Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month

TheTechNerd@lemmy.world to Android@lemdro.id – 225 points – Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month
9to5google.com

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.

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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.

Indian family plan is £2 a month for 6 people.

Does it block people who don't live in the same location/state?

Nope. You only need a VPN on the initial purchase then you can add or remove family members as you wish.

I don't think it is possible anymore. If you've signed up in the past you're fine. However, you now need a payment card from the country in order to purchase.

A lot of streaming services are cracking down on workarounds it seems. Many have stopped accepted disposal debit cards as a means of repeatedly getting free trials.

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.

Any video service builds a profile of you based on viewing habits.

I have never subscribed to any video service where the service provider knows what I'm watching and has my financial data. The last service I got was (traditional, no provider-provided box) cable video service, about fifteen years back. All the provider knows there is that I got the basic cable package.

The closest I ever came was being in the random sample for a Nielson Ratings poll, which I did not respond to (and in any event, I am sure that they do not profile individuals, because their sample is too small to make doing so worthwhile).

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 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.

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.

Are you non-American? Seems like only Americans get any kind of deal. Rest of the world gets the middle finger.

Yeah. I've still got my $10 a month price for YouTube Red.

I have the $10 price from Google Play Music and just got an email saying they were jacking my price to $14, but because I've been such a long-time user they're giving me until December.

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.

The creators will see jack shit of that price increase. It's all going into exec's pockets. The smart ones all have Patreon or other ways of monetising their content anyway.

Sorry, I don't see what this has to do with my comment? I was answering the question "What is the point of Youtube Premium anyway?" and said nothing about the price increase.

  • No ads.
  • Background play.
  • Download videos
  • YouTube Music Premium included

First one makes it worth it for me. Have you seen how many ads some videos have? It's insane. Not interested in watching 8+ minutes of ads in a 45 minute video.

I know there are plugins, alternative apps, etc. to get the same stuff free, but I just prefer paying and never having to worry about any apps or plugins breaking. I just know it'll be a perfect experience every time.

At this point it's less about cost than it is about doing something against rampant collection of personal data no one should have any business looking at.

I don't see any problem if people see value in that subscription and want to pay it. But the fact that you pay and they still siphon the same metric fuck ton of data to monetize for themselves really shouldn't be okay.

Now, if they were transparent about this, asked the user for consent, who then agrees, then it's obviously fair game. But doing this any other way should never be acceptable.

You may be surprised to hear that the revenue split on Premium is the same as the split on Ads: 55% of all Premium money goes directly to creators on a member viewership basis. Alphabet increasing the price of Premium does increase the money going to Youtube corporate, but the revenue structure is fundamentally designed so that creators also receive an equal raise.

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.

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.

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

but like who doesn’t use an AdBlocker these days

Hard to do from a game console or Chromecast, which happen to be the two methods I use most often for watching YouTube.

If you got an apple device safari is fantastic when it comes to just air playing YouTube videos without ads. Sponsorblock extension works too and skips them. No messing around with third party apps installs.

Although, I'm not sure if consoles or chrome cast have airplay support.

If you use the older Chromecast dongle that doesn't have android TV and no remote (the circular ones) you should be able to use castblock to auto mute ads and automatically press the skip button as soon as it shows up. It also has sponsorblock support so it will auto skip sponsor segments too. You just have to run the program on the same network with flags specifying you want it to mute ads, skip ads, and give it the list of sponsorblock segment types to skip and it'll auto detect any Chromecasts and do it's auto skipping and muting magic

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.

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

I don't know if new plans still come with YouTube music but mine does. That plus ad free YouTube on device.

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.

youtube-dlp is the solution!

yt-dlp. Just "yt" rather than "youtube".

youtube-dl is an ancestor program of yt-dlp.

Huh? The ad revenue it replaces can't be more than $1/month.

Definitely wasn't worth it before and now they want to increase prices? Yikes. Guess I'll keep using revanced forever then

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!

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.

They are also raising it for student plans. I got an email saying my student rate is going to $7.99 starting in September

Reminder to just get a family membership and split with friends, a very good value tbh

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.

"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.

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.

This shit should be included with YouTube premium