YouTube Plans Lower-Priced, Ad-Free Version of Paid Video Tier 44
According to Bloomberg, YouTube plans to introduce a lower-priced, ad-free version of its paid video service. From the report: The package, dubbed "premium lite," will be announced soon in the US, Australia, Germany and Thailand, according to a person familiar with the plans. The service will target viewers who primarily want to watch programs other than music videos. While YouTube may be best known for the free videos uploaded by users, the company also offers a variety of paid services. YouTube Premium is a $13.99-a-month package in the US that lets subscribers watch everything on the service, including music videos, without ads.
"As part of our commitment to provide our users with more choice and flexibility, we've been testing a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free in several of our markets," a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. "We're hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future with our partners' support."
"As part of our commitment to provide our users with more choice and flexibility, we've been testing a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free in several of our markets," a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. "We're hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future with our partners' support."
It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
It's about time. $13.99 for deleting ads was always absurdly high.
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You can get all YouTube videos from torrent sites?
Ad-Free sure you betcha (Score:2)
"Ad-Free" lol for how long?
Pro Tip: I get an ad-free youtube experience by using Brave; that's all there is to it.
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"Ad-Free" lol for how long?
As long as it takes to watch some content creator with a sponsored Clash of Clans segment, or whoever is the latest freemium mobile game dev to be dumping money on YouTube influencers.
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Sponsorblock works. Try it.
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Usually the "influencers" who accept those kind of sponsorships to begin with are bottom tier. They'll also typically accept sponsorships from crypto scams and the like. You know the video is going to be crap when sponsorblock has to skip past several minutes of "hello youtube" "shoutouts to..." and a needlessly flashy and long intro video and logo.
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I've switched to the MyTube frontend since their last push for mandatory ads. Haven't been bothered by a single ad since.
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>"Pro Tip: I get an ad-free youtube experience by using Brave; that's all there is to it."
Or and even better "pro tip", Firefox + UBlock Origin, because it isn't based on a browser core that Google controls.
Even so, most of the good content will have creator-embedded ads. But I find they are acceptable because they aren't "forced" content. You can choose to watch them or skip quickly through. This is what I have done for eons on my DVR/TiVo and I find it reasonable. And sometimes, even at great speed
TFA makes my head hurt (Score:3, Interesting)
Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube plans to introduce a new, lower-priced version of its paid video service, offering its vast library of podcasts and how-to clips without advertising.
The package, dubbed “premium lite,” will be announced soon in the US, Australia, Germany and Thailand, according to a person familiar with the plans. The service will target viewers who primarily want to watch programs other than music videos.
Well, that makes it clear as mud. So, is it only podcasts and how-to clips that would be ad-free with this new subscription tier, or everything except music videos? And when they say music videos, are they referring to only officially produced ones, or does that also include fan-made stuff that hit a content ID match? What about the Hollywood movies that YouTube has available to paid subscribers?
I'm just going to assume that the article is referring to all user-generated content. This is likely something Google/Alphabet is offering because they've annoyed people to no end with their anti-adblock campaign and the present cost of $13.99/mo is a damn rip-off if all you want to do is watch some lawyer pick locks in his spare time. Still, since (as the article mentions) many YouTube content creators insert their own sponsored content into their videos, any paid plan essentially just amounts to less ads, unless you only watch content creators who never accept sponsorships.
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>"Still, since (as the article mentions) many YouTube content creators insert their own sponsored content into their videos, any paid plan essentially just amounts to less ads, unless you only watch content creators who never accept sponsorships."
There is a *huge* difference between unskippable [Youtube-placed] ads and content-creator-added ads that can be zoomed through like on a TiVo/DVR. I find the latter acceptable and the former intolerable.
I also find it intolerable to watch/listen to most things
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From what I've gathered it seems that you get ad-free YouTube, just not the other YouTube Premium stuff like unlimited YouTube Music streaming without ads, and the associated music videos.
This is a good step because I don't want that other stuff, and the price in the UK is kind of ridiculous. If they bring it here I will seriously consider it, even if I keep using SmartTube to block ads anyway. My wife likes Apple devices and you can't run any ad blocking YouTube clients on those without jailbreaks that mes
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If you're watching on a computer, check out SponsorBlock to skip those sponsored segments.
I want to support YouTube (Score:5, Interesting)
Elon Musk gets a lot of praise or flak (depending) for restoring free speech to Twitter, but frankly YouTube has done more to spread the word. I know there are all kinds of gotchas regarding censorship on YouTube, but in the main it has been absolutely essential to hosting independent voices.
So I absolutely want to support the service and its content creators. I'm not someone who gets a thrill stealing things from people. If they produce something of value, it's only fair that they get paid. Everybody needs to get paid for what they do. We all have the same bills to pay. I charge people for my time and talents, too.
