Remote View

1y ago

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

197 comments

$400 a year for YouTube premium.
I'd gladly pay that much for a robust ad blocker!
- At this point, everyone should invest a fraction of that into automating youtube downloads. No ads, no buffering, and $200 will get you eniugh hard drive space for years.
- donate to your nearest adblock developers.
  i heard the ublock origin guys are having a hard time, and they are the heroes behind most people's safe and distraction free browsing.
  
  @umbrella @Why9 Have you got a wee source? Went to donate but their about page says not looking for donations.
  https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#about
- I just use newpipe

Got the same bullshit email, total dick move by Google and I'll be cancelling. It's just pure greed.
I'm be exploring the ad blocking and/or VPN options.
Google need to separate YouTube and Music.
- https://revanced.app
  
  Well aware of those apps, installed that yesterday on my phone and Smarttube on the media player, could still end up blocked by Google.
  
  newpipe is lighter and i like it
- Google need to separate YouTube and Music.
  I actually think they need to go the other way with it. Increase the value proposition by adding more features to it. Include more drive space, Google one, etc.
  A lot of people are upset because they haven't added any additional value to YouTube and are now just hiking the rents. If they threw in, more products and services to the bundle it's a more compelling offering. I'd pay if it got me unlimited data on Google Fi, Google one with 200GB of storage, yt premium, I guess yt music? (I pay for prime music RN), and maybe some collab space/compute.
  
  This is just the cable model. You want one channel (Youtube in this analogy) so you have to pay for the 200 channel package because that's the only place it is even though you don't want the other 199 channels.
  If they threw in all of the things you said and still hiked the price, I'd still bail because not only do I not have any desire for those services, I actively want to avoid using many Google products as I can. The reality for me would be the same as including nothing and hiking the price, because I will still see no value from it.
  
  I don't want none of those "features", I just want to browse YouTube without ads. Right now I have to choose, pay more than 100€/year to get it without trouble, or install an adblocker and also not have ads, but with the slim chance that YouTube will implement an anti-adblocker that will last a few days. I'll just install the adblocker.
  If they just sold an "ad-free YouTube" instead of "premium YouTube" for half (or third) the price I might consider it, since I wouldn't have to worry ever again. I won't pay more than 100€/year just so I can get a single feature of a huge pack of features I don't need or want.
  
  Bloatware is not going to help the issue.
  
  What you are describing is similar to Apple One. Music and Storage, Apple Arcade, AppleTV+, News and Fitness+. The thing is, Apple also charge these things separately too, but if you just want two of them, you can just select two of them. The bundle is priced in such a way that it is more cost effective to get them bundled. The cost of the smaller bundle (without News or Fitness+) is much cheaper than what Google is asking for YouTube Premium.
  I would have no interest in Googles other services, I hardly trust them with my YouTube viewing habits. I’m not going to trust them to store my files, read my email, log my search history, even if I do pay them for the privilege.
  
  Yeah nah buddy.
  I only have YouTube Premium/Red because it came free with Play Music, then they killed that and we all jumped to Spotify because it was/is so much better and kept our subscription just for ad-free YouTube.
  If they seperate YouTube from YouTube Music, YouTube Music would die in seconds. The app sucks, having it linked to YouTube sucks, they know this.
- They want You to do everything Google. YouTube is the only thing that differentiates their All-in-One product from the competition. Everyone offers Music so VEVOs no value. Everything else Google offers for no monetary charge.
  AppleOne includes music, storage and AppleTV+, as well as Fitness (that nobody uses, but nobody admits to not using).
  Amazon Prime includes music, Audiobooks and Freight Discounts.
  Xbox Gold offers games.
  Netflix, HBO, etc, has no extra value except “original” and exclusive content.

Jesus, how do they justify that price?
They charge more than Netflix yet they don't even make any of their own content?
- It's because you also get youtube music streaming included with it. If netflix had its own music streaming service bundled in their prices would be even higher than they are now.
  
  Music might really be their main problem. Basically every video has some music in it. If not in the foreground, then in the background. Even game soundtracks in Let's Plays are often under license. So the moment someone plays any such video, the content mafia comes around the corner with their baseball bats in hand collecting their tolls.
  So I assume if they have to pay for music any way, they figured they might as well include a tailored music listening experience with Premium.
- Not apologizing for them: they're assholes. But I expect they have more traffic. Still not saying they're right.

