Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1271 points –
Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month
9to5google.com
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I'm not going to defend the price increase, but a lot of comments in here are just aimless hatred of the idea of paying anything, ever.

Pound for pound, YouTube Premium has been a decent deal at $10. Has been. This is pushing it, but there's a lot of comments that seem absolutely indignant at the idea of paying YouTube period (and by extension the content creators).

There's got to be some room for nuance here. The internet is plagued by advertising and paywalls, yes, but it can also not exist without them, so we find some middle ground.

It can definitely exist without advertising and paywalls. It just going to be smaller.

I've been using the internet for over 24 years. I can tell you that the internet can survive without ads or paywalls. Ads and paywalls are a product of greed. Ads are way more efficient these days but many used to take up so much memory. I remember when AdBlock or whatever it was called came out. It made browsing the internet smoother.

The only way the internet can survive without ads or paywalls is for the person/business hosting the content to pay for everything out of pocket.

A platform like YouTube could never exist without some form of revenue. I understand that there are small platforms out there, such as PeerTube, but they will never be comparable to the scale of YouTube without some form of revenue. Sure, people could grow PeerTube by spinning up their own instances, but then they need to provide their own hardware and storage. At which point you’re spending just as much, or likely more, than you would on a subscription service.

I think its possible it will just be slow and requires people to sacrifice a bit just like we are trying to do with lemmy. maybe find a different route for ads like how Brave the browser does it where it give the user the choice to see ads and give them and the content creator a cut if they agree to it, not that I trust that browser but its an interesting concept

Yeah. We can’t have free, privacy, and creators that eat. Pick two.

(We might end up paying and getting neither privacy or paid creators… but at least it is worth the attempt to do things right.)