Unpopular Opinion

You like it now, just wait though. In another year "YouTube Premium" will probably split further into basic and premium plus tiers. Basic will cost exactly the same except you now have to watch "limited" ads again, while Premium Plus will cost twice as much and be basically the same thing you're paying for now plus some new bullshit feature no one cares about.

This is what YouTube has become. It's what all the corporate services that like to make you think they care about you do. As long as we all keep shelling out more money for less services they will all just keep pumping us for every dollar they can possibly get.

It's an unethical strategy called a "loss leader" where these companies offer a service they actually lose money on for a limited time until they get you to the point that you take it for granted. Then they make that same price point terrible and jack up the price for the good service you've come to expect.

Upvoted for a truly unpopular (and valid) opinion.

In a vacuum, I agree with you. Had it started off as a paid service, or if the paid version was substantially better on its own merits, 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.

I also upvoted for an absurdly unpopular opinion, this is a shocking take.

It's like paying for Exxon Mobil "premium" oil out of respect that they were one of the first oil companies.

I wouldn't mind paying for YouTube Premium, if:

• They did not track or keep selling your info for money after buying it
• It wasn't so expensive

But both of them seem like things that can never become true (especially the first point), so yes. I am hoping for PeerTube to get attention when YouTube starts breaking down.

I already paid for a lifetime of free Google services with all the data they stole from me before I had any sense that something so massive and invasive could even exist.

Thanks to ReVanced and Freetube and some others, Google can effortlessly pay out their equitable share.

I enjoy making Google hurt by blocking the ad revenue.

I would be ecstatic if they failed as a company.

Google is evil, supporting them financially is unethical.

Unpopular opinion, I agree.

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.

There was a time where I would have been happy to pay for it too, back when the ads were less intrusive. However, the number of ads increased drastically when they started pushing premium, and it's only gotten worse - not to mention the fact that, even though they make more money, the content creators (employees) are paid less per view. I don't mind paying for a product or service. I do mind paying to make an engineered inconvenience from a mega corporation that has a de facto monopoly go away.

Even if YT Premium was cheap AF, I wouldn't pay for it because:

• I know they will raise the price non stop (we all know this).
• It doesn't come with Sponsorblock, that is already a downgrade.

I'll pay Tubular (NewPipe) / PeerTube first.

I bought premium years ago as part of Google Music family (pre yt-music) and stuck with it, it was affordable. I am more than capable of blocking the ads over the years. Other members of my family want to use YT without ads on a myriad of devices. When the price got hiked at the start of the year I was really annoyed, and probably would have dropped the service if it were just me. However my family made it pretty clear that they did not want to jump through the hoops of blocking the ads.

I'm the same way. I bought Premium when I started sleeping to Thunderstorm Sounds videos and didn't want ads interrupting my sleep. And I found that it's nice to watch my ASMR videos and videogame reviews without struggling with ad blockers, etc. Overall I don't mind spending a couple bucks a month for it. I get that server costs are expensive and the platform needs a way to make money so it is what it is.

My lemmy instance doesn't support downvotes and I only see upvotes, so feel free to downvote me to oblivion - I'll have no idea.

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

Your take is so incredibly bad and you should feel bad and this is the most uncomfortable upvote

I don't mind paying and I do pay but I do mind this disgusting bootlicking, OP...

You need to think big picture where this is going. Big tech has no limits or regard for us.

This is an adverserial situation and you are trying to be a good faith actor.

Never forget who you are dealing with here.

With that said... This is likely unpopular so got to upvote haha

Nice try Diddy.

I remember youtube when there weren't ads.

I pay for it as well. I started when it was Youtube Red because I absolutely fucking despise ads. I learned later on that YouTubers get paid a lot more per Premium view, and that's helped to keep me paying for it. I tend to watch channels that don't do sponsorships, and many of those channels have videos that are quite expensive to produce (Project Farm and Torque Test Channel stand out in that regard). I like these people and what they do, so I want to help them.

It's expensive (I have the family version so my partner and her dad can be covered as well), but I have the means to afford it.

If YouTubers stop getting paid more for my views, I'll probably drop it and switch to NewPipe (which I already use on occasion for videos that have intrusive sponsorships).

What I dont get is most of the people shitting on it pay for premium on Spotify...

Google play music was awesome, and rolled into YouTube Music, which is decent.

It comes with YouTube Premium and at least used to cost similar.

No ads on YouTube was just an extra.

I also post for it and I also don't mind. I watch a lot of YouTube (nearly 2000 hours so far), I listen to a lot of YouTube music (nearly 4000 hours) and I find it to be a reasonable price.

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.

I only wish they’d kept the “premium light” option (which I paid for until they canceled it). I don’t need another music service or locked screen playback, so I wish I could still pay a bit less for not using those.

Good post, I vehemently disagree in every way

The problem is that the paid premium is NOT better than free with extensions. Piracy is a service problem, and the paid service is NOT better than the "pirated" one. Even if premium was completely free, if it didn't allow extensions I would still use the ad version with extensions.

Revanced android apps also exist, and I won't use them with premium accounts (no point) and they are the only way of having sponsorblock, return youtube dislike, manual HDR and many other small but very useful features.

I would gladly pay for the content if and when the youtube official apps and website had features similar to those extensions.

I also don't mind using ReVanced and getting the same features as YouTube Premium for free.

It made economic sense for us to get the YouTube Premium family plan. When we dropped several streaming services and also Spotify, it was a bit more expensive than Spotify's family plan, but YouTube without the ads was worth it, especially considering they have a huge library of movies that they are offering in high quality for streaming.

Honestly, I'm more satisfied than when I was paying for Spotify Family and Disney+ and Paramount+. And if I must see the eight billionth Marvel show of the year, which I generally don't, there's always the high seas.

Upvoted for a truly unpopular opinion.

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