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 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.
  
  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?
- 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.

It's times like these when I'm glad I refused to even log into Google to view YouTube, let alone buy subscriptions. I also refuse to view downloading content (without logging in) that's freely available to be viewed as piracy.
These subscriptions are undoubtedly a rip-off. For those saying creators get a "cut", there's a reason why sites like Patreon exist. It's substantially better for creators if you subscribe to them directly that way and get your videos from Patreon. Same with Nebula etc. If I really had to pay then I'd do that (and do already for some stuff that was never on YouTube anyway).
You can get enough subs for the price of a YT premium to get plenty of content to watch, even if you don't want to subvert Google. So there's zero reason to throw money at them for this. None at all.
- I am not saying I like YouTube, but they are actually one of the best when it comes to paying their creators.
  Pretty much every popular creator from other platforms (like tiktok) goes to YouTube once they are big and want to earn money.
  And yes of course they earn more on Patreon, but if I recall correctly most YouTubers get most of their money from YouTube, because they have their biggest audience.
  De-monitisation is a pretty huge problem for many though.
  
  TikTok's biggest problem is that it pays people through a very limited pool of money that shrinks the more people become a part of it. It's pretty good pay if you live in a poorer country but it's pennies if you live in a developed one. Twitch is better but still lags behind Youtube. Facebook is said to pay as much if not a little more than Youtube but it's also much easier to get demonetized or have your content removed on there than Youtube.

I'm curious what's driving this revenue rush at Alphabet. It almost feels like something internal, like they're trying to make it actually self sufficient based on cloud pricing.
- It’s not just Alphabet it’s cloud based companies across the board and basically VC money is drying up because it can be secured on 0% interest loans anymore
  
  Alphabet would be less impacted by interest rates or VC money since they're a megacorp. I'm curious if for them they are afraid of not being competitive enough if they get trust busted.
- It's happening across a lot of industries, especially tech. During covid line went up very fast. Post-covid line stopped going up fast, but companies are desperate to keep it going up fast. Otherwise it would count as a slowdown in year-on-year growth and we can never ever have that (/s).
  
  Companies then: Let's make money!
  Companies now: Let's make more money faster! Our graph of profit must concave up!
  Companies 100 years from now: Let's increase the rate at which the rate at which our growth in profit increases increases!
- companies want to maximize profits
- I'm expecting YT to be spun off/sold within a year or so.
  
  I don't think it'll happen willingly. They don't want it to be a drain on their cloud business and they don't want it to use AWS either.

I can't blame them. The fight to block adblockers is an expensive one, and they went all in on the fight. /s
Asshats.
E: adding the sarcasm mark, in case it wasn't obvious.

Revanced project, smart YouTubeTV and/or Smart YouTubeNext, ublock origin, and xManager for Spotify.
- I have an android phone and an android TV so I see no ads. However I have an iPad which I take away and the ads make me sad.
  Is there any way to adblock YouTube on an iPad?
  
  Safari has the hyperweb extension that does a pretty good job for me!
  Edit: hyperweb does a bunch of stuff, eliminating youtube ads is only a fraction of this extension
  
  You can install Firefox on iOS, and install ublock origin
  Edit: apparently not
  
  Piped frontend via the browser
  
  Get an Android tablet lol
  
  Late, but maybe nextdns. I haven't actually tried with YouTube on an iPhone/ipad, but I know they integrate pretty easily on Apple devices. Fairly customizable too with a free tier, just need to make a profile.
- Don't forget NewPipe
  
  Careful with NewPipe, lot of Malware infested versions floating around on the internet
- Hadn't heard of x manager, thank you! Super giddy right now, I've been using modded versions of the apk for years but a few months ago my go-to stopped working and haven't found a viable replacement until now. Really godda give them props I'm super surprised at how easy that was lol
  Also I'd used revanced but quit when the original got buggy. With how crappy their ads have gotten now I'm going to give the new version a shot thanks for mentioning that as well

For reference this is about $20 USD
- For now....
- I did not pay attention and thought it was in USD already. Inwas shocked someone would pay nearly $40 a month.
  Semi unrelated, but I had no idea that we started using only one strike through the dollar sign more frequently as of recent. I have always written it with 2 and am shook.
  
