If you pay for YouTube premium, you’re a clown and you’re only fueling the enshittification.
Ads are bad (I agree).
Paying for things is bad.
Then what’s left? YouTube should somehow be ad free and free of cost for the user forever and ever? Who’s gonna pay for the enormous costs of operating the service?
People are going to start yelling at me about capitalism and enshitiffication. Both of which are cause problems, but what do you propose here? Magic?
I’m not opposed to paying for online services in general, I’m just not going to pay them to make the site worse with every update. (Plus I kinda categorically refuse to give Google money at this point.)
I’ll still call someone a clown for paying even if I’m able to acknowledge that someone has to hold the bag. Just ain’t gonna me or hopefully anyone I care about.
I propose YouTube make a MUCH better premium product and price it correctly. Paying for things is fine. Paying for things to get crappier? Na
How is YouTube getting crappier for me as a paying customer? I feel like it hasn’t really changed in years.
Glad you enjoy it. Keep doing your thing. But are you seriously def to the rising chorus of complaints about YouTube? This thread contains many examples of youtube’s enshitification over the few couple years. Your question feels disingenuous at best to me
Name one complaint, other than blocking people with ad blockers. How has the actual product changed?
Makes sense and probably all companies that do regional pricing have a rule for this, Steam explicitly states to not do this as well
You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.
You can use NewPipe or Tubular for Android
Also there is https://piped.video/trending for watching in browser and Revanced on Android
And for anyone using YouTube Music there is Desktop app for Linux,MacOS and Windows https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music
LibreTube is also a good one. Basically an app for piped
Blows my mind that to this day, companies don’t realize it’s a service issue. Like it’s straight up regressed. Adobe and Microsoft used to encourage piracy to help their bottom line. Now you have stupid PMs who realize they can get a good performance review by talking about how much money they’ll make/save from doing stuff like this
This really is not a service issue. This is not a privacy issue.
YouTube as a service is … actually a great service, it pays creators well, it’s fast, it has decades of content, and it has tons of features.
It’s monetized with ads, you either watch those ads or you pay them. Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.
no company would accept that.
Except for a company that understands going after these people won’t benefit them?
Literally read about regional pricing and how important it is. It’s incredibly ignorant to be against regional pricing.
The alternative to regional pricing is people just don’t have access at all.
that’s abuse of regional pricing
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.
Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.
So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers
And right there I’m done with your comment. Regional pricing is incredibly important, without it everyone pays the US or EU price and there is no service provided period.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
Even if true, that’s not what this hoopla is about. It’s about someone from say … the US using a VPN to get Kenyan pricing. As another person said “The internet’s most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs.”
Regional pricing is the only reason people in these countries even stand a chance at access to the service (because ultimately their costs might be a bit lower in these countries but not by much … I would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark). People in other countries abusing those slashed prices threatens the whole system.
This is people in “first world” countries trying to rig the system: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/15hz5ys/found_country_that_works_to_get_youtube_premium/
Someone in Uzbekistan for instance would feel as the average US consumer would if a year of YouTube premium was $829.
Your problem is that you’re working backwards. Is the “correct” price for youtube premium the US/EU price, and the rest of the world is getting a discount? No! Of course not! If that were the case then Google would be losing money on every single third world youtube user!
The “correct” price is something much, much lower, and the people in the most expensive regions are being gouged because they can afford it.
would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark
And in the efficient market, that’s how much the service would cost for everyone, because otherwise I could just go to a competitor of YouTube for less, and YouTube would have to lower their pricing to get customers, and so on until no one can lose their prices without losing money.
Unfortunately, efficient markets are just a neoliberal fantasy. In real life, there are network effects - YouTube has people uploading videos to it because it has the most viewers, and it has the most viewers because it has the most videos. It’s practically impossible for anyone to compete with them effectively because of this, and this is why they can put their prices in some regions up to get more profit. The proper solution is for regulators to step in and require things like data portability (e.g. requiring monopolists to publish videos they receive over open standards like ActivityPub), but regulatory capture makes that unlikely. In a just world, this would happen and their pricing would be close to the costs of running the platform.
