this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Honestly, if YouTube offered a $5 adfree video plan I’d pay for it. It’s not worth $14/month in my opinion
I think these companies are starting to run into the brick wall caused by disgusting wealth inequality and the subsequent inability to spend as frivolously as needed for a healthy economy.
Also just coming to the realization that advertising on the internet has always been done atrociously (not that RL advertising is any better but at least follows some kind of structure and isn't thrown in your face repeatedly) and that a large swath of people do not want to deal with it or interact with it.
Rather than fix something that is clearly broken, they'd rather double down, throw money at it and make it more of a problem than admit they need to reign it in and put some common sense and sanity checks on how advertising should take place online.
Its product life cycle in their eyes came to the phase of "cash cow" . They are milking what was built in past untill there's anything left. It was same with gaming industry. It seems inevitable once company reaches certain size (not in people count sense). That's why we need alternative to keep things good for users.
The majority of Internet ads are ableist. I have ADHD and they're too distracting.
That's the YouTube Premium Lite plan that they killed off less than a month ago.
Youtube would profit off of $2 a month the fact that they need to charge 14 is just greed
How did you compute that?
This was 2022 and there is conflicting figures, most of which are 2 billion to 2.8 billion regular users (regular use of at least once a week, most daily.) https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statistics/
Google has claimed youtube costs 5 billion a year to run back in 2019 but has never put out a solid figure or statement to the public, Entourage Marketing & Design did research in 2019 but the article seems to be down as I can't locate the actual source. This could be inaccurate today but all information I've seen points to it still being single digit billions to operate year to year.
If these figures are accurate, 2USD from their claimed regular users would put them near their break even point without even considering income from advertisers or other investors and business opportunities. If they really did intend for every adult youtube user (roughly 80% of their audience) to pay them 14USD a month, that's still over five times their operating costs alone.
Clearly, youtube is getting a lot more money from advertisers then they are from premium users, which is why they are trying to make the free to use option on their website so awful and unbearable that people will pay them directly to skip the ads (though rumblings have been going around at them finding ways to insert ads into premium user viewing experience as well.) And since the advertising side is so toxic and predatory they can tell when people are using ad blockers to avoid it, it reports back they aren't watching ads and thus tries to prevent people from utilizing the service entirely until their participation generates money for youtube.
Fuck that shit. They'd just increase it gradually until it hit 80$. They also don't care about the user experience playing shit ads that are some times horrific (like the recent Israel propaganda ads with war, or 1 hr + ads, or salacious ads). They also inject the ads at the worst possible spots. They should give creators that control but fuck them.
Don't give Youtube or Google that option. This is what they want. They are ruining the internet further.
That's way too expensive. I guess regional pricing did me good because here it costs an equivalent of $3.75 (RM 17.90). That much for Premium + Music ain't no way I'm not taking it.
Spotify costs $3.35 (RM 15.90).
I'd pay €1 a month. Max. If only 50 million people did the same, they'd make 50 million per month. Must be more than they make now from ads....
I cancelled Spotify and use YouTube for music and videos now so it's worth $14 to me. Just loaded all my Spotify playlists into YTM. Interface isn't as good as other music apps, but it has a pretty insane catalog, especially for stuff like remixes and bootlegs
Not to mention, ads make so much less per user. And if you started to click on most of them they will demonetize the content creator for it.
So those 14 bucks / per user is like the user was thousand people watching hundreds of videos roughly speaking.