I don’t think I specifically posted about it on lemmy but yeah, I also concluded youtube would be going further ‘pay to win’ around this time 2 years ago.
Twitch will keep getting more and more monetized / ad heavy as well, until it just gets shutdown.
I’ll be amazed if it still exists by the end of 2026.
The guy who took this screenshot and posted it to Reddit likely has Premium Lite, which still shows ads on music videos. The title of the video is probably cut out to hide it.
I think you are right. And the OP look like they are in Germany where they are testing these plans. https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272930/youtube-cheaper-premium-lite-subscription-limited-ads
Premium Lite is hilarious branding. “Oh, it’s high quality, but like, less. Quality Lite”
It’s like when they sell a medium pizza but no small. Bitch, you can’t have “medium” if you don’t have a small and large to compare it to!
Actually I don’t know if it’s like that at all…
“All animals are born equal, but some are born more equal than others”
Worse experience than with just ublock origin AND you get to pay for it. Imagine being this much of a sucker
Basically the point is that you don’t have to pay for the music side of Premium if you already have a different music subscription, which I think is nice. The branding is a little silly though.
Oh, it’s high quality, but like, less. Quality Lite
Please sir, may I have some quality less?
You could also recreate this by using revanced to change the banner to yt premium but forgetting to apply the ad block patch
Alright where are all the YouTube premium apologetics that keep appearing everytime someone discusses any sort of Ad-blocker?! What do you guys have to say now?!
No ads so far here but I definitely will cancel Premium if I start seeing ads. That’s literally the only thing I’m paying for.
Same. No ads yet but will cancel and delete if they start showing up.
Been slowly moving over to Nebula anyway.
As long as it have good value to me I will use it. The same as with other services.
The thing is I don’t mostly mind paying for having YouTube without ads, but I would prefer if it didn’t have anything to do with Google in the first place.
I would prefer it not be owned by Google as well, though that wouldn’t really change the economics of the situation.
These are screenshots and don’t prove anything.
I’m continuing apologising for premium exclusively because it pays creators more, and more consistently. I never go on the internet without all the adblocks possible, the sight of an add makes me irrationally angry. I’m still paying for premium
most creators have patreons or sell merch. youtube doesn’t get a cut from that so you can support more directly!
If i paid money to every the patreon of every content creator that I want to support, it’d be a lot more money than youtube premium. Better believe ill be cancelling premium the very first ad I see though.
You throwing $12 a month or whatever towards patreons is strictly better than throwing $12 a month towards premium if what you care about is the creators getting paid
They’re lying to themselves. Probably some small part of them cares about supporting creators, but it’s not their main motivation.
I used to be in the same boat as OP, but since trying to degoogle I (obvioisly) stopped buying Premium and instead buy into Patreon of select creators. If there was some sort of degoogled Youtube Premium that would go towards support of people I watch, I’d much rather opt for that (obviously a very theoretical proposition) - I can support only so many via Patreon, even if all would have a 1$ tier.
Of course, when buying Premium part of my motivation was my comfort. It was comfortable support via Premium or uncomfortable support via ads. Patreon is fine but you can’t feasibly pay for one for every creator who’s video you watched
You’ve just invented something I would use.
Doesn’t Patreon then take a cut? What’s the difference? (Fee % might, haven’t checked to be fair)
I’m supporting one creator via Patreon and got merch from another one (and have tried channel memberships), however this doesn’t really scale.
- merch is only really great when one needs whatever is offered anyways
- Patreon is nice, but requires explicit effort and regular payments for each channel
So from that perspective, having creators being payed more per-view is actually a nice, convenient effect and will cover channels that might otherwise get nothing. I’d like to have something like this for the general internet - pay some monthly fee, no more ads and websites, news sites etc all get some share (that is ultimatively more than what the ads would’ve given them in the first place).
okay the adderall is kicking in so, sorry if this is a massive wall of text, but since you asked, adblockers are great, I never use the web without one when I can, but ads are only one part of why i pay for YouTube.
here are all my reasons:
- easy adless YouTube on non-android smart TV
- YouTube music (dont have to pay for Spotify)
- auto background video downloading to save on mobile data when I leave the house
- supports more creators (albeit in smaller amounts) than I could ever afford to support via patreon or merch (and supports them directly proportionally to how much I watch thier content, so I never risk paying a creator that ive lost interest in or forgetting to add a creator’s patreon)
I would never try to convince someone else to pay for YouTube, it’s defintily not for everyone, especially when a decent adblocker will satisfy most people. But for some people like me, it just makes sense, and I don’t understand why some people get so mad to learn I’m paying for it.
