YouTube Raises Premium Prices in Over 15 Countries

[Analog Kid]

IMO, life is too short to watch commercials, so even if they do raise the price for the US, I will keep it as I watch far too much YouTube to not have Premium.

I agree with that sentiment in every other source of media I consume, but I have a hard time seeing YouTube as anything more than a diversion and can't convince myself that it's worth a subscription cost on a par with, say, Netflix or Max.

The commercials have gotten out of control though and while I keep telling myself that should motivate me to watch less stuff on YouTube, it hasn't yet. Maybe it's just time to bite the bullet and accept that YouTube is a service worth paying for.

But seeing this and how Amazon has jacked up Prime fees over time tells me I'd regret it... This is how subscriptions work-- the hard part is getting people to buy in, but once it's all on autopayment people are really slow to turn it off.

 

[Etienne79]

brave does not have YT ad blocker for ipad. Tried may - nothing worked.

Adblocker for my TV already skips there in video ads. No issues there.

Brave blocks ALL ads perfectly on iPad and iPhone as well. However, the key is: do NOT log in (this applies only to iPad and iPhone; on Mac, you can log in without issues). If you’re already logged in, try deleting the app and redownloading it.

Of course, without logging in, you won’t get personalized suggestions, but there’s a workaround: you can open the official YouTube app, choose your video, and use the ‘Share’ option to open it in Brave.

I’ve had zero ads for years on all my devices, except for my smart TV.

 

[crazymac]

I wasn't okay with the last price increase, but I paid for it. If the US gets another price increase, I am out.

 

[BelgianChoklit]

I watch mostly on Apple TV, so that is not really an option. And the sites are getting better and better at circumventing the ad blockers on PC browsers, which turns it into a perpetual game of offense vs. defense.

First of all, the Apple TV is not a living being. ***the or ***an Apple TV
I watch using the Apple TV as well but you can airplay, even if the quality is lower. Or you could get a phone number in Argentina to use to set up your youtube Premium account there = very cheap

 

[Abazigal]

I agree with that sentiment in every other source of media I consume, but I have a hard time seeing YouTube as anything more than a diversion and can't convince myself that it's worth a subscription cost on a par with, say, Netflix or Max.

I find short form content like travel vlogs pretty entertaining to watch, and their duration (~10 min+) makes it easier to get into compared to entire seasons of shows on Netflix. Like I can play one while travelling on the train or have a little time to kill.

I am left with just a YouTube premium and Prime subscription now, so the former is my key source of entertainment at the moment. The price hike is painful to swallow, but since I share my sub with my dad, it works out to be identical price-wise, so I am sticking with it.

 

[Infinitewisdom]

IMO, life is too short to watch commercials, so even if they do raise the price for the US, I will keep it as I watch far too much YouTube to not have Premium.

This is me. It’s so jarring when I watch YouTube on someone else’s device and an ad pops up. With how much I watch YouTube, paying to get rid of the ads is money well spent.

 

[Analog Kid]

I find short form content like travel vlogs pretty entertaining to watch, and their duration (~10 min+) makes it easier to get into compared to entire seasons of shows on Netflix. Like I can play one while travelling on the train or have a little time to kill.

I am left with just a YouTube premium and Prime subscription now, so the former is my key source of entertainment at the moment. The price hike is painful to swallow, but since I share my sub with my dad, it works out to be identical price-wise, so I am sticking with it.

Yeah, I hear you. I have really mixed feelings about YouTube-- so much of their content is crap, but so much more is only available through YouTube. Their tech reviews are garbage, for example, but there is some quite good science content. I spent last weekend just watching clips of one of my favorite bands performing live over the years.

But their whole model bothers me a bit-- just everyone throwing everything into the algorithm and each of us receiving what the algorithms chooses to reveal. I don't like that it's a Google property. The short form, quick video after video consumption model tends to encourage lower quality content which is ok when it's just YouTube, but is it really what I want to spend $20 a month on?

YouTube is making moves to force me to pick a side though-- the ads are becoming unbearable, so I'm either going to capitulate or be forced to cut my usage substantially.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

This is why people pirate, excessive pricing.
Shame India isn’t possible anymore, nor for instance Ukraine, lots cheaper.
There are other ways to see YouTube without the adds legally.
Pricing will one day mean its downfall.
I understand why some go to Alibaba, 24 euro for a whole year, I don’t blame them.

Adblockers are neither piracy nor illegal.

I should know, I'm an advocate for REAL piracy.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

you could also just listen to free high quality internet radios

also, real internet radio doesn’t trap you in an algorithmic hole like most services will

i beg you all to free yourselves

There's no algorithmic hole if you turn off and delete your watch history. I do strongly recommend you all do that, they even removed the 'recommended' videos from the YT homepage a while ago as a silly attempt to 'punish' you from turning the history off. They put a banner on that to encourage you to turn history on - so I adblocked that too.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Once they start injecting the ads into the videos themselves, something they are currently trialing, it'll be interesting to see if the ad-blocking community can defeat that.

They already did.

