Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month
Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month
Oof I think this service is only worth it if you have a family plan and everyone helping. That is how I personally make it reasonable in terms of pricing.
I’m in the UK and it’s already too expensive imo.
Would be great if I could just pay for no ads YT without YT music.
In fairness, the amount of YT that I watch on TV/iPhone makes it worth the cost, but any increases and I’ll probably just cancel and watch less YT, which isn’t a bad thing.
Or maybe just look at getting one of those Turkish subscriptions for like £2/month
I would subscribe in a heartbeat if I could get a cheaper subscription without youtube music.
Yeah, it’s just absolutely useless for me.
I’ve got a decent Sonos setup and use Tidal because the quality on YT music makes everything sound meh.
In fairness, the amount of YT that I watch on TV/iPhone makes it worth the cost
Yeah, my take was "the good I get out of YouTube is worth that, so if I'm in a situation where I need to pay that, I'd pay it".
For me what I don't like is that I haven't seen anything about Google not using it to profile me. If I get an account with Google, pay them, then they have not just the usage data, but it linked to financial data, which makes it a lot easier for them to build a profile. And that I don't want.
Google provides some good services, and they are services that I'd be willing to pay for, but I don't want to be paying the bill and having Google building a profile on me. Maybe some people don't care about that, but I do.
Hell, even if Google were to say "we won't profile you", I'd have no way of knowing that they wouldn't change their policy in the future.
Wow! It was hardly worth it to begin with.
Feels like one of the best value subscriptions to me?
I use YouTube more than most streaming services and it helps support creators
I can somewhat understand Hulu and Netflix raising prices because of video content licensing but Youtube Premium? Fucking stupid as hell.
YouTube has also been increasing its ads for free.
Youtube Vanced on my devices, Piped on my computers. gg saved you 13.99 a month
NewPipe is also a good alternative if you want to cut Google off your data, it doesn't use accounts and instead subscriptions are kept locally on the device.
I don't comment at all, so NewPipe gets most of the functionaloty I would ever want from YouTube. Plus, it also helps by not having personalized reccomendations to keep me stuck watching it.
I only use revanced because I consider picture in picture and playback with screen off a basic feature, and removing it to monetize inherently immoral.
The fact it comes with everything else is bonuses. I'd pay for those bonuses, but I won't if they try to cheat me beforehand.
The regular YouTube app won’t even do PIP on iOS even with the premium subscription; it’s ridiculous.
And SmartTube for TV
I use yt-dlp to pull down YouTube videos, and have ad blockers on my web browser (I didn't actually realize that YouTube even had ads until what was apparently years until after they'd rolled out, was stunned when I used someone else's computer).
However, I would assume that if a significant chunk of people go that way and YouTube decides that they're losing out on sufficient ad revenue and/or profiling data doing this, that they're going to start blocking those. I would guess that they can make life unworkably difficult for any third-party clients connecting to their service if they put their minds to it.
YouTube probably doesn't care about SponsorBlock, because they aren't getting a piece of that money. Heck, they probably benefit if it encourages advertisers to go through YouTube rather than content creators on YouTube. But the profiling and the YouTube-displayed ads are probably something that they are going to care about, if push comes to shove and the impact on their bottom line is large enough.
And one more point -- I can believe that the Threadiverse could potentially displace Reddit. Usenet was distributed and was once the norm for Internet forums, and something like that could be the situation again.
But the bandwidth costs of videos are a lot higher than the bandwidth costs of forum text. I am not convinced that PeerTube or something like that will necessarily work at the scale of replacing YouTube. At the least, it's going to be a rather larger chunk of money that has to come from somewhere than is the situation with forums. Someone is going to have to be writing checks, at the end of the day. Maybe it doesn't have to be via watching ads or users getting profiled, but the money's gotta be coming out of someone's pocket.
YouTube also has some of its content creators putting material up to be paid. Reddit doesn't -- well, didn't, as it looks like now they're exploring that -- have that commercial model, where they try to pay people who create content. For YouTube content where the creator is doing it with the aim of generating income, any hypothetical YouTube replacement would need to generate money to cover not just bandwidth costs, but also paying content creators.
Has Vanced been working for you? Mine has been breaking quite a bit recently (as in, videos will stop loading after only about 30 seconds)
I switched to revanced and overall it's been great. Occasionally I'll get ads in the main YouTube dev but never mid roll or pre roll ads which are arguably the most annoying ones
I do believe there is a fix for that, iirc you have to enable 'Spoof App Signature' under Settings > ReVanced > Misc.
