this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is "buy YouTube premium, so you won't be stuck in our ad supported model" and now we're ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn't YouTube premium exactly that?
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
So "pay or you don't get shit" is okay, but "pay or see ads, your choice" is bad somehow?
Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It's not mysterious at all.
There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.
Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.
All those are fine suggestions, but a "free with ads" option isn't that bad either; the real problem isn't the ads themselves. The real problem is how intrusive the ads are, how many of them there are, as well as much information they (and YouTube) collect on you. Plus, in this case, the company in question isn't exactly a small company who is financially struggling. It's the classic capitalist problem of "infinite growth", where your profits have to be constantly increasing.
But there's nothing inherently wrong about the idea of having ads, just like there's nothing inherently wrong about youtubers having sponsors.
That's a fine opinion, but I happen to disagree.
It's not pay or remove ads. It is pay to give us the money that we need to run our business or we will use ads to get that much money
You're right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn't math.
They simultaneously introduced this ad blocker change and took away the $5 no-ads package.
This is a shakedown and it's been happening across many streaming platforms for a while now.
I don't mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they've become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I'm trying to watch and I'll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
I'm not against using ads to support websites but it's the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can't ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
But no, not like that. Clearly they need to find a way of materializing money from thin air.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
"Guys they don't have any money, they just gotta be privacy vampires and spam us with ads, they have no other means of funding it!"
Maybe stop being a bootlicker for a company that used to be "Don't be evil."
Yeah! There needs to be a model that does neither cost nor inconveniences me. Everything else is unacceptable and corporate BS!
I'm sure they can take a page from every online service before we entered the 2020s, where you could pay to enter without ads, like Netflix was. But no, the ad company has to inject ads into everything.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
"Guys they don't have any money, they just gotta be privacy vampires and spam us with ads, they have no other means of funding it!"