Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month

I already am kinda that with shorts. I avoid clicking on them whenever possible and just never reply. At some point people noticed that if you send me shorts-links, there's a very solid chance the conversation about that topic ends there.

Just cba with video that only fills 30% of my screen and has the artistic energy of a 5y old who had entirely too much sugar.

Have they finally added a way to download revanced, or do you still have to build it manually from github? There was some unofficial site where you could download it that the developers claimed was """"maybe"""" serving backdoored malware so I just went to newpipe.

Edit: Yes they have! It's a lot less convenient than Vanced Manager was, but you can do it all on your phone at least. Okay, well today is a good day. Hopefully ReVanced doesn't go out with as stupid an unforced error as Vanced did.

Wow, I'm so glad I gave one of my Tildes invites to my husband. Now he can correct my information in real life and on the internet!

In seriousness, this is good to know. I'm glad creators get at least some benefit from premium subscribers.

Also, I think we should switch to a family plan.

Linus Tech Tips is a channel I know that has shown their YT Premium revenue being higher than their YT ad revenue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh5hL47z2us

I'm trying to move to Nebula and Floatplane for creators on those platforms though

I've been meaning to look into platforms like that for a while, maybe now is time to get to it.

It's difficult to imagine the internet/world without YouTube, but it won't last forever, and it clearly hasn't been a good experience for many YouTube creators for years now. Also I'm starting to find the censorship to be almost unbearable. Practically every video has some awkward edit in it so it doesn't get demonetized. Because again, the entire draw of YouTube for me is the independent creators, and they can't even make videos how they want to make them.

But yes, I agree, YouTube premium is my most valuable subscription, hands down. I can't imagine watching ads on YouTube.

Especially after living a life without them for so long.
Once you get used to no ads, there is no going back

I'm in the same boat. I've been a subscriber since it was called YouTube Red and came with a GooglePlay Music subscription instead of YouTube music.

The changes are annoying. I preferred GooglePlay music over YTMusic, but I adapted. I preferred when podcasts were integrated as part of GPM, rather than being a separate app(and I think I recently heard that they're going to be canning Google Podcasts and migrating those to YouTubeMusic now, right?)

I'm also peeved at the price increase. I think it was originally $9.99 when I subbed.. So it see it go up by almost 50% in those years is frustrating, considering that the applications haven't really gotten better along with the cost.

But I think I'm too deep in. Ditching Hulu, Netflix, HBO etc was all easy to do. I don't miss them. I recently visited a friend however and got to watch YouTube with ads and it was horrendous. There are so many of them, and they've gotten long.

Getting rid of YouTube premium would probably mean a big cut in the content I consume, which I would miss. I watch programming on YouTube far more than any other source.

Everything you’ve said makes complete sense to me.

I support Nebula as well, in additional to some smaller Patreon accounts, and ultimately: I wish there was a more curated site with all the content I actually wanted to watch. YouTube is definitely bogged down with a lot of “noise” and content I’m not interested in. I’m certain that’s the case for everyone, and is due in no small part to the Home tab algorithm and rising prevalence of Shorts.

Similarly, I feel the same about Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms. As they grow they tend to lose their initial identity and large communities seem to trend towards mediocrity. I’m not exactly sure why, but I think the sheer volume of content overwhelms people, so whatever thing ends up trending is what people latch onto and it dominates the space. Ultimately leading to the fact you end up wasting a lot of time to find a few gems in the rough.

Good question. $29.99 is what it says in my subscriptions/receipt history, so there’s probably additional fees on iOS through the app store.

YouTube Music is my primary reason for subscribing. But at $14, I'd have to re-evaluate if the $4/month more than pretty much any other music streaming service is worth not having ads on the limited time I spend on YouTube. I can totally understand and agree with the position that $14 is too steep for people who don't use YTM.

How are they banning people? If I don't have an account, can it catch me?

We'll see but I personally doubt that since it actually patches the youtube executable and spoofs the app info, but even then I can just use Invidious which has its own account system not tied to youtube in the first place.

It's not like I lose anything anyways, not like I paid for ReVanced lol.

I've also started watching the people I'd usually watch on youtube on Odysee instead, the biggest being Wendigoon.

Must be EU-only.

They still have to pay out to the creators who do make the content, Youtube doesn't get the whole payout from ads.

They also do produce their own content with Youtube Originals, albeit a smaller collection than other streaming channels.

For licensed content that they do host, like renting movies or TV shows off of Youtube, they have to give a cut to the owners of that content too.