So the people paying higher regional prices are paying money in a just world they shouldn’t have to pay, while those using VPNs to pay less are paying an amount closer to what it should be in a just world. That makes the VPN users people mitigating Google’s abuse, not abusers.
My main concern is that they sometimes serve ads that redirect to porn, even if you aren’t signed in, meaning children could be shown these ads. By this alone I wouldn’t want to use YouTube, but as they practically have a monopoly on video streaming it’s not really viable to boycott them without giving up on user generated videos
You’re getting down voted, but you are mostly correct.
I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.
The thing is, Google isn’t dumb. They’ve user tested this strategy and they know it results in higher revenue.
And the enshitification continues…for those that don’t pay
You can pay to have less ad, but you’re still also paying with your data. Bet pretty soon it will be pay and have ads, or pay more again. They have a captive market. They can extract and extract.
I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.
I do agree but their costs have also skyrocketed because the resolution and frame rate of videos has skyrocketed.
Linus Tech Tips did a video about this … which agree with his conclusions or not, he paints a clear picture about how YouTube is more expensive to run than it used to be https://youtu.be/MDsJJRNXjYI
Google also isn’t in the business of “running things at a loss in hopes of future profit” anymore … so they need YouTube to be profitable. Maybe it’s “too profitable”, maybe they could cut down on the amount of advertising they use … but you’re absolutely right that they do test this stuff and find the threshold between “annoying but profitable” and “annoying but we’re losing users.”
More competition is always good … but Google isn’t stopping competition from showing up, just like Valve isn’t stopping competition from showing up, they’re just providing a better service that creators keep coming back to (because it’s ultimately good for those same creators to get their content out there and monetize it).
NewPipe, no problems.
Tubular is better. It’s a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock built-in.
That’s how it’s called now?
Yes. The NewPipe x SponsorBlock repo is archived and there’s a message in the README saying:
Development Has Stopped
This fork is old and no longer maintained. See Tubular, a new fork of NewPipe.
I keep saying it. Privacy invasive, targeted advertising has got to be barely worth the cost of maintaining it. Why else is Google trying to put more ads in places, kill ad blockers on chrome, force expats out of subscriptions, and experiment with unskippable ads if not to try and invent some kind of additional value to advertisers out of nothing.
Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What’s happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.
YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube’s losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.
But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.
And this is what it looks like.
As for risking competition, at this point, I don’t think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.
I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There’s a long-term strategy here to nuke and blocking permanently. That’s what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back.
Enshittification
I use to care, but then I just use Peertube. Oh but there’s not as much content on Peertube. Put the type of content you like on Peertube make a channel it is free. Another tip is, look for specific types of content, and not specific content creators. and if you happened to find a creator you know or knew, follow them on Peertube!
I have plenty of tech that keep me up to date on Peertube, and it’s a type of platform that will never have ads or go a direction I don’'t want it to as a whole in terms of federation of servers and being an opensource video platform.
Server can surely make some unwelcomed decisions, and I can just change servers easily. Better then Youtube no ads, and your experience does not get throttled.
Peertube is a crazy impressive piece of tech. Just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it needs something to happen to push users over to it (or something like it). YouTube keeps doing stupid things like this, so one day users will be pushed away from it and the creators will have to follow or die.
They did not get me yet 🥳 (I don‘t Know why)
I’d rather not use youtube than give them money for it or even sit through their intrusive ads. There are infinite ways to entertain myself.
I mean… that is the point.
Pay for premium, watch ads, or don’t watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.
Google should have thought of that before trying to paywall the zeitgeist.
If there’s a bouncer holding culture hostage, I’m going to sneak in the backdoor.
I specified intrusive ads. They could have non-intrusive ads, like a little banner or something. Instead they put up multiple video ads before and during videos. No thanks.
