Technology

I'm one of the people grandfathered into YouTube music because I was a Google play music subscriber. At one point YouTube premium was bundled into my service as a perk for being a subscriber. I currently pay $8. I received an email upping that price to $13.99 for premium (YouTube music and YouTube premium). I'll still pay it. Mostly because I use the product I'm actively paying for and the lack of ads on YouTube is beneficial to me even though I use unlock origin.

I have not got any experience with how ads are implemented on YouTube because I have had my sub since 2011. So I have not experienced the frustration of many other people here who are having ads pushed at them by google on YouTube relentlessly.

That being said, if I'm honest right now the price of YouTube Music vs the price of Spotify is comparable ($10.99) currently so far as I can tell? But once the YouTube premium price ($13.99) increase hits (including YouTube music) Google will have the most expensive streaming service because all the other big music ones are around $10.99.

Amazon has movies, tv, and music bundled in prime and it costs $14.99 a month. Apple One (which is TV and music and some other stuff) is $19.95 a month. Hulu doesn't include music and it's no ad tier is $17.99 a month (with no music service). Netflix's lowest non-ad tier is $15.49 a month (again with no music service).

The removal of the lower paid tier for just no ads was a mistake. Some people are willing to pay a dollar or two to not see ads. Don't make it difficult for people who want to pay you to pay you. After all, there are people who pay for adblockers and VPN's.

Lumping "features" and services together under one umbrella premium subscription was a mistake (because people don't see value in all their services and it's similar to what cable companies like Comcast do, forcing subscribers to pay for services they don't use to get a "better price").

Because I think their anti-adblock antics are simply an effort to push more people to subscribe or watch ads (and only really aimed at people who are suggestible like your mom who only has adblock because you set it up for her), and considering that if you're a paid subscriber they don't care if you use adblock or not (so mom wouldn't even have to figure out how to turn off adblock, she'd just have to enter her credit card info), I don't know if this is a service problem.

I think it's a capitalism problem. This company is required to meet and exceed yearly profits on it's products. Ad aggregation is it's biggest product by far. A lot of people still seem to think Google sells that data to ad companies. They don't. They hoard it and make ad companies pay them and in exchange they show targeted ads to people who use their products. As a result (and since this is their biggest money maker), when people use adblockers they are actively circumventing Google's main revenue stream.

I feel like what we actually need is legal regulations. And the only way to really get those is to lobby for them.

Edit: I looked into it. CPM (Clicks Per Million) payout is 3.5 cents per adview. Google is raising the price of it's Premium tier to $13.99. To make that same revenue from a single viewer in ad spots that viewer would have to watch about 400 ad spots. This definitely explains why they're pushing premium so hard. They do actually apparently make more money from premium members so far as I can tell. Especially for casual users (and kids whose account are only allowed to show a limited quantity of specifically vetted ads, meaning that other people in these comments suggesting that Google can vet ads and work within user preferences to not show viewers certain ads are already implemented elsewhere on the platform).