YouTube Premium family plan price update ($17.99/month -> $32.99/month!)

So this is some bollocks. Guess I'll be cancelling our plan since it's only used by two of us.

Current price $17.99/month, new price $32.99/month.

If they boiled the frog better I would probably have accepted a $5/month price rise, and then another later... But close to doubling in one go is a no from me dawg.

Thank you for being a loyal member throughout our journey. We created YouTube Premium so that you could enjoy all the videos and music you love without interruptions.‌

To continue delivering great service and features, we are increasing the YouTube Premium family plan price to A$32.99/month. We don't make these decisions lightly, and this update will allow us to continue to improve YouTube Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube. This is the first ever price increase for your subscription.

Links to cancellation etc: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12400348?sjid=6028684095030617608-AP

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197 comments

I'm always amaze by the fact that all these streaming platform do is give you access to others content ( they dont create shit), but they get to keep 98.7% of the revenue, because.
- In this industry the “means of production” = “hosting and distribution platform and servers”. If you’ve got no way of hosting your content and putting it in front of people, your content may as well not exist. In much the same way an actor needs a theatre.
  So as per any capitalist industry, those that own the means of production (I.e. google with YouTube) exploit its workers (content creators) to generate profit in the same way a steel mill owner gets to keep the profits from his steel mill despite the fact that the owner never creates any steel ingots themselves.
  
  Yeah people don't notice that the Internet used to be like going over to a friend's house who had the cool stuff which over time became niche shops.
  Rules, regulations and restrictions, slowly put up more and more stops for simple small people to enter the space and left only large companies in it's place. Some of this by consumers own demand for more.
  So here we are, the Internet just the next space for capitalism and having every last scrap of revenue squeezed from it while those with capital complain they need the next big invention to exploit as they run out of space and room to grow and things to consume. Each day pushing more towards their pockets and less towards the rest of us.
  I just want small curators back. Small groups filling niches instead of massive "creators" who simply consume as much as possible to regurgitate it back at their audience.
  
  I think you're mostly correct, but I slightly disagree on this part:
  Rules, regulations and restrictions, slowly put up more and more stops for simple small people to enter the space
  I think the reality is that convenience simply trumped out. As much as we can see now that allowing the internet to coalesce into a handful of silos, or often only 1-2 silos as is the case with Youtube, years ago the major value they provided was that you could simply go there and find the content. Reddit's demise reminded me of this more than anything else. I was a daily visitor for quite an array of topics for over a decade. When they decided to fully fuck up the site and I left, I found myself having to think about which of those content sources I wanted to replace and what I'd want to replace them with, and as much as it would be cool for that all to just be "lemmy" the reality is that I now am looking at far more RSS feeds, discord servers, mastodon servers, etc.
  I also think that there is a phenomenon that is a bit more insidious at play, and that's that most of these services are funded by VC or these massive companies and don't make money for years or even a decade or more until they've consolidated the market to basically just them and they can charge whatever they feel like. Youtube follows this pattern. Even after Google's acquisition, it was quite a while before YouTube became even break-even as they gobbled up the market for this type of thing. VC/Google can sink billions into infrastructure without turning a profit until the market is basically just Youtube, and then all of a sudden we get Adblock crackdowns and near doubling of Premium rates. The only place that might compete with Youtube at this point is probably Apple or Amazon mostly because they're the only companies that can say "we're going to lose hundreds of millions or billions for at least a decade."
  Ultimately, I think this is going to be the major lesson from about 2000-2020. As consumers, we should be extremely mistrusting of businesses where we can't understand how they make money, because usually that just means that the way they make money is to basically monopolize the market and then really fuck us.
  