  Probably because it's less noisy in small text
- I'd pay $50 or maybe up to $80 usd a year. But $20 a month is insane. I'll just run blockers
  
  Honestly, I'd be fine with even 20. Much more than that and I'd be questioning it pretty hard. I watch YouTube tons and know how goddamn expensive cloud bandwidth is so I'm biased

imagine paying $204/yr instead of taking 20 seconds to download ublock
- how do i watch youtube without ads on a roku/chromecast? pihole? plex?
  edit: i found https://github.com/iBicha/playlet so far. havent tried it
- *$396/yr
  
  word yah. i was more making a stab at OP for even being cool with the prior 17.99/mo price
- Google have just started blocking all ad blockers, hence being so cocky about jacking up the price now.
  
  uBlock Origin gets around their efforts.

All prices seem to be going up around the board. I just got an email saying my Turkish Family Plan (via VPN) is increasing from TRY ₺59.99 to TRY ₺115.99. That's $3.29 to $6.36.
- I haven’t received the email but I guess I should expect that price hike. Thanks for the info

nearly double the price for the same thing! this after disney raised prices, max downgraded service and kept prices the same, and disney is about to finish buying out hulu in order to, I'm sure, raise prices. Yarr!

People saying I'll cancel will not cancel. I've seen so many corp simps in the last few years that I lost faith in humanity
- But it's on the internet, it must be true!
- So many Google bootlickers in these threads these days
  
  @blackbirdbiryani @yoz
  I'm indelibly attached to Google and I hate it.
  
  I haven't seen any in this thread or any of the other social media conversations I have online.
  Maybe I'm bubbled but everyone seems to be shitting on Google. Can you link me to 3-4 of these bootlicker comments please? I'm interested in what you're seeing
- "I will never set foot in this shop again!!", a customer said to me when we couldn't refund her thing because she broke it and it was her fault.
  A couple of days later...

Enshittification of youtube is definitely progressing very rapidly.

Personally, I'm a fan of
Piped for browser
SmartTube for android app/android TV
For those who must have the official paid version, keep an eye on Ozbargain Youtube.
Free trials and/or VPN + subscribe overseas for a fraction of the price, eg Individual has been $2.34 a month via India, A$2.30 via Turkey
(this is before any potential price increases in those countries)

uncritical support for the mad lad accelerationists working undercover at youtube premium

Does this mean that for people who don't pay they're going to make the ads twice as annoying?
- Twice as frequent and half as skippable maybe.
  It'll be like having visited a bad pornsite in the 90's and your screen will end up being ads stacked on top of ads.
  Might be the end kf the platform if that actually happens, there's already an insufferable amount of ads as i keep getting these double ad blocks in a row.
- Feels like they are shooting themselves in the foot. But, that's capitalism for you. Being predictably profitable is "not sustainable". Share holders want more. Which for some reason, I don't understand, directly leads to just a slightly worse money-grabbing product than what consumers are willing to pay. Rince, repeat, enshitification ensues.
  I cancelled my Premium Lite yesterday (or rather, Google did, by no longer offering it). Installed the Revanced stuff. And suddenly, the YouTube app works much, much, better than when I paid for it.
  In-video sponsored content is automatically skipped w/SponsorBlock
  Gestures for controlling volume and brightness.
  Reducing the amount of "shorts"
  button to skip intro
  downvotes are shown
- UBlock Origin is still fighting against them

Well... I guess it helps creators at least.
Unless youtube changes their cut
- That's going into Google's pocket, not the creators'.
  
  Why do Lemmy users spread lies?
  
  They receive a 2/3 cut
  
  You watch a video and sit through the ad. The uploaded of the video gets a cut. That's common knowledge this point.

What is the benefit of "Youtube Premium", anyway? Is that just Youtube without ads?
- And YouTube music
  
  Well, the ads - I don't see any ads here, anyway, and this YT music is about paying for music that you don't own in the end, or am I mistaken?
- YouTube without ads, and music in various guises.
  I used Google Play Music all day, everyday. When it transitioned to YT Music I reluctantly followed, mostly due to the thousands of songs I'd uploaded from my own library.
  For the family plan at $17.99/month for my wife and I it was a barely acceptable price to pay for ad free music, with the small bonus that when we watched something on YouTube it was ad free.
  The proposed price is laughably high when 99% of our usage is background music at work. I'll be cancelling.