Google is a gross company for sure, hell except for YouTube ive pretty much completly degoogled my life. I can use Plex for movies and shows, Proton for mail and calandar, magic earth for GPS, Firefox and DDG for search, etc. but there isnt a good replacement for YouTube especially since its one of my main hobbies. peertube and other video hosting sites really just dont compare for my usecase
ofc I think its shitty that theyre trialing showing ads to premium users in Germany, but honestly that would barely affect me if it was happening where I live. I use adblockers everywhere except my TV, so most of the time it’d be impossible for me to see an ad whether YouTube tried to serve me one or not.
if you were genuinly asking what people who pay for YouTube have to say about this, I hope that answered your question
I appreciate your nuanced answer. That’s something a lot of “why not just pay for YouTube premium” guys don’t
You raised good points and if you’re happy to pay for the convenience, I’m not going to fight you on that.
While I don’t fully agree with paying for a service that doesn’t listen to their customers(bring back dislikes), I can still see where you’re coming from.
edit: sorry for the wall of text again lol
thanks, I appreciate your response too. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I wrote it lol but this response was a pleasant surprise
I will admit that I never really engaged with likes/dislikes, so while I was annoyed on a conceptual level when they removed dislikes it didnt really affect me. I might feel differently about paying youtube if that wasn’t the case.
I wasn’t aware when I wrote this that there were so many people who respond to simple complaints about ads with “just buy premium”, that was a total blindspot for me. Most comments ive seen about it (before reading comments on this thread, dear god) were more similar to mine, albeit more brief.
at risk of overgeneralizing, I think anyone who pays for YouTube /just/ for the ads (while watching mostly on PC or android), is probably an idiot. adblock is trivial to set up on those platforms and will likely soon prove to be more effective at preventing ads than paying for YouTube. its upsetting the sheer amount of people that will give money to evil corporations just to avoid having to think at all about what theyre consuming, and if thats really the loud majority of people who pay for YouTube then I can defintily understand the negative interactions ive had in the past.
this has been an enlightening discussion for me, thanks for that!
I have a youtube premium account. Used to just use u-block but my computer is non-functional and I now primarily consume media on my ipad so I got a subscription. So far I have not had any ads. Working on getting a new pc and coming back to the light
You can download Firefox and install Ublock on the mobile app, then just go to YouTube.com. That’s how I usually do it on my android phone anyway; I assume it works for iOS too
No no no no, you’re supposed to use the app on mobile devices. There are no browser pages in mobile Ba Sing Se /s
Last time I tried, I couldn’t install add-ons on Firefox on the iPad. Because Firefox on iPad is just safari with a coat of paint.
All browsers on iPad and iPhone are just safari with a coat of paint to be fair.
I wouldn’t mind so much is uBlock Origin was available for safari, but it’s not, so I will have to go for one of the dodgy knockoffs…
It does, I use adblocks, Untrap, DeArrow, and SponsorBlock on iOS safari, and I don’t see shit other than the video itself.
I would absolutely love to do this but I am nearly tech illiterate. I use firefox already and poked around on ublock origin’s site but I dont know how to install extensions or whatever on ipad and I didnt see anything obvious in the settings on firefox. Any recommendations?
I have yt premium because my view counts as 1000x an ad supported view does.
I still end up using yt-dlp because playback in firefox is ass.
Uhh I don’t care who doesn’t pay for YTP or just blocks them, seems like an odd thing to care about?
I do have grandfathered $7/mo GPM (YTM) which comes with free YTP and I’ve yet to see ads at all. I don’t even get ads on my linked gaming YT account. This kinda seems like misinformation?
If you think paying $10+ for Spotify instead of $7 YTM+YTP then yes, you are a fucking idiot.