  I fully agree and still think that regulations to a degree do impact the ability for others to join in spaces. The world is full of nuance and as always it's a bit of A & B and C through fucking Z as well in small amounts.
  Convenience has let people grow complacent to companies doing whatever which gives us now when the reaper has come to collect and wants more money since they have nothing else to focus on.
  But think of it also as making a hotdog. There are rules that are super necessary and helpful. You want it made with good ingredients and not rodent and in a kitchen that is clean and inspected every so often. But imagine if they made a requirement for size and shape, stated that each hotdog must be measured by an IR camera and nuked by gamma radiation to be sold. Suddenly the only people that can sell hotdogs retail are ones that can afford plutonium and very expensive equipment.
  Not a huge issue cause those hotdogs last longer and are reliable but there was literally a law saying all platforms must be responsible for every single comment on their platform and several of them said they would turn off comments.
  With server costs, bandwidth costs, registration and more eventually the people that can afford to meet those minimum requirements are the ones who already have the money to do so. The walls get built and those inside make sure they stay safe of others impact.
  They can only do that while people have no interest in leaving the walled garden, and they assist in building them. It seems to just be how people interact with their world. Ignorant. And I say that without prejudice cause it lets them be happy but the horrors will come out of nowhere to them.
  
  Fair, I also didn't realize that I was replying in an Aussie specific community, so this part:
  but there was literally a law saying all platforms must be responsible for every single comment on their platform and several of them said they would turn off comments.
  makes it make more sense to me why you said that in your original comment. Over here (US) there is very little regulation of these platforms. Basically, they can't knowingly host CSAM, and they have to respond to DMCA requests. The DCMA is basically just "take down copyrighted material when a right's holder complains." We have a carve out called section 230 that really lets companies not have much responsibility for the content they host. So in the US's case when it comes to these things going back to the hot dog analogy, our tech companies only responsibility is along the lines of not explicitly encouraging employees to allow rodents, or even to police for rodents, it's basically just if the right people report rodents they have to do something about it.
  So in the case of YouTube, for example, I and most other people who know how to build websites can make a site that hosts video fairly easily. Because regs here are so lax, all I really need to do is explicitly state that CSAM/copyright materials aren't allowed, do a shockingly small amount of work to automatically take it down when reported. Laws over here aren't really the barrier.
  
  Most creators worth watching will be making their work available beyond Youtube, and if they aren't then it's worth contacting them.
- I will not justify the price increase of this post, but the high margins kinda do make sense to me.
  The average profit that youtube makes on a gigabyte worth of video data, is much much lower than that 98.7%. There is such a vast amount of random crap being uploaded, that the content creators that actually generate views, hence revenue, must bear a huge sinkhole of costs for youtube. The same holds for Twitch: streams with only a handfull of watchers cost Twitch money. But it is a double edged sword. Because the reason these content creators are as big as they are, is because they could start from nothing, and upload for free. The big guys support vast amounts of amateurs trying to become big. It is probably one of the most socialistic models we have in our current capitalistic market.
  That being said: Youtube is getting shittier in an attempt to sqeeze this model for extra profit.
  
  There is such a vast amount of random crap being uploaded, that the content creators that actually generate views, hence revenue, must bear a huge sinkhole of costs for youtube.
  There are better ways around this than by doubling the price for everyone and continuing to allow unlimited BS uploads for free. They charge $1.99 for 100GB of storage for email and photos. I guess it never occurred to them to include a minor barrier like this that most legitimate aspiring content creators would be willing to pay but would stop randos posting 10 hour long videos in 4K.
  
  Exactly. This is why people defending YouTube are full of shit.
  YouTube is trying to fuck everyone over first instead of investing time and effort into but making their platform a cesspool.
  Start by removing the Nazi assholes and stop allowing everyone to post for free past their regular 15gb limit.
  The current model means the cost of youtube and YouTube premium will just go up forever and price increases will be a monthly thing.
  
  Interesting problem. Is it possible to trim copyright and pointless content, e.g. children's movies, entertainment shorts with less than a certain number of views, which can be used as pointers to redirect to the original content?
  
  Automatically? Not trivially
- These platforms are basically just one step removed from pure landlordism. Same goes for Uber and similar shit. The platforms themselves are usually cheap to maintain, the exception here might be Youtube since it does gobble up a whole lot of bandwidth and storage but come on nobody streams $10 worth of bandwidth a month.
  
  The platforms themselves are usually cheap to maintain
  ?? video is extremely intensive in terms of storage, bandwidth, and compute needs. There are also very few people in the world who know how to work on these things so they're expensive to hire. These platforms are anything but cheap to run, there's a reason they all go all in on ads and subscriptions.
- Because they're paying for the content?...
  
  Cute.
  
  Not if you don't have enough subscribers. Then YouTube makes the money.

197 comments