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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. (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[+] -21 points 2 years ago (18 children)

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.

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  • [–] 65 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    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

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    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.

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