Yea it's a pretty crazy increase. time to VPN up and move the family plan to india or turkey.
- What are the downsides of buying a plan from another country?
  
  There's always the chance that your account gets blocked in some way, or perhaps even your payment processor flags it as fraudulent. so it is best to set up a new account entirely just in case.
  Also, your music and some algorithm suggestions will get mixed up, but that tends to solve itself after a little while
  
  They raise the price, and price out locals, of that country?

selfhost jellyfin
automatically download youtube videos based on a txt file with channel urls
redirect youtube links to invidious for all other use case.
never directly visit the youtube site ever again, depending on other service you use, no longer need a google account.
no profit cause i never paid a dime but no regrets either.
- Lmao, that's not gonna fly with my wife.
  The only reason I got premium is because she uses YouTube quite a bit and I'd rather pay than her having to deal with ads all day
  
  If your only concern is ads then get any android box or a fire TV stick and install smarttubenext on it. It's basically YouTube without the ads and with sponsorblock and dislikes showing.
  
  Depends on the use case. This setup really is to continue watching channels your subscribed towards but theres no search.
  You may want to look at invidious which is much more like an alternative front end with search and trending pages.
  Sometimes though when people are comfortable with the present it is of course entirely valid to decide that paying up is the least stressfull, best solution for your family. But never hurts to know that alternatives do exist.
  
  well unless she only uses an iphone, get ublock origin in the browser or newpipe on the phone, and cancel the subscription
- What are you using to download videos? Youtube-dl hasn't updated in a couple years now and didn't seem to work anymore last I used it.
  
  Not OP, but i use yt-dlp to great success.
  
  I use tube archivist, has both Plex and jellyfin plugins
- How do you deal with the increased storage usage of all the videos you download? Do you have some sort of auto delete after it's watched or after some about of time?
  
  On pc jellyfin allows you to delete the media straight from within the webinterface so il usually delete videos after watching. But because i use the same server like a nass i do have some space for videos i do want to keep.
  I am also rather picky on what goes on the list. Theres maybe 15 channels in their now, favorites i really don’t want to miss. I run a personal indivious client next to it with all my second tier and filler subscriptions.

I didn’t buy it in the first place because it was too expensive, this only further cements my never buying it.
Happily had Spotify for over a decade now and no issues paying a reasonable price there.

November last year the plan in CAD went from $17.99 to $22.99 a month, I took that because.i get a lot of use out of it. I haven't got an email yet but $46 a month will get it cancelled.
- We're talking about the family plan here, which gives you 5 individual accounts.
  
  Yes, that's the plan I have.
  
  Big dog over here flexing with having 4 friends to share with 🥲

We will own nothing, don't pay, sail the seas mate.
- Heaps of corp simps out there mate.
  
  Corp Simps or just don't know how to do anything else?

Marx wasn’t lying, that rate of profit can tend to fall

Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall goes brrr

It costs so much more to get the packets across the ocean, right?

Change your VPN to turkey, login via incognito, buy premium for $4 a month. Price was just under $3 before raise.

I'd pay for no ads. I don't want their bullshit music and tv services.
- Me too A REASONABLE price. 5$ no ads one account.
  
  If it was 5 bucks I probably wouldn't block ads on my phone, but I won't stop on my desktop, as long as it's built into ublock origin. Just because every other site on the Internet sucks ass without it.

I got the same email. I will be cancelling when the """grace period""" ends.

we may have to start making excuses for the lack of terror

It's not even worthwhile for $17. Many of the trending videos on YouTube use that stupid AI voice too, the people making the videos can't even be bothered narrating them.
And people with under 10k subscribers can't even monotise, so YouTube makes the money on all of those.
I'd be willing to pay maybe $3 per month.

Not every illness has its cure, but this one...
Alternatively, if the anti adblockers purges aren't targetting you

For me it's 12€ for no ads, a music app and downloadable videos. I can't complain
- I just get all 3 for free. I can't complain either
  
  Good for you

Is it global? I didn't get it yet.
- Read elsewhere that only certain countries are getting the hike, some got it before and some will probably get it in the future, I'm probably in the future category with one of the lowest prices in my country anyway.
  
  Our buying power is so low they might lose all of us if they price hike.

Imo you are fiscally irresponsible even if you paid the 17 bucks

197 comments