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

  • Why9@lemmy.world
    97·
    3 years ago

    $400 a year for YouTube premium.

    I’d gladly pay that much for a robust ad blocker!

  • bestusername@aussie.zoneM
    81·
    3 years ago

    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.

      • bestusername@aussie.zoneM
        6·
        3 years ago

        Well aware of those apps, installed that yesterday on my phone and Smarttube on the media player, could still end up blocked by Google.

        • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
          31·
          3 years ago

          In my experience Smart Tube for my Google tv is already blocked. Updated to the latest version and I still can’t sign in with it. The code for activating the device never appears.

          • bestusername@aussie.zoneM
            15·
            3 years ago

            You might not have the latest version, that was a known bug and fixed yesterday.

            I was able to sign in yesterday after updating.

            • fine_sandy_bottom@aussie.zone
              4·
              3 years ago

              I’ve been using newpipe for android for several years.

              It’s great. One thing I’ve learned about these apps though is that they’re brittle. Expect them to break, sometimes several times a month. That said, there’s never been a case where I’ve noticed it break but a patch wasn’t already released. The thing is, repo’s like f-droid often aren’t up to date. Much better to get the release from the source.

      • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        3 years ago

        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.

      • Salvo@aussie.zoneEnglish
        1·
        3 years ago

        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.

      • bestusername@aussie.zoneM
        22·
        3 years ago

        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.

        • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 years ago

          Weird. I hated YouTube music (have it since my friend let me join his family plan) until I finally tried Spotify using xmanager. I realized ytm is miles ahead of Spotify and it’s made me rethink my hate for it

          What do you like about Spotify besides your friends being on it?

          I’ve gotten used to the queue function which lets you scroll through your entire now playing list. I was blown away seeing that Spotify only shows the upcoming songs (at least on mobile). I’m also liking the option to switch to a music video mid song. That’s super neat.

          That said, even though I’ve never planned on paying for Spotify, I can totally see wanting options to pay for things separately

          • bestusername@aussie.zoneM
            2·
            3 years ago

            I’ve ditched Spotify a few times, purely for financial reasons since I’m already paying for YouTube Music, I always get frustrated and re-subscribe.

            With Spotify I can switch between my car, my phone, my desktop, my loungeroom, my shed, anywhere I’m signed into Spotify, without having to start the song or playlist again. I’ve read YouTube Music working on this and it might be enough to get me to switch.

            I don’t care who else uses Spotify.

            YouTube Music doesn’t have a dedicated Android TV app, there’s no background playback on either of my media players and I don’t care for video clips.

            You can also see all upcoming songs, and rearrange/remove them if desired, with Spotify. Maybe I’m not understanding your 3rd paragraph.

          • aksdb@feddit.de
            1·
            3 years ago

            I don’t want cloud storage. I want ad-free YouTube. And the price is not fit for what they offer (they are a damn content hoster and not motherfucking Netflix).

    • Salvo@aussie.zoneEnglish
      2·
      3 years ago

      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.

  • Pyr@lemmy.ca
    501·
    3 years ago

    Jesus, how do they justify that price?

    They charge more than Netflix yet they don’t even make any of their own content?

    • ChronosWing@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • aksdb@feddit.de
        11·
        3 years ago

        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.

          • aksdb@feddit.de
            01·
            3 years ago

            My point was: they likely have to pay for licensed music to the content mafia, so they cannot really offer anything without including music in the pricing.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
      32·
      3 years ago

      Not apologizing for them: they’re assholes. But I expect they have more traffic. Still not saying they’re right.

    • Mr_Blott@lemmy.world
      51·
      3 years ago

      I’m reading this thread with lots of people saying they keep paying for premium because they watch so much YouTube, and fair play to them, it’s more convenient to pay

      But what the fuck are people actually watching?!?

      Edit - just seen this lmao - https://mander.xyz/post/5718061

      • BzzBiotch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        3 years ago

        As an avid YT watcher: lots of high quality food and cooking shows, music and concerts, science channels, space and spacefaring channels and of course regular entertainment. Enough to fill your whole day, if necessary. With no fucking ads at all. I love it! ❤️

      • SolarNialamide@lemm.ee
        3·
        3 years ago

        I watch a lot of long-form video essays about politics, economics, media analysis, and societal stuff like that, sketch or video game comedy, and some random hobby stuff, all by independent creators. I also watch stream vods on YouTube. Oh and asmr to fall asleep. I don’t want to watch ads obviously but it would be much more expensive to support everyone I watch on patreon, even if I only gave a dollar to every one. And I do want to support them financially because a lot of that long-form stuff literally takes weeks or months to make.

      • CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 years ago

        I use it every day. I watch videos that are i on a specific topic, and YouTube has lots of them. For now, my uBlock in Firefox works. I will not pay for Premium if they block me

      • Instigate@aussie.zone
        2·
        3 years ago

        This is what I don’t understand either - as someone who stopped using Youtube the day that they brought ads in (except for watching embedded videos elsewhere as they don’t have ads), I haven’t been exposed to the long-form enshittification others have experienced and so maybe that’s why I don’t get it, but who is using Youtube for hours on end and what are they watching? Is it just conspiracy theorists falling further and further down the rabbit hole? I really don’t know.