I think that's how I fixed it, but if not there are discussions on how to fix this issue over at the ReVanced subreddit.
Yeah, there's no reason to pay for Premium unless you have an iPhone (and hopefully even that will change once the EU drags Apple kicking and screaming away from their App Store monopoly.)
Gripping tight onto my initial grandfathered price from Google play music. $8
How? I had the same plan and got an email saying they wouldn't honor the grandfathered plan and I was still being upped. I think they gave me an extra month or two at the lower rate and that was it.
No clue but never received an email. I'm a day 1 subscriber though.
Are you non-American? Seems like only Americans get any kind of deal. Rest of the world gets the middle finger.
Objectively, Youtube Premium is the one streaming service that I actually use... with youtube dlp because actually I can't stand the interface at all anymore; but even so, I use it and I feel ok about paying for it.
Why do you have a subscription and use YouTube dlp, doesn’t that just download the video whether you have a subscription or not?
Nebula has a lot of the better YT content and costs much less than that.
Even better if you got in on the CuriositySteam + Nebula bundle for $20/yr.
I've been sailing the last few years so far out, I can't see the land anymore. And kinda don't care about land anymore...
You mean to tell me there is actual land? I thought we were in Waterworld?
Ah, we have Waterworld. In HD. Ya... there is an island still, we call it Spotify on our boat. We couldn't do without our shanties... But we do have a sea cave ready tho, when those Privateers become greedy.
What is the point of Youtube Premium anyway?
It means the creators I enjoy actually get paid, whereas with adblock they don't get any ad revenue.
I can skip the middleman and pay the creators via Patreon or whatever, no?
Careful. People here got angry at Linus from LMG when he said it's important for creators to make money to continue paying their massive staff and bring more content.
Block ads without having to use an AdBlocker, but like who doesn’t use an AdBlocker these days
On mobile it allows you to continue playing videos when you close the app
And a recent addition they’ve added to it for mobile is the ability to fucking queue videos
Yeah, Adblocker is part of internet security. Just using a regular search engine these days can be risky with the sponsored links that can lead to people going to the wrong site.
I've had premium for so long now that I forget youtube has ads and when my friends try and play anything I am shocked at how shitty the experience is.
No ads on devices where you can't block ads (like WebOS or Tizen TVs), and cba to circumvent it with newpipe on android stick or something
Also youtube music for some people I guess
About WebOS: https://github.com/webosbrew/youtube-webos
Adblock + SponsorBlock, works great! I installed it using the Device Manager app instructions
I don't know if new plans still come with YouTube music but mine does. That plus ad free YouTube on device.
You can download videos with it, which is quite useful for train rides or flights.
Phones, tablets; Revanced Extended
Android TV; Smarttubenext
What's revanced extended? Did the original revanced stop working!
I use smartTube ony my TV (with sponsorblock integrated), LibreTube and newPipe on my phone (no ads, and download included), and YouTube + adguard, sponsorblock, unhook, dislike button extensions on my Desktoo. With all that effort, i do not need paying for Youtube premium.
Huh? The ad revenue it replaces can't be more than $1/month.
youtube-dlp is the solution!
yt-dlp. Just "yt" rather than "youtube".
youtube-dl is an ancestor program of yt-dlp.
The annual subscription, which was introduced in January of 2022, goes to $139.99 in a $20 increase.
I literally renewed just two days ago, right under the wire!
Definitely wasn't worth it before and now they want to increase prices? Yikes. Guess I'll keep using revanced forever then
I use it too rarely to justify paying monthly. Now I thought about it, if it were only like 4,99. That's still 60 bucks a year, which is a lot for all the in-video ads you see anyways. But triple that, hell nah.
I wish I didn’t have to pay for premium, but we’re all iOS users and we use Smart TVs and Chromcasts to cast and I’m not sure how to block ads on those (not Android TV, Samsung TVs).
If there’s a way to block ads there I’d love to know. I can’t really use AltStore either, I’ve tied it in the past and I don’t always have the means to refresh every 7 days.
Yeah... not much you can do beyond DNS-based blocking for most dumb SmartTV OSes and obviously sideloading iOS apps sucks if you're not jailbroken. Cases like these are really where they get you!
