I get that it started for free with less intrusive ads, but YouTube has had a huge impact on the way we all share and consume information. Understanding how much money it takes to run a service with the technology needed to provide high definition videos on a site that is up 99.9999999% of the time, I have no issue paying for a service that has changed my life in many positive ways. Now I do hate price gouging like everyone else, but it’s inescapable from gas & groceries to all streaming platforms.

  • Noo@jlai.luEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    If you got the money, you can pay for whatever you want that’s legal. No needs to justify yourself at all.

    • Eww@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I am not opposed to being enlightened if you are willing to share. Otherwise, your comment adds nothing of value.

      • otter@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        I get that it started for free with less intrusive ads

        Prepping the market for future fuckery is not a virtue, and this smacks of apologist rhetoric.

        but YouTube has had a huge impact on the way we all share and consume information.

        This in no way is grounds for a society to handwave increasingly unethical, exploitive tactics.

        Understanding how much money it takes to run a service with the technology needed to provide high definition videos on a site that is up 99.9999999% of the time,

        Operational costs? That’s the crux of this apology for poor li’l YT just trying to make it in the big scary world? FFS. I’m sure exec profits have nothing to do with their business model. 🤦🏽‍♂️

        I have no issue paying for a service that has changed my life in many positive ways.

        The logical fallacies continue…

        Now I do hate price gouging like everyone else,

        A plea to the plebs?

        but it’s inescapable

        Ah, there’s the “but”, of course…

        from gas & groceries to all streaming platforms.

        Gas & groceries are goods, a streaming platform is not. More accurately, you’d have to rephrase it to something like “from Chevron & Kroger…”, but therein lies the rub, citizen.

        It’s not about the product that “has changed your life”, it’s the simple fact that the corporation behind the platform is using you — and you’re paying them to be their fucking product. 🤦🏽‍♂️

        • GhostCowboy76@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          So what should we do? Avoid all monetized information sources? I don’t pay for YT except with my time until I can skip an ad. But if you stop and think no information source is free. Libraries - over inflated taxes on an already middle to lower class that can’t afford the luxury tax breaks the ultra rich can buy, the internet - if it’s a free site then it’s selling your data skimmed from accessing the page. So what should we be supporting? Where should we be sharing and consuming knowledge in a 100% no cost to the user atmosphere?

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgMEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Upvoted for a truly unpopular opinion.

    In a vacuum, I agree. Had it started off as a paid service, or if the paid version was substantially better, I’d consider it. But in order for them to incentivize people to pay for Premium, they intentionally made the “standard” experience worse. I just cannot bring myself to reward that behavior/business practice.

    • osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org
      0·
      10 days ago

      I’ve been a youtube premium subscriber since like 2017, long before the enshitification went terminal. I have a family plan so my kids can watch videos on the TV or on the tablet for the older kid without being bombarded by ads. I get not wanting to encourage youtube’s shitty behavior these days, but I’ve always gotten plenty of value out of my youtube subscription, more than I ever did out of hulu or even netflix or paramount most months.

    • lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I got grandfathered in when they shutdown Google Play Music and it made Youtube so much more enjoyable of an experience. If I were to sign up today, I wouldn’t pay for Youtube Premium, but I’ve been spoiled and don’t want to go back to how shitty Youtube has become.

    • Eww@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I’m not rewarding them for bad behavior, I am paying them for running a sophisticated system that delivers any and all information in a digestible format to my fingertips. I do agree their free service has gone to shit, but it should have been a paid service from the start. I’ve built my own personal cloud and it is prohibitively expensive for me to have it stream HD video. Definitely more than a YT Premium subscription.

      • Mushroomm@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Don’t conflate services with goods. If your grocery bag boy showed up at your door when you were 3/4 through your loaf of bread and said you owed an extra dollar before you ate the rest you’d tell em to get the fuck off your property before you called the police.

        If you want to compare them as the same, you’ve got to use every example.

    • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      Hard agree. I’d love to have decided to most due to the convenience and quality of the service but I decided to pay because the frequency and number of ads wa ramping up. These fuckers know exactly the point that which I broke and they’re going to use that information to break others.

  • astrsk@fedia.io
    0·
    10 days ago

    I think this is unpopular enough. Though I will always advocate people donate directly, buy merch, or figure out some other way to support the creators. Typically buying a single t-shirt will completely offset your personal adblocking of a creator pretty much for life.

  • tteok@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Just use Brave browser and you will not see any ads, anywhere, on any website… for free.

  • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Which department do you work for?

    Google is fucking evil and has had a big hand in making society worse over the last 15 years. They will never get another penny from me.

  • kyle@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Honestly I’m with you. It recently told me I’ve watched > 1,620 hours of YouTube since switching to Premium a few years ago.

    There’s a lot to hate about Google and price gouging, but honestly this is a service that’s well worth the convenience for me.

  • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I’m with you in this one (so expecting downvotes). I’ve got 5 people in my house that all watch a shit load of YouTube. Originally I used Vanced on my phone, but realized that my kids were watching YouTube on the TVs and on their personal devices. At one point, I went into my daughter’s room at night and saw there were ads playing on her device where she had fallen asleep watching YouTube.

    So once Vanced shut down (I know there is ReVanced and other alternatives) I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium. The reality is, being a tech nerd is fine for me, but it wasn’t easy to scale up and protect my entire family from ads on all their devices. So I figured that a few bucks a month was worth it for me.

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Hahahaha, yeah, that’s probably because most people still don’t want pay for it, once your opinion gets popular, then it won’t be worth it.

  • Kyouki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Would rather pay the creators directly instead of it going 80% to anyone in ceo position and maybe 5% to the creator.

      • Kyouki@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        Pulled out of my ass as it was hypothetical… Just that I rather support creators instead of orgs with ceo’s salaries.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      At least with ads, 60% goes to the creator and 40% to YouTube. I had a video go viral because it was newsworthy, and a CDN (Storyful) offered to help with licensing and marketing, and their price was 40% of my 60%. I wasn’t really expecting the video to go viral, so decided “why not.”

      I only got 36% of the money from the YouTube views, but Storyful delivered and got it on the news and a few documentaries and I ended up making thousands of dollars for a few minutes of video. 10/10 would do again, but then YouTube changed the rules and now you need like 1,000 subscribers for your video to even qualify for monetization :(

  • Clent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    I have a family plan but it’s not for any reason other than my children use it and I can afford to pay to reduce their ad exposure. We live in a swing state so they were previously bombarded with political advertising.

    The way I see it, I swapped the Netflix account for a YouTube account because that’s what the kids favor now. If they move on, I will drop it immediately. If the price goes up then I am very likely to drop it. It’s already overpriced for what it is.

  • Bromine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I don’t mind ads.

    But I do mind having targeted ads. To be fair, most of what Google presumes about me is wrong, but from the ad patterns it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. Our data shouldn’t be hoarded and we shouldn’t be herded like cattle from which they can extract money through ad placement.

    I’m fine with subscription services, and ads, but the steps they’re taking to maximize their revenue is gross and I don’t just mean youtube. This is just the stuff we know about for sure.