this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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I’d pay for YouTube premium if t wasn’t more expensive than HBO. It’s ridiculous. Especially considering YouTube has no production costs. It’s all user-generated content.
the users do get paid though, although i'm sure it's a fraction of what youtube makes.
Hmmm. $20 a month for the big budget action of Westworld, or $20 a month for a cooking show filmed in someone’s basement. Decisions, decisions.
To be fair, YouTube has far more variety and far more content overall. Personally, I have seen pretty much anything worth watching on the major streaming services. My wife and I can just ignore any top 200 list of shows or movies because we have already seen it all and anything we haven't seen doesn't look interesting to us. We just have to wait for new shows to come out.
YouTube though. It's functionally unlimited considering the length of a human lifespan.
For some insight, a quick Google search says that Netflix has about 4 years of content if you sat down and watched everything they have to offer. Meanwhile, YouTube has about 18,000 years of content.
Are they including all those 10-hour long loop videos I uploaded?
I'd take 10h shreksophone over 3 of those 4 years worth of netflix content any day of the week!
I've never been one to really get into the loop of watching YouTube endlessly. It's felt like my use has been more like a search engine.
For me it's not really been a great source of entertainment. At best background noise. Quantity of hours is a useless metric for me when most of it is stuff that feels like unnecessary content. I think it's most telling that what makes YouTube watchable for me is sponsorblock with one of my most used functions skip to highlight, and blocktube to block the popular channels that dominate search results. And lately youtubetranscript to just save myself time watching and overly long 10+ minute long segment in favor of quickly skimming over the words.
I feel the algorithm promoting long videos has ruined the quality with now more videos trying to fit that minimum length.
The irony of this comment is you can find the cooking show but not Westworld on HBO lol
honestly i will watch westworld once, but i never use my netflix account but i watch stuff like physics lectures and chemistry videos all the time. i just find it fascinating, in a way scripted TV isn't for me.
I'd pay more for YouTube rather than HBO/Netflix. There's much more content that interests me on YouTube.
I sleep to lectures on youtube so I probably clock up a lot of hours a day and ads would ruin that forever - so I pay
but i do enjoy a lot of creator channels too, so it's worth it for that as well. plus i really fucking hate ads.
part of me also thinks - it must cost a bomb to deliver that much data and storage, plus the bandwidth for 4k video at any time, plus paying the people who make content. some of them are millionaires, youtuber is kind of a career and it's not all in-video endorsements.
at some point, someone has to pay, and it's the advertisers paying to access me, or it's me paying. i'd rather pay. i'd prefer it if it was free but i kind of get that it's not. I couldn't pay to host youtube and develop the platform and have everyone watch free.
I'm sorry but I find this deeply comic and I can't stop giggle
At the same time, clickbait has always existed. There's a reason trash emerged from tv to become his own subgenre
The DeArrow extension "fixes" thumbnails on Youtube to make them less clickbaity. Sadly content makers have to do it if they want the blessings of the algorithm god.
We actually don't know what percentage they're making. They can tell you how much they're paid, but no one but Google can tell you how much of the subscription cost goes to them versus Google.
This was maybe 5 or so years ago, but I remember Game Grumps did mention something along the lines of how they get more from someone watching their video on YouTube premium vs someone who watches their videos with ads playing.
It's still not a ton of info, and I'm not sure if it's still true. Or maybe it's different for every channel or something.
It's such a low number most people would be disgusted.
We're talking a few bucks for a million views.
the big guys get sponsors to fund them, not ad revenue
That's a symptom of a broken system. It's literally users creating their own ads because the platform's ads aren't getting them paid.
On a related note, you can skip those ads with a plugin, or the right app on Android and Android TV.
It's about 1$ per 1000 views. Source: my small YT channel.
cpm = cents per million
You can get Premium cheaper through other countries. It’s super simple. I only pay about 1€ / month and that feels about right to me unlike the 15€ or something I’d have to pay otherwise.
Isn't there a risk of getting your Google account banned for doing this?
It's definitely a TOS violation (as is using any kind of VPN to access their content apparently) but I never heard of anyone having trouble with it. Either way, I moved off of other Google services completely, so it would not be a huge loss for me at least.
That's not a bad idea. I could consider making an extra Google account just for that so that way if for some reason it went screwy it doesn't affect being able to log into other services.
Man, I hate Google.
I've been doing it for four years and never had a problem with it. There are so many people from India that live and travel in my country so how would they know that I'm not one of them?
I'm guessing via a VPN, but which country do you connect to for the low prices?
Argentina or (in my case) Turkey seem to be popular options. You only need to use a VPN when setting up the first payment. Your credit card can be from your home country, no checks at all. After that it'll just work and you won't need a VPN anymore.
I'm from India and it's about ₹120 ~ $1.4.
Which country did you go through? I assume you purchase on a VPN and then after it applies normally?
Yep! I left another reply with more details. I'm using Turkey and it's super easy to set up.
More video is uploaded every minute than anyone can ever watch in a lifetime. It costs money to store and serve all that.
Then they shouldn't store everything.
Isn't their issue more hosting costs and not production costs? Unless they start telling people they can't upload videos (exception being copyright of course) Youtube greatly outpaces the storage costs of other social media sites.
They probably still store more than other video-hosting sites too.
their problem is probably paying $2 billion a year or some crazy number for nfl football.
It should be a crime the way they make you subscribe to YouTube Music to get YouTube Premium.
The pricing feels like it only makes sense if you want to use YouTube Music (and thus also don't use one of the many streaming music competitors). Paying a couple of bucks extra for ad free YouTube is fine and that's why I pay it personally. But if I wasn't a YTM user already, I don't think I would.
And most people don't want to switch streaming music services. I did that years ago and it sucked. Music is the kinda thing where you really benefit from the service knowing your tastes. I only did it because back then, Spotify was missing some of my favourite artists while Google Play Music had them. I don't even know if that applies today.
A part of your YT Premium payment goes directly to creators that you watch based on your watch time. That is their content expenses just like HBO for making new shows.
Idk if the price is that ridiculous, the family plan costs me 16 bucks and I have YT premium for my household+. I also have YouTube music from that as well, I find it better than spotify for my use and I dont have to put up additional cost for music streaming elsewhere. There was also youtube premium content (Youtube Red?) if that is still a thing, I remember the Vsauce series being available because of this.
Youtube having no costs is a hot take if ive ever seen one, but I dont think I can say anything about this that hasnt been said.
Only a kid used to having mommy and daddy pay for everything would claim youtube has no costs. It is amazing how many people on social media think everything should be free. The real issue here it is the lack of competition.
That's a bit disingenuous, IMO. Of course they don't pay to produce content, but they definitely pay quite a lot to store all of the video that millions of people are uploading daily for free.