They also don't have the luxury that gated sites like Netflix have, where no one can watch anything unless they (or someone they gave the password to) pays every month. Anyone in the world can log on to youtube.com and watch videos, and Youtube has to foot the hosting bill regardless. Those people can come from anywhere in the world, and by and large are people coming from countries that do not have the purchasing power of someone from say, the USA (4% of the world's population), or Europe (9%). Those people may be from India (18%, with a GDP per capita less than Bolivia), or Brazil (2.7%), or Indonesia (3.5%). Their eyeballs are presumably not worth as much to advertisers since their purchasing power is so low, and the companies that would want to advertise to them specifically also have a lower purchasing power too. Youtube lets anyone in the world view videos, and doesn't have as easy of a time monetizing it as streamers with a paywall.

Not having to pay to produce for content also isn't necessarily a boon. Being able to host, say, all the Marvel movies, does come with the cost of producing those movies, but they also made their money back in the box office and initial streaming, and bring in subscribers to your service. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 brings a lot more people to your service than a vsauce video would, and you still have to pay vsauce a proportional cut of the ad revenue you bring in (or pay them to produce Mind Field, the Youtube Originals show that vsauce did).

You also don't get the benefit of scale from producing the content that you now own either. If the movie you paid to produce is a bigger hit than expected, you still paid the same initial amount to produce and market the movie, but your box office draw (or the count of subscribers coming to your service) is higher. If a Youtube video is a big hit and brings in more eyes, you get more ad revenue from it, but you also have to pay a proportional cut to the channel -- and in the future you also can't license that content out to another streaming service or syndication, because its not your content.

That’s a fair number to have - any number is fair. But how pricing works is that all of us have a number which we consider the maximum amount we’d be willing to pay. For me, it’d probably be $50 or $60/month where I’d serious consider not subscribing because it’d just be too much.

When you put all of the potential customers maximum price together, you have a function that says how many subscribers you have for a given price. The optimal point is the one YouTube will choose.

That’s pricing. The cost of running the services shifts the graph, but it is far from the only factor.

Based on what? Is this enough to cover their costs? How much are they profiting at $10/mo? Will they generate more or less revenue at $10 vs. $14?

That was the old price back when Google Play Music existed. Guess the price hikes were inevitable in these times

That being said....if storage was the main concern they could probably ditch everything but x265 at 480/1080p/4k and call it a day. Youtube is so huge I think most everything else would hop to it quick.

The YouTube infrastructure is really impressive and kind of makes me drool.

Oddly it seems that Google actually retains the original video files as well as their transcoded versions they use for actual streaming, so they're probably spending a not-insignificant sum on data retention alone.

I should do more research probably, but I was under the impression that they were profitable just with ads (though, ad revenue is going to change over time)... I find it hard to believe they're generating $14/mo per user with ads, so it seems like premium would bring in quite a bit more money per user.

But ultimately... Even if it does cost $14/mo per user to run... That doesn't necessarily mean that people want to pay for it, even if people do value the service. Plus, often times a huge component of why a service is valuable in the first place is that it's free for people to access and use, too. Like if YouTube charged creators to upload videos it wouldn't be as big as it is now.

it's the idea that corporate thirst for profits has driven up inflation with price hikes like what's being discussed.

I'm not a big fan of framing it like that. It doesn't even really make sense within its own universe. But fundamentally, saying "greed" is causing price increases is like saying that gravity caused a plane to crash. Well, yeah, in a way, but I don't think anyone was assuming gravity wasn't present during a plane's operation.

Greed, or the idea that the parties in a market economy each try to maximize their own profit, is the engine of a market economy, it's why it reaches an equilibrium. If you see profit margins increase during an inflationary period, what that is telling you is that there is excess demand, as opposed to insufficient supply. Just like you'd blame a plane crash on the broken engine.

I'd note that demand causing inflation is not abnormal by any means, demand-pull inflation is arguably much more common than supply-push.

Even if we assume that "greed" is the cause, that implies some sort of benevolence from companies pre-2020? Was Tyson Foods trying to do americans a solid before COVID? No, all the firms were just as greedy before COVID and after COVID - that is, maximally greedy.

It's a common misconception that you "need" growth. Companies don't need growth, it's merely prized more by investors for obvious reasons. If all held equal, company A that makes $5/year and is growing 20% is of course worth more than company B that makes $5/year and is not growing, because company A is going to make $7/year next year.

But there's plenty of companies - really, the majority - whos growth is roughly equal to inflation, that is, they have no real growth. They output dividends for their owners and that's about it.

The price is just arbitrarily going to keep going up while the services keep being cut and reduced.

No, that's not how pricing works. It's not an arbitrary lever the companies pull up and down because they're greedy - there's a point where you if you put the price up, you will lose money. And that's the stopping point.

"Anti-consumer" doesn't literally refer to things being worse for consumers. Any positive price is "bad" for consumers. The point is for the tension between the two to produce a result which balances both interests.

Things that are anti-consumer include companies abusing information asymmetry, for instance, lying or misleading about product capabilities. Because of capability asymmetry, there's an impediment there for proper price discovery.