I had GPM and never got YTP. Switched o Tidal becuse YTM keeps repeating songs. I’ve had a song go 6 times in sequence.
So, shitty product, shitty support (see blackmail video claims), shitty creator compensation. Goodbye Google.
This is exactly why I just switched to Tidal. And I had the grandfathered price. It’s just not worth it for a shitty product.
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Everyone knows you need to pay for YouTube Premium-Pro-Plus if you don’t want to see ads. Only 69.99 per
monthweek.Only 69.99 per
monthweek.Minute watched
Unrealistic
per minute watched
Per started minute
Counts as two minutes if you start a minute and end it in a few seconds and start another minute later
Premium+ coming in 2026 for truly ad-free experience. Premium++ coming in 2028 for truly truly ad-free experience. Premium+++ coming in 2030 for truly truly truly ad-free experience.
Ad revenue is like crack to corporations. I think Google needs an intervention.
Needs euthanization
I can’t wait until computers and compression algorithms advance to the point where YouTube competitors become commercially viable!
Just kidding, YT will probably just blackmail their content creators into only posting on their platform and nowhere else to maintain their monopoly.
can’t wait until computers and compression algorithms advance to the point where YouTube competitors become commercially viable
hell just going back to regular cable is now viable for me, I might see less ads!
#re-attachingTheCord
Or install uBlock Origin
I for see Premium Deluxe this coming 2028.
Premium# coming in 2032 for truly truly truly ad-free experience.
Premium#+ coming in 2034 for truly truly truly ad-free experience.
…
I heard tell from a Gen Xer who said cable TV used to not have ads.
Our national tv channel is lawfully barred from running commercials.
They just changed the definition of ads they run to “messages of commercial importance” or some dumb shit like that. And just like that, ads on the national channel are suddenly a-ok
PBS here has ads. They are short, but there are ads nonetheless. This is over and above the ads for their own shows that will be on the channel at a later date.
You’re lying. I can’t imagine this so it must be false!
Mixed truth. They carried broadcast networks that always had ads. Fox, NBC, ABC all had ads.
Comcast would even overwrite one or two of the network ads with their own ads. A commercial break would start, some life insurance BS would start playing audio compressed all to hell so it’s twice as loud, at the end, you’d catch 5 seconds of some toy commercial and then one or two other regular network commercials.Premium channels like HBO didn’t have ‘ads,’ but they did have station identification and self-promotion for what’s coming to the platform in the near future. They wouldn’t break the movies up, though, only in between. A few standouts didn’t start with ads like Nickelodeon, but eventually got them.
Saturday cartoons on USA and TNT certainly had ads from day one.
Talk about looking at the past with distorting rose-colored glasses!
Fuckingcapitalists
A story in three parts: get an adblocker, problem solved
Why would you pay for YouTube and then get an ad blocker? Seems redundant.
Also, YouTube has begun integrating ads server side, making them more difficult to parse out.
I don’t have premium I just have an ad blocker
Smart
“You’ve got to support the creators”
I spend so much money on Patreon and I never regret a penny of it
Better: quit youtube premium, get an adblocker and live life hassle free
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Never heard of Jdownloader, does it offer any benefits over yt-dlp?
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The third part is youtube keeps implementing more sophisticated ad blocking to the point you can’t block ads…
Idk I’m still blocking ads no problem.
I think its the opposite, the more they tighten the noose the more innovative our solutions are for getting around them. I got so pissed off at seeing half my video watching time go to ads that I found a youtube alternative that goes right on my firestick (smarttube). I wouldnt have bothered doing all that if they had not pushed it too far, which they obviously have.
Sure but also ugggh
They haven’t been successful yet.
They will break the internet as much as they need to in order to accomplish this.
What the heck is this “Youtube Premium”?
All I ever know was uBlock Origin.
🏴☠️
It’s convenient timing that Google Chrome is removing support for ad blocking plugins like uBlock right as Premium sneaks ads back in… 🙄
Me on my home lab Invidious instance: What are “ads”?
