Paying for premium is fine, but premium users letting Youtube off the hook for their corporate greed is annoying. If YT ran reasonable ads like they used to in the olden days I wouldn’t use an adblocker. Don’t even get me started on their garbage search, a multi billion dollar company can and should do better. Then of course there’s the fiasco of their demonetization system, and rules that apply to some but not others. Simply put they don’t deserve to be paid for premium, if their grinch heart grows and they decide to do better as a company I’d honestly pay for premium.

And here I am, getting the same thing and paying nothing because I’ve got uBlock Origin.

Meanwhile I’m over here like:

I’ll pay to not be exposed to ads. I’ll also pay to support a service I get value from. So I’m paying for YouTube premium, Netflix, Hulu. etc. When a service with media I want that has a more desirable corporate structure becomes available I’ll pay for that and maybe get rid of other services. I also occasionally sail the high seas if the thing I want isn’t available on any of the services I’m already paying for.

You think that’s bad? Mention you use a HP printer sometime. I dare you to try it.

I subscribe to YouTube Music and have since the Play days (R.I.P.). Watching videos without ads is just a perk.

I just find the cost of Premium to be too high.

Here in Sweden it costs about 120SEK/month, that is far too much, I’d happily pay 60-70SEK/month, that would be worth it to me.

And would still give rhem more money than me not watching ads

I think I’m more ok with people playing for YouTube premium. It still helps the creators on YouTube more directly than Netflix

I pay for it so my kids’ accounts don’t have ads. They’re too young to sort out all the edge cases that aggressive ad blocking generates and for a bonus we get youtube music.

Youtube does not offer Content instead they offer space to publish Videos and have Youtube Music.

The Price they are deamding is too high as if they Produce own Content and Music.

Youtube Premium would only be viable for me if i can be anonymous to buy it and removes age restriction,perma bann for YT Shorts the worst they done.

I cannot give a Company money that it this rotten.

Monopoly of YT is just sad.

Paying for Netflix is not fine

I know this is a silly meme but my issue with not wanting to pay for youtube is 3 fold.

1.Theyre a monopoly. Google bought out the plucky streaming service on the rise(and honestly if it wasnt google it would have been someone else) and then continued to build up momentum and squash the competition. There is no competition. Daily motion and vimeo and peertube exist, but they dont really compete with youtube anymore.

Google can complain all they want about how it’s expensive to host 4k videos from anyone who wants to upload and how all the global traffic makes their service unprofitable but given theyre a giant corporation, if it didnt bring them value they wouldnt be doing it and if it is a hole theyre putting money into then it’s an hole they dug for themselves.

2.Google sucks at dealing with their creators. The lifeblood of the site is that it is the default platform for video content creators because its so big. Unjustified DCMA takedowns which ruin a persons livelihood and are difficult to appeal, their demonetization and essentially delisting from the algorithm of nsfw videos(which can happen if a key word is detected or a specific type of image, that recent issue with the big youtuber doxing another and getting a slap on the wrist, and the changes made to algorithms that hurt creators and shape content.

Like how the comedy sketches and animators that were prevalent in the early days got squeezed out because the algorithm favored longer videos and a steadier stream of content. Or a case where a youtuber got his own song DCMA’d because another artist remixed his music. And thats not even getting into the poor compensation from ads that means creators need to use sites like patreon to get by. “Oh but if you pay premium your views count more” wow how nice of one of the biggest most valuable companies on earth.

They also have no easy way for even decent sized creators with millions of subs to appeal or get a hold of them, let alone one in the 100s of thousdands or tens of thousands mark. All ai reviewed and ai resolved.

3. The algorithm debacle. Its fickle tweaks have indirect impacts on creators and at worst it has been known to feed into conspiracy theories and red pill people into extremist pipelines and it took google way too long to address it. Even when it works well it can still push a lot of the same content. But its arbitrary nature an be a windfall on some seasons for one type of creator and tank another.

4. Honestly even if all else failed and adblock stopped working I would probably just watch the ads. It’s like a 15 second clip in the beginning if you skip and a minute worth of ad 10 or 15 minutes later. Im not gunna say I love it but do you people not remember what watching tv was like or reading magazines, or have you ever had a bus drive by you? I can live with the minor amount of mostly skipable ads I’d get an hour especially if it means Im not paying.

I believe it’s someone else’s hard earned money, if they want to throw money to have what is objectively a better viewing experience, then it’s not my problem.

It’s very ferengi to pay for goods and services.

But it is also very ferengi to steal goods and services.

Be a ferengi 😎

Here’s the thing: how much YouTube content creators are really affected by ad blockers varies widely, and that’s due to several factors such as what region their main viewership is in, their subject matter, and how many viewers of each creator fit the demographic that might use ad blockers. YouTube is the only entity that would have the real data on the real impact to content creators due to ad blockers, and it’s believed that the reason they don’t share that data is so that they can inflate the numbers in order to claim greater losses than they actually suffer— and while that may very well be a strong motivation, I believe the primary motivation to be to hide the wide variation in levels of compensation between their top content creators. If the ad-blocking impact data became public, it would also reveal the wide disparities in how much YouTube compensates different tiers of content creators and would make public deals with top creators that have, until now, remained private.

This so why it’s always discussed in vague terms and as some existential threat— which is is, for them.