It's called SponsorBlock. Community sourced adblocking for the videos with sponsors, it'll block ad garbage that's part of the videos.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

brave does not have YT ad blocker for ipad. Tried may - nothing worked.

Adblocker for my TV already skips there in video ads. No issues there.

Orion + uBlock Origin works on the iPad.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Ad blockers don’t work in the app do they?

So delete the app. It's better in a browser anyway.

 

[VisceralRealist]

Once they start injecting the ads into the videos themselves, something they are currently trialing, it'll be interesting to see if the ad-blocking community can defeat that.

The difference is you can just fast-forward through those. And decent YouTubers at least mark where the sponsored ads are or place them at the end of the video so you can just skip them entirely. It's the non-skippable YouTube-inserted ads that I can't put up with.

 

[Moriakum]

Or, spend $99 on a Dev account and sideload uYou+. Need to perform some steps but not too complicated. Google took down the ready-to-download modded .ipa files from GitHub. But you can create your own .ipa file from a decrypted YouTube .ipa based on the files that still get updated in that same GitHub...just need to create the .ipa yourself, which is much safer than downloading an .ipa from some random website.

$99 a year to sideload vs. $168 for YT premium. Not to mention other benefits of being able to sideload. I also have Kodi w/ Fen addon for all of my other streaming of shows and movies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sideloaded/comments/1dpth9p

Kodi on Apple TV doesn’t do HDR or Dolby Vision, so it’s completely useless to me.

 

[dumastudetto]

They already did.

It's called SponsorBlock. Community sourced adblocking for the videos with sponsors, it'll block ad garbage that's part of the videos.

Is that community flagging the timestamps where ads start and end? The extension presumably then tries to skip at the right moments, where it has verified info from the community?

 

[dumastudetto]

The difference is you can just fast-forward through those. And decent YouTubers at least mark where the sponsored ads are or place them at the end of the video so you can just skip them entirely. It's the non-skippable YouTube-inserted ads that I can't put up with.

New YT ads will be embedded in the video - just like the YouTuber does - presumably with a mechanism to disable skipping past points where YT ads exist.

 

[Harthag]

Kodi on Apple TV doesn’t do HDR or Dolby Vision, so it’s completely useless to me.

I also have it installed on my Android streaming box. I use it on my phone when working out, etc.

 

[fanarchist]

Increasing the price because Stadia failed so miserably. Unfortunately, I can't cancel my family subscription.

 

[CWallace]

Increasing the price because Stadia failed so miserably. Unfortunately, I can't cancel my family subscription.

I expect the true reason they are raising prices is they make more money from showing advertisements.

It is why we have seen ad-free streaming service prices rise after ad-supported tiers are added.

 

[scorpio vega]

No, but you can use Safari.

I don’t want to use safari as the app is better.

So as I said ad block doesn’t work on the app.

So delete the app. It's better in a browser anyway.

No it’s not lol.
The app is way better.

 

[EsTriFee]

Check out AdGuard / Vinegar for iPhone, AdBlock Pro for iPad.

I'll check these out, alread had adguard on iphone but didn't realize it wasn't enabled in extensions.. it's mostly on firefox on mac i need them since this is where i'd end up watching youtube, but i addded adguard on it now as well maybe it will work better

 

[Stiksi]

Entitlement? It's discrimination. People shouldn't be paying 10 times more for the same product just because they earn more money.

I'm never going to pay these crazy prices when someone from India pays only $2 for the same product.

Your use of the word ”earn” is a stretch. You don’t ”earn” more, the Indian economy just works at a different scale. You get more money because poorer countries make it possible by providing cheap labor. You are getting the money they worked for and now you complain about having to spend some of it proportionally. That is entitlement. Ignorance is another word, but I’m not sure that applies. You know how it works and choose to see yourself as above it, so not the word here.

But seriously, you should read history and understand why the Indian economy is like it is now. Before the 19th century, India was the world’s largest economy. Who do you think might have changed that?

 

[Abazigal]

The difference is you can just fast-forward through those. And decent YouTubers at least mark where the sponsored ads are or place them at the end of the video so you can just skip them entirely. It's the non-skippable YouTube-inserted ads that I can't put up with.

Isn’t it ironic that the creators making the effort to do the right thing are also the ones being punished for them? 🤔

 

[amartinez1660]

The Ads from the last 5 years have been so savagely bad, piling up in double sometimes triple serving, that I think it’s not really an actual Ad business going on but a trolling attack on the free users to wear them down so much until they succumb and decide to go premium.

They never even serve something that I would find useful… not a single thing I have seen has made me think of going to Amazon and get it. “They know all about you” my *ss… not a single game I would like have ever been shown and they still can’t realize that I already have a very good and in shape car!

Those badly made on purpose fake Ads, with the grating voice of someone doing a half assed effort at reading and explaining a product, with a completely broken background chroma key, must be doing so well that they have the galls to increase the price of the subscription.

 

[JapanApple]

We’re talking about YouTube here. The ads are still getting through. Other sites works of course. But YouTube it doesn’t.