  • Yerbouti@lemmy.ml
    353·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • Palacegalleryratio [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      122·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Krauerking@lemy.lol
        81·
        3 years ago

        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.

        • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          3 years ago

          I think you’re mostly correct, but I slightly disagree on this part:

          Rules, regulations and restrictions, slowly put up more and more stops for simple small people to enter the space

          I think the reality is that convenience simply trumped out. As much as we can see now that allowing the internet to coalesce into a handful of silos, or often only 1-2 silos as is the case with Youtube, years ago the major value they provided was that you could simply go there and find the content. Reddit’s demise reminded me of this more than anything else. I was a daily visitor for quite an array of topics for over a decade. When they decided to fully fuck up the site and I left, I found myself having to think about which of those content sources I wanted to replace and what I’d want to replace them with, and as much as it would be cool for that all to just be “lemmy” the reality is that I now am looking at far more RSS feeds, discord servers, mastodon servers, etc.

          I also think that there is a phenomenon that is a bit more insidious at play, and that’s that most of these services are funded by VC or these massive companies and don’t make money for years or even a decade or more until they’ve consolidated the market to basically just them and they can charge whatever they feel like. Youtube follows this pattern. Even after Google’s acquisition, it was quite a while before YouTube became even break-even as they gobbled up the market for this type of thing. VC/Google can sink billions into infrastructure without turning a profit until the market is basically just Youtube, and then all of a sudden we get Adblock crackdowns and near doubling of Premium rates. The only place that might compete with Youtube at this point is probably Apple or Amazon mostly because they’re the only companies that can say “we’re going to lose hundreds of millions or billions for at least a decade.”

          Ultimately, I think this is going to be the major lesson from about 2000-2020. As consumers, we should be extremely mistrusting of businesses where we can’t understand how they make money, because usually that just means that the way they make money is to basically monopolize the market and then really fuck us.

          • Krauerking@lemy.lol
            2·
            3 years ago

            I fully agree and still think that regulations to a degree do impact the ability for others to join in spaces. The world is full of nuance and as always it’s a bit of A & B and C through fucking Z as well in small amounts.

            Convenience has let people grow complacent to companies doing whatever which gives us now when the reaper has come to collect and wants more money since they have nothing else to focus on.

            But think of it also as making a hotdog. There are rules that are super necessary and helpful. You want it made with good ingredients and not rodent and in a kitchen that is clean and inspected every so often. But imagine if they made a requirement for size and shape, stated that each hotdog must be measured by an IR camera and nuked by gamma radiation to be sold. Suddenly the only people that can sell hotdogs retail are ones that can afford plutonium and very expensive equipment.

            Not a huge issue cause those hotdogs last longer and are reliable but there was literally a law saying all platforms must be responsible for every single comment on their platform and several of them said they would turn off comments.
            With server costs, bandwidth costs, registration and more eventually the people that can afford to meet those minimum requirements are the ones who already have the money to do so. The walls get built and those inside make sure they stay safe of others impact.

            They can only do that while people have no interest in leaving the walled garden, and they assist in building them. It seems to just be how people interact with their world. Ignorant. And I say that without prejudice cause it lets them be happy but the horrors will come out of nowhere to them.

            • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
              2·
              3 years ago

              Fair, I also didn’t realize that I was replying in an Aussie specific community, so this part:

              but there was literally a law saying all platforms must be responsible for every single comment on their platform and several of them said they would turn off comments.

              makes it make more sense to me why you said that in your original comment. Over here (US) there is very little regulation of these platforms. Basically, they can’t knowingly host CSAM, and they have to respond to DMCA requests. The DCMA is basically just “take down copyrighted material when a right’s holder complains.” We have a carve out called section 230 that really lets companies not have much responsibility for the content they host. So in the US’s case when it comes to these things going back to the hot dog analogy, our tech companies only responsibility is along the lines of not explicitly encouraging employees to allow rodents, or even to police for rodents, it’s basically just if the right people report rodents they have to do something about it.

              So in the case of YouTube, for example, I and most other people who know how to build websites can make a site that hosts video fairly easily. Because regs here are so lax, all I really need to do is explicitly state that CSAM/copyright materials aren’t allowed, do a shockingly small amount of work to automatically take it down when reported. Laws over here aren’t really the barrier.

    • Rednax@lemmy.world
      82·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      63·
      3 years ago

      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.

  • roguetrick@kbin.social
    31·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • galoisghost@aussie.zone
      22·
      3 years ago

      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

      • roguetrick@kbin.social
        7·
        3 years ago

        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.

    • Seraphin 🐬@pawb.social
      18·
      3 years ago

      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).

      • been_jamming@lemm.ee
        10·
        3 years ago

        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!

      • roguetrick@kbin.social
        4·
        3 years ago

        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.

  • Sphere@reddthat.com
    261·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • retro@infosec.pub
    211·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • pedroparamo@lemm.ee
      7·
      3 years ago

      I haven’t received the email but I guess I should expect that price hike. Thanks for the info

  • No1@aussie.zone
    16·
    3 years ago

    Personally, I’m a fan of

    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)

  • yoz@aussie.zonedeleted by creatorEnglish
    193·
    3 years ago

    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

    • CrowAirbrush@lemm.ee
      6·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • okamiueru@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 years ago

      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
      • Faceman🇦🇺@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        7·
        3 years ago

        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