I’ve had some hideous collection of ABP, ublock, and some extension that hides all shorts all on chrome and I’ve somehow completely dodged all the drama in the past year. I’ve never had to manually update or fiddle with any settings. I’ve seen all the crap everyone else is getting, and I constantly think its right around the corner, but nothing. Sometimes the page loads funny and just shows a black rectangle, and i think welp they finally got to me, but an immediate refresh always fixes it. Maybe one day I’ll have to deal with it
I’ve dodged nearly everything with only Firefox + Ublock + Ghostery. The most I ever got was maybe one warning page on YouTube and never seen anything about it again.
Me on my home lab Invidious instance: What are “ads”?
Me on my firestick with smarttube: What are “ads”?
At what point do content creators stop creating content for this?
When they stop getting paid.
Does anyone even buy anything because of these stupid ads?
Yes, otherwise companies would not spend their money on them.
I wouldn’t as that’s just asking to get screwed
From what I understand, they’re already getting paid pennies by youtube, which is why many of them constantly shill for patreon/nebula/curiositystream/whatever on top of sponsored content. So youtube is shit for the creators, shit for the consumers, and a net loss for google. It’s the same non-business model as food delivery apps: nobody profits, yet it still somehow keeps going because modern economics is make-believe.
When there is a viable alternative
There are alternatives for the people who make money off the YouTube.
The Youtubers who do get paid enough to make a living from YouTube also make production quality content and have great gear and staff. They might as well sell their production to any other streaming service.
Something like Veritasium might as well be on Netflix as YouTube. Mr.Beast would fit in on Mtv…
Those both require subscriptions for access though instead of offering an ad based tier so that already excludes a majority of viewers from being able to move over from yt and those producers are unlikely to abandon their current audiences for a possibly bigger audience under a different corporation. I think that’s going to be necessary for a majority of viewers and producers to switch to another A/V distribution platform. If Netflix or MTV had an ad-only based tier and released apps for phones, Roku, browser, etc and allowed producer uploads then I suspect they could take a big chunk of Google’s yt viewership and profits.
We are just one step away from YouTube being a paid only service.
I think that would be the death of the platform
I’m even wondering how people can use it as it is without ad blockers or clients like newpipe
Every time I use it on not-my-device I’m losing my nerves, because I have to watch at least 2 ads for a 1min video, when I want to show someone something
It would be a tragedy if youtube collapsed. There are so many useful and important videos on there. I passed the second year of my engineering bachelor almost exclusively by studying from youtube (the lectures at my college are useless), the vast breadth of content available on that platform simply does not exist anywhere else, and archiving all of it would be a monumental task. With youtube being a net loss for google for multiple years in a row, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that if they can’t make it profitable, they might just… shut it down like they did with Plus.
When they first started ramping up ads and demonetising more videos for being insufficiently advertiser-friendly, they probably still had enough goodwill from users that if they’d immediately launched YouTube Premium and presented it as a way to both remove ads, and support video creators that couldn’t rely on ad revenue, it would have been decently successful. A good number of YouTubers who had to switch to sponsorships and Patreon could have been pushing for people to subscribe to Premium instead of play Raid: Shadow Legends, which presumably would have boosted subscriber counts, and might have been enough to make YouTube profitable and much more pleasant for both free and premium users than it is today. Instead, they burned through a large amount of goodwill before implementing Premium, so people were already more reluctant, and for a long while it only shared revenue with a select few channels who were already raking in ad money, and was unaffected by view counts, so early Premium subscribers were paying Logan Paul even if they never watched that kind of video, but weren’t paying the channels they actually watched.
Maybe we should start mirroring to a federated service
Just some time ago, I was thinking about some P2P Video service, where everyone would provide the data they have - so like a BitTorrent YouTube
But I’m not sure if that would be viable
Just some time ago, I was thinking about some P2P Video service, where everyone would provide the data they have - so like a BitTorrent YouTube
It’s called PeerTube. It uses activitypub, the same federation protocol as lemmy. Large creators could certainly afford to host their own videos. Some federation/self-hosting/free software creators already do. Can we have large free-to-use instances where individuals can upload their videos, like we do with Lemmy? I would like to hope so.