Regarding Chromecasts, just in case anyone's interested: they're still Android under the hood, so you can simply send the Revanced Manager APK via Send files to TV and proceed as usual. FYI: you need to enable developer mode (see step 3, specfically) to install custom APKs -- this won't impact your warranty.
I think the best solution right now for older Chromecast (ones without a dedicated remote) is running castblock on a raspberry pi or something else attached to your network. It doesn't block ads but it can automatically mute the chromecast volume when ads are playing, as well as automatically hit the skip button when it shows up (maybe like 5% of the time it misses both but still better than nothing). It also looks up sponsor segments from sponsorblock and detects when a sponsor is about to play and can skip those too. It auto detects all Chromecast on the network so all you have to do is run the program with the flags for what features you want enabled / what sponsorblock segments it should skip.
If you have a Chromecast with Google TV (with like a remote control and apps) I've heard smarttube-next is a good alternative app with ad blocking.
I'm not sure what works with TVs that have Chromecast built in, might also be smarttube-next. I only have the Chromecast ultra and the older standard Chromecast and castblock works great running on my pihole box
But I think they will cut access without ads soon enough, and I do agree someone needs to pay for the service.
My problem is quality of the platform went down with higer quality of production. Those with better production are doing better than those with quality content. Additionally it started looking like TV network with dozen big shows, and not enough random content. Ex. they always recommend me videos with 1M+ views, even thou a I want only ones with less than 100k.
I have been dusting of my podcast players for some time. I like to have a video, but looks like price is too high for me. Audio will be good.
Pi hole does not work for YouTube (or Twitch or many others). It doesn't work for services who distribute ads from their own servers.
If you had Android instead of iOS you may have been able to use an ad-free youtube client and cast to TV, but if you're streaming on the TV, or from iOS, I don't know how you'd go about blocking ads.
Reminder to just get a family membership and split with friends, a very good value tbh
They are also raising it for student plans. I got an email saying my student rate is going to $7.99 starting in September
I used to have this bundled with Youtube Music. The Youtube Music app was possibly the worst Android app I have ever used, slow, unstable, buggy and flaky as all hell. Ditched it for Deezer which has a terrific if slightly disorganised catalogue and a far better app
Am I the only one who isn't completely outraged by 50 cents per day?
In fairness, it’s not just 50 cents per day, it’s yet another streaming service that’s increasing prices.
And it’s all well and good saying “you don’t have to buy it”, but these streaming companies are starting to get aggressive with squeezing money out of people.
Google in particular is trying to crack down on ad blockers, and trying to force more ads at the same time.
There's a lot of fatigue going around with everyone trying to sell you on their subscription service, "it's only x cents a day" becomes much more annoying when every facit of life also apparently needs to cost you X cents
I'm not outraged at all. Just more perplexed as someone who doesn't pay for it, since increasing price doesn't incentivize me more to get it. Not sure why in terms of features it doesn't have something that might make it worth it for those who haven't bothered like return of YouTube dislikes and bringing back the ability to group channels together. Which really helps when you have an overactive channel that is putting out too much content and suppressing your smaller channels which leads you to unsubscribe from them.
Once they got rid of channel groupings was when I started using YouTube logged in less and less and now I use newpipe which does have channel groupings. Oh another thing is no control over stuff like youtube shorts. They really should give paid users an ability to block that off and auto convert short videos into normal videos so it isn't looping without video controls. Other than ads it just feels lacking in additional customization for what is called a premium service. Even control over thumbnails so it replaces them with a screen cap from the video should be provided for premium users. YouTube is such an obnoxious delivery system by default. Provide ability to block channels too.
Just as Gaben once said, piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem.
It's not that we can't afford it, we just don't like getting treated as cash cows and idiots. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile, and before you know it, everything will be locked behind paywalls.
Yeah sure
It's not bad with pixel pass.
Does anyone actually use that crap to begin with?
If you really use YT and YT Music enough, and have a family that does the same and pitches in on the cost, it makes sense. No ads without the fuss.
Any other situation, it's a lot more questionable if it's worth it.
"YouTube Vanced" on my phone (Pixel 7 Pro) and then use "Smart Tube Next" on my Sony Bravia Android TV, I'd happily pay for just Ad-free YouTube but I refuse to pay for YouTube music bundled into it.
This shit should be included with YouTube premium
