YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
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I'll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
- I use it every day and I'm a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
- I think YouTube's content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
- A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
- The "premium" encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
- Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I'll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I don't think there is anything wrong with paying for what you consider to be value. I pay for Nebula for similar reasons. Similarly, I don't have a problem with free services including modest ads to cover their costs and even make a profit.
I do have a problem with ads that have gotten so aggressive that the free experience becomes unusable. For many providers, I feel like they have lured in content creators by promising free access and then changed the bargain after the fact by making the free tier intolerable.
rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It's a win win
Alright, let's say I do that. I'll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I've watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows... about 100 different channels.
Let's ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I'd have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let's do math together:
- Subscription: $12.48 (the extra $0.48 is applied at checkout for the 4% VAT)
- 4% VAT (rounds up): -$0.48 ($12.00)
- 1.9% + $0.30 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.53 ($11.47)
- 45% Platform Split (not rounded!): -$5.1615 ($6.3085)
- 100x split: $0.063085 p/channel
Ok. That's ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. Now, I don't know about you... but I'm kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let's go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:
- Not-Subscription: $12.48
- Rounded up: $13.00 (the donation has to be evenly divisible by 100)
- Per-creator donation: $00.13
- 4% Local Digital VAT (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.12)
- 5% Platform Fee (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.11)
- 5% + $0.10 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.11 ($0.00)
In other words: I'd be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the "no money" problem, there's also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. Of course, we've also conveniently ignored the issue of individually navigating numerous currency conversions...
Let's be honest with each other: you weren't being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I'm certain that you don't follow your own advice because it's quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
We watch a vastly different amount of videos online I guess. I was thinking 10 or 20 people at most. But even with 100 people, if somehow you wanted to donate to every single person, the solution is simply to donate yearly rather than monthly. (Seriously tho, not judging your lifestyle, but 100 channels? That's a lot)
You are making a lot of assumptions with your argument.
In your current model, a considerable share of your subscription money goes to the platform (in this case, Alphabet), rather than directly to creators. While this is indeed a reality of the current system, that doesn't mean it is the most effective way to support creators, and it is this point that the suggested model seeks to challenge. Direct contributions, even if smaller in size, have a larger portion reaching the creators.
Also, your argument assumes that you donate an equal share of revenue to every creator, but that doesn't always make sense. You have the Power of Choice: In the current model, you pay your subscription fee and have little say over how it is distributed. In a direct donation model, you have a greater ability to vote with your wallet, supporting the creators who you feel truly deserve your support.
I’m certain that you don’t actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
No, I don't, I donate more than that, and most of the time without third party platforms that take their cut, but look I agree, it's not practical for every individual to distribute $12 among dozens of creators around the world. But, if a significant number of people were to adopt this approach, the collective impact could indeed be substantial.
Also, patreon and similar platforms are only used for convenience, and are not the end all be all, for instance liberapay takes no fees (with the exception of the processing fees that are charged by the payment processor).
I didn't know that you also get higher bitrate with premium. That might change things for me. Most of the time I watch YouTube on a desktop where I can use uBlock but when I watch on my iPad the ads get really annoying and I have already thought about getting premium just to get rid of the ads while watching videos during breakfast. Having higher bitrate would be a nice bonus.
Eh, I'm not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you'd have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement -- youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.
On the other hand, ads suck. I'd have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.
What I find most annoying is that it's still not possible to get Premium Lite (Premium without music, offline and background play) because I already have Spotify and don't really need background and offline play. 12 EUR/month is a steep price for just removing ads.
Fair enough, you need to look out for you. If the money would be missed, don't pay the bridge troll. Block ads and be free.
FWIW: YouTube Red was basically what you're asking for and it cost the equivalent of 9 EUR/month. Red wasn't available in Europe so this is a moot point, but that's the rate that YouTube previously valued itself at as a standalone product if you're curious.
They had a pilot project in benelux and nordic countries called Premium Lite for 6,99 EUR/month
Oh! I'd never heard of Premium Lite so I thought you were speaking hypothetically. TIL.
Yeah, that is a lot lower. If they offered that option I'd definitely use it over the $12 one... but I suppose that explains why the pilot never took off, eh?
Probably, such a shame really
If you watch YouTube videos on a small smartphone screen, sure, the bitrate does not matter that much. But whenever I watch it on my 55" 4k TV I cringe every time the image gets a bit busy and suddenly there are blocking artifacts everywhere
I’m also a YouTube premium user. I realize there are other ways to get around the ads, but I prefer supporting the services I enjoy using.
I subscribed to a paid version of YouTube Music many years ago, and at some point, due to some changes by YouTube, this automatically converted into a Premium YouTube membership, and I've been somehow locked in at $9.99/mo since then. Thankfully, my wife doesn't care about watching ads, so we don't need the family plan. That being said, even if I had to pay full price, and even if my other family members wanted Premium, I'd still pay for it. It's 100% worth it from my perspective, for all of the reasons you mentioned.
I second this. Probably the best $15 I spend for my family every month. No ads for kids watching YT on their own is nice peace of mind for me and my wife.
And because I already pay for it, we've slowly all migrated over from Spotify to YT Music and been surprisingly happy with it.
The family plan was the best $15 I spent for many years but when they raised the rates this past year I took a look at all my streaming subscriptions and YouTube didn't make the cut any longer. There's a small chance I'll resub as an individual down the road but for now it's ad blockers for me.
How is it $15/mo for you? When I look at a family plan it's $23/mo. I'm using Spotify with a student discount right now, but my wife and I accidentally kick each other off from time to time and it'd be nice to not have to worry about that. $15 would be worth considering since we just freed up some money by cancelling Netflix.
That's reasonable. I'd be fine paying but I just feel like the cost is too high for my usage. I don't use YouTube enough to justify the cost. If they had like a lower tier where for 5 bucks a month I could skip x ads or ads on x hours of videos I'd be a subscriber already.