.ml
    33·
    8 months ago

    Fuck them. I’d rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.

    The issue is not only the ads, it’s the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it’s the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it’s every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn’t work for you, it works against you. That’s not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.ml
    364·
    8 months ago

    Youtube isn’t some one of a kind miracle. There’s at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it’s not as difficult as people think.

    • graymess@lemmy.world
      249·
      8 months ago

      It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
        224·
        8 months ago

        No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.

        The number of times I’ve heard “XYZ will never happen” in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.

        Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we’d all like to see, but it will happen.

        • graymess@lemmy.world
          9·
          8 months ago

          History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.

          Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.

          The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.

          • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
            5·
            8 months ago

            The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse.

            While you’ve got some reasonable points, I’m about 14 years into using exclusively the OS everyone tried to tell me would never be viable on the desktop as my only desktop OS, and have been able to find opportunities to deploy it in my day job also. Haven’t used Windows except when paid to in all that time.

            And we’re conversing here on Lemmy, which may be objectively “worse” than Reddit by some metrics, but not any metrics that matter to me, nor, I think, to the majority of its users.

            When I’m done typing this I’m going to fire up my Jellyfin client to connect to my free and open source Jellyfin media server, and watch some content on that system which does everything I’d ever hoped a media server would do, even though I was confidently told by many people when it first forked from Emby (after Emby was enshittified) that it would be dead in two years, and certainly could never begin to compete with Plex. (I have never missed Plex for a single minute since moving to Jellyfin)

            Those are just three recent examples that I could think of without much effort. As you may be thinking, all of them are far smaller in scale than youtube, and yet, all three of them are things that quite happily serve my needs without spying on me or requiring exorbitant fees to feed someone else’s greed. I can (and do) support them financially, and in other ways, because I choose to.

            I’m not listing more examples because I’m too lazy to, not because lots more don’t exist.

            More broadly, I grew up during the time when very nearly everything regarding using a personal computer really was controlled by corporations, and was exorbitantly expensive. I had a computer because I was privileged enough to have parents who could buy me one, but the only free or inexpensive things to do with it were: Piracy (via locally copying each others’ games in most cases), Bulletin Board Systems, and learning to program. Shareware and Freeware existed, but with some notable exceptions tended to be not so good for various reasons, and the selection was not especially broad.

            There was no free/cheap equivalent like the Raspberry Pi to play with, but if you really wanted to pinch pennies you could build a PC with a kit from Heathkit or Radio Shack, for a fee that was still out of reach for a great many people due to cost or skill. There was not a global internet where people could collaborate and teach each other, and to whatever degree things like BBSs and Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL) might have been capable of providing those sorts of interpersonal connections, the critical mass wasn’t there in a way that it is today.

            We have Linux. We have cheap and/or open hardware. We have a vast trove of Free (not just gratis: libre) software that anyone in the world can use to run on that hardware, and improve on their own without penalty. We can share knowledge with others at a rate unheard of for most individuals decades ago. We have numerous examples of users who keep such services and products going, and thriving, without needing to siphon money out of the public as fast as possible to appease shareholder value.

            I predict that any such collapse as you describe will be transient, and it will pass far more quickly than it would have in the past. We (gesturing broadly) have the technology, the capability, and (I think) the desire to move past reliance on many of these services and corporate-controlled environments, and various individuals are already doing so. What emerges on the other side after such a paradigm shift as you predict won’t be Youtube, but that won’t mean it’s a step backwards, either.

            we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade

            I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing overall.

            It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.”

            Enshittification is a concept that has a little bit more depth than just being Lemmy’s favorite buzzword.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

            https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

            • graymess@lemmy.world
              4·
              8 months ago

              I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.

              But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.

              This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.

              • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
                4·
                8 months ago

                I think the primary difference in our views is that I don’t think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don’t claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I’m certain one exists.

                • graymess@lemmy.world
                  3·
                  8 months ago

                  I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
        12·
        8 months ago

        If the modern internet teaches us anything, its that everything is ephemeral even when you stringently catalogue every last byte of data. People just dont need access to 90% of YouTube’s library, yet Youtube has to pay big money to make 100% of that library available 24/7 365.

        There’s already rips at the seams of these systems. Time is not on the side of YouTube.

    • gap_betweenus@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 months ago

      Video hosting is still rather expensive, live streaming even more. Not sure that even youtube is profitable. Until some new tech comes along I think only amazon would be able to support some kind of viable alternative - and not sure they will be much better.

      • ImpulseDrive42@lemmy.world
        6·
        8 months ago

        Google “Odysee”.

        It’s currently my preferred YouTube alternative. Granted it obviously doesn’t have as much content as YouTube. But several well known content creators post to both YouTube and Odysee now.

        Some of the ones I follow include: Louis Rossman, Anton Petrov, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and Zach Star Himself. Just to name a few.

        And there’s also a browser extension called “Watch on Odysee” which adds a button to the YouTube video if the video is also found on Odysee so you can “watch on Odysee” instead of YouTube. Which can help you locate your favorite youtubers on the platform and let you follow them.

        And there is also an Odysee mobile app if you like watching videos on mobile.

        This is just one example, but I hope it helps ;-)