YT has literally become my cable. I listen to music, watch movies, documentaries, stand up comedy, news, sports… and cat videos, obviously.
To me it’s just worth it to pay a bit of money each month and have the whole thing just available to me.
I feel like if you were to put a money value on all the complaining, stomping of feet and trying to side-step the ads I’ve seen over the last several years, you’d probably find it’s actually less to just pay and enjoy it.
you do you if you use it that much and you think it's worth your money then good for you ( i honestly mean it ) we don't like youtube ads, YES that is true but it is not the only reason :
some of us hate youtube ( and google by extent ) for tracking
some of us hate youtube because it's algorithms tricking us into forcing certain agendas and ideals upon us
some of us hate youtube because the hypocrisy around how they treat content creator differently yet claiming they are all under the same "rules"
the list goes on but what i want to say is that we don't hate people who pay for youtube we hate those who defend the platform like it's a white knight and nothing shady happening in it
Google sucks and YouTube is evil.
If they were not such an explicitly and overtly shitty company, I'd pay for premium no qualms.
As it is, I wouldn't give them a dollar if the CEO would personally suck me off.
It's the principle of the matter to me. Google became the multibillion dollar corporation it is by selling my data, your data, everyones data. To then come around and demand I pay to continue using their service the way I have for over a decade? But also still continue selling our data? Nah, fuck that. When they cut me in a percentage on the data selling business, maybe then I'd consider premium.
Given that we are in the piracy subreddit, you can change your Google account to Argentina or similar and pay Argentinian prices for premium. I'm from Europe and I pay 2€ for a family subscription for 5 people.
You're paying for premium, but you're not paying it to people producing the content you enjoy. You're paying it to a middle man parasite. Content creators get a tiny fraction of your money.
Paying because they made it deliberately difficult to use without paying is akin to giving the bully your lunch money because it's better "money value" than standing up for yourself. That's not something I can do without losing respect for myself.
And my "trying to side step the ads" has so far taken a total of 30 seconds - installing uBlock origin, which I would have done anyway.
Besides, to use premium you need to be logged in. Being logged in Google outside of a contained environment is idiotic if you have a shred of respect for your own privacy.
That middle-man parasite enables those creators to upload their content for free and provides the bandwidth and discovery for everyone here to watch them. It's a give and take relationship. I don't see the problem here, especially as creators get more money from Premium viewers than they do ad-supported viewers. Sure you would get more from a direct payment from the viewer, but you're not subscribing to every creator you watch either.
You know that this parasite in the first place enables creators to make a living? Youtube also has the best revenue split between it and the creators.
They're storing exabytes of data for you, watchable at any time, in any resolution you'd like.
Google has been running Youtube at a loss for a long time and ads are not going to cover the costs. They need paying users. 12.99$ a month for more videos than Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.... , unlimited music streaming and even giving your favorite creators more money (they get more revenue from premium members than from free "ad-viewing" members) is not a lot to ask for.
Stop your Spotify or Netflix or Hulu or Sky subscription and get youtube premium.
I also have been paying for Premium the last couple years and I completely agree. I get more value out of my premium subscription than I do Netflix or Max. Plus premium supports the creators more than ads do.
I had your same mindset for years but the cost of premium went up this year and when looking at the new price vs other streaming services, it didn't make sense for my family any more. If their AdBlock thing starts screwing with my account, I just might be done with all Google products.