Don’t forget after! Man I hate that when I have to sit through an ad if I don’t realize the video is all the way over yet, or I don’t change it in time
I use VPN on all my personal devices and 100% block all of Google but my work computer is either company VPN or straight “normal” Internet.
From time to time I have to check out YouTube from the work computer and since they’ve got no data on my home IP address, it’s wild seeing the content of the ads shift from irrelevant (non-targeted) from my home IP to highly targeted on the work VPN (it’s clear they target the demographics of my company).
I mean, it is great that you have very specific rules in terms of what kind of ads you will tolerate. You should write a letter to John Google about that.
But also? We have been through all this before. Back in the day, ads on websites were incredibly unobtrusive. A small png at the top of the page that everyone skimmed past. But people still wanted to block those because only the evil sites were sellouts who needed to pay for hosting and blah blah blah. Which more or less started the ad war we have going to today. First they were simple jpegs. Then they were animated gifs. Then they were annoying animated gifs. Then they became flash ads. Then they became flash ads about how this shitty age of empires ripoff totally has boobs. And so forth.
Because if people aren’t looking at ads? The people who buy ads know that. So we get ads that are harder to look away from. Until they are ads we can’t look away from because they are embedded in the videos themselves.
And, until we live in a post scarcity society where energy is infinite, it is going to cost money/resources to host web content. Ads are still the closest thing to an “effective” way to pay for a lot of that. And that means a war to have ads that get past ad blockers and ensure eyes get on them.
What really started the ad war was the endless drive for greater profits. Let’s say I accept youtube’s terms and sign up for premium. Sooner or later they will introduce ads into premium as well. We’ve seen this process happen with many other services before. I didn’t start using an ad blocker until quite a bit after pop-ups were rampant and malware-infested ads became an issue. There’s a point where it becomes too much and people will seek out alternatives. An entire generation grew up with convenient streaming services and they’re generally less knowledgeable about piracy than the generation before them. That will likely change as those streaming services continue to jack up prices while making the experience worse all in the name of profit.
Again, there is an endless supply of entertainment these days. If companies think they can endlessly jack up prices and/or worsen the experience, they’re contending with practically infinite supply, the consequences of which are obvious in when it comes to supply vs demand.
Were the ad companies interested in increased profits? Of course they were. But they also aren’t a charity. And when they are buying ad space for a web comic but having zero impressions, they are going to be pissed. They aren’t running a charity (well… some actually ARE but that is a different mess).
Again, this has been going on well before subscription models were even a thing.
That said, I do agree that it is a generational “problem”. Youtube has been around for almost 20 years and, arguably, in its current form for almost 10. Significant parts of the internet have no memory of anything else. Like, my niece and nephew literally throw tantrums when they see tv commercials when their father is watching a football game. Whereas my sister and I remember the fights over who got to use the downstairs bathroom during the second commercial break in The Simpsons that week.
But… I am an old. I remember heartfelt blog posts from some of my favorite webcomics and gaming news sites that were basically “Look. Hosting costs money. Especially as we are getting a lot more popular. I go out of my way to curate what ads we run on this site and have an inbox set up in case a company sneaks a bad one in. Please whitelist me in your ad blocker so I can keep doing this in the evenings”.
And… I dunno. It is just REALLY frustrating to watch people pretend they care about… anything all while dicking over “the little guys”. Because Google is going to get their cut. The pewdiepies of youtube will also get their cuts because they have literally been doing this for years in the form of sponsored videos. But the low/mid tier creators? They aren’t getting the massive sponsor deals (unless they want to do raid shadow legends or better help) AND are going to not be getting their ad revenue or youtube premium money because no ads were run.
If you have an iPhone or iPad you don’t even need to use a VPN to get cheap Premium. Just make an new Apple ID with an Indian address, top it up by buying a digital Apple Card on Amazon.in and redeeming it to your Indian account in iTunes on a computer. Then on your iPad or iPhone go to your Apple ID in the settings, log out of Media and Purchases and login with the Indian account. Then you can buy Premium in the YouTube app with your Rupees, you don’t even need to change your YouTube account.