But just standing up and copying all of youtube’s content? Like I said, it’s a MONUMENTAL task. There are around 14e9 videos on there. That’s almost two videos for every person on planet earth. And I’m not even sure how useful mirroring would be. It’s important for archival purposes, sure, but it’s not forward-thinking. For a lot of pieces of content, the value comes mainly from the community surrounding it, not the content itself. Mirroring cuts the community out of the content. I believe that If archiving/mirroring efforts are to succeed at anything beyond occupying disk space, they must be focused on a specific type of content, and headed by people who are genuinely passionate about the content they are archiving, not disintrested data hoarders.
PeerTube is really P2P?
Ok, I could have figured because of the name. Now I feel like an idiot…
Yes, it even uses BitTorrent to distribute videos.
The same way people watched cable TV for decades. The slow ramp up of ads has a portion of the population prepped to be slightly frustrated, but willing to deal with it.
But yeah having been spoiled with no ads for years now, I have to mute my parents TV every time I go over. Even muted, there’s still something about lots of ads that draws my eye more than whatever the actual show is. Drives me nuts.
Just to be clear, ads free cable TV was a thing on a very small minority of cable channels for less than 10 years (from 81 up until 87 if I recall the research I did on the subject correctly), the only reason people keep talking about it is because they didn’t live it. At first the vast majority of cable channels were just regular channels from regions too far away to get a signal for with antennas and cable only channels mostly had ads as well, there were something like four of them that didn’t.
I wasn’t really referring to the free years, but the many years where people put up with increasingly loud and lengthy commercial breaks which became so invasive that shows would literally design their beats around being interrupted
I’m even wondering how people can use it as it is without ad blockers or clients like newpipe
I tend to use my TV and don’t have a PiHole. I usually watch 20-45 minute long videos and, for some reason, YouTube actually puts fewer ads on longer videos. Get like maybe two, 30 second ad blocks in a ~25 minute video. But then I’ll get three, 90 second unskippable ad blocks in a 1:30 video. 🤦♂️
IDK why they don’t just have it only show an ad every X minutes, regardless of it being the same video or not. Or what about ads on Shorts? I haven’t seen a single ad the few times I’ve been binging shorts.
There are also videos and entire channels that aren’t monetized at all that never get ads on them. Like when people put a pirated film on there it doesn’t get taken down, it just has no ads.
Some of the shorts are ads themselves
Probably because shorter videos get more views
But I’m only guessing…
This seems likely to me. The goal is to get it in front of as many eyes as possible, and ppl looking for a quick dopamine hit aren’t typically pulling up videos over 5 mins long. Probably looks better in their stats when they charge absurd prices to advertisers too
I blocked YT ads on my Samsung tv using TizenTube. It’s fucking great.
There’s still the step where Youtube has Spotify level ads. Whatever the visual equivalent of
bait-and-switch-fav-song/LISTENTOMYPODCAST/oh-god-are-those-sirens-behind-meis.
Yeah, anyone who didn’t see this coming hasn’t been paying attention.
To be fair google could have one of those days since workplace accident boards but for bad youtube decisions.
I’d be surprised if it hit 3 digits.
Floating point digits, sure.
Fun thing, I don’t want to get YouTube Premium because YouTube has a huge bunch of bugs and glitches and crap UI design and since they’re the only service in the niche there’s been no indication they’ll ever fix their shit.
I didn’t care about YouTube Music, so losing ads on stock YouTube apps was literally the only reason I was even considering getting Premium.
But if it doesn’t even do the one job…?
Third party clients have entered the chat
VPN to a country with a lower cost, and sign up there. It used to be Turkey and India, where you could get a Family Plan for like $2/mo - but they’ve cracked down a bit on it.
We use YT for so much in our ‘household’ that it made sense to pool together and get Premium, and honestly it feels good having ~5 people who consume a tonne of content ad-free for nearly no cost while still supporting our preferred content creators.
They’ve brought the hammer down on this. I was happily ‘traveling to Ukraine’ with my Apple TV to watch YouTube without ads for the equivalent of around £3 a month for over a year. Last month they canned our Premium.
I use yt-dlp to download my subs into a Plex folder now. Fuck ‘em.
So they reduced their revenue from you from £3 to 0. Smooth move Google.
That’s fine, at least they just increased the family plan pricing by 60%. Oh, wait.
Yeah, 20€ instead of 13 for me