I currently have a Premium account on YouTube because that's the only way to directly contribute my money to creators. I rarely use the Music Service, and even more rarely use the Movie/TV services (even though I pay for them both.) If they introduce Premium Lite and the price is low enough, I'll buy subscriptions for everyone in my household who wants one. At it stands now, I only pay for the one subscription because it's too expensive.
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...and yet you are still required to say the covid vaccine is safe and effective if you mention the vaccines
This. Also the pointless censorship of obvious words. You can flip through the channels dropping fuck-bombs like nukes all day long on YouTube..and then run across a popular channel on relationship advice where grown-ass adults are forced to have a serious discussion about watching too much “corn”. (When I first heard this I thought “the hell are the corn farmers in the fields seeing?”)
Don't give a damn what the lame excuse is for coherced play on words sandwiched in between act
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This. Also the pointless censorship of obvious words. You can flip through the channels dropping fuck-bombs like nukes all day long on YouTube..and then run across a popular channel on relationship advice where grown-ass adults are forced to have a serious discussion about watching too much “corn”. (When I first heard this I thought “the hell are the corn farmers in the fields seeing?”)
Don't give a damn what the lame excuse is for coherced play on words sandwiched in between actual offensive language. I’ll support YouTube when they grow the fuck up. Pointless censorship, is pointless and childish.
That is TikTok censoring at work. You can't say words like porn or suicide (unalive is the TikTok term) and the self censorship leaks into other areas.
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You can flip through the channels dropping fuck-bombs like nukes all day long on YouTube..and then run across a popular channel on relationship advice where grown-ass adults are forced to have a serious discussion about watching too much corn
I'm totally going to have to test this with an AI generated song.
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Because smooth brains like you keep saying it isn't.
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I wouldn't mind paying for youtube if it meant I could disable their recommendation algorithms, tracking, etc. The only possible way to do that at all is to simply not log in. So ublock+sponsorblock it is.
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They'll never offer that level of service. The data is to valuable to them to just throw it away. The only solution is to block all ads.
They were supposedly working on making ad blockers ineffective by blocking the content if an ad blocker was detected. Either it was too much of a cat and mouse game, or they are waiting for the right moment to deploy it.
Maybe the strategy is to try and convert as many users to subscription, then prod the rest with ad blocker detection. Once they get most people on subscript
Where to go if leaving YouTube? (Score:2)
When this happens, it will be time to move to another delivery platform.
What platform might that be? Last I checked, Vidme ran out of money and closed, and Rumble, BitChute, and Odysee have built a reputation of hosting mostly conspiracy theories, cryptocurrency promotion, and far-right bigotry. Are PeerTube instances any good?
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>"I wouldn't mind paying for youtube if it meant I could disable their recommendation algorithms, tracking, etc. The only possible way to do that at all is to simply not log in. So ublock+sponsorblock it is."
Funny you should say that. I do the same thing. I never log in, and use Firefox + Ublock. I don't use Sponsorblock, though, since zooming through non-forced ads is easy.
Interestingly, it still makes decent recommendations. So it has assigned me some ID cookie, for sure. But it isn't official or
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I do all of this in a few ways:
Desktop firefox uses temporary container tabs and cookie auto delete, plus what ublock and sponsorblock do.
Android firefox defaults to private mode. Not the greatest but it does the trick. ublock + sponsorblock + background playback fixer == zen
The only annoying thing is the occasional "please sign in to confirm you're not a bot", but if reloading a few times doesn't fix it, then connecting to a different VPN server with proton does.
The thing I hate about recommendation crap i
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I wouldn't mind paying for youtube if it meant I could disable their recommendation algorithms, tracking, etc. The only possible way to do that at all is to simply not log in. So ublock+sponsorblock it is.
I recently signed up for the free trial of Kagi [kagi.com], the subscription-based search engine. It was an astonishing and stark reminder for how good something can be when you pay for the product instead of being the product.
Not only does the search engine work well -- better than Google IMO -- but you can turn features on or off, modify your personalized search rankings for sites, hide or pin domains, is very fast, etc. All this as Google removes the ability to customize, even how many results appear on a page.
Reading between the lines (Score:5, Insightful)
No one's buying our premium subscription because the price is an abomination so we've got to come up with a cheaper plan.
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This.
There are certain user made videos I watch on big screen TV. In theory, I can get ad blocking on the device that displays to the screen but it's a huge pita and I'm too fucking lazy to go through that much bullshit. I'm also too cheap to pay $14 a month to avoid a few 5 second ads per day. But I would consider it if the price was significantly lower and there were no dumb gotchas.
This is mostly for military history videos, btw. I like watching tactical replays with red and blue X's and arrows for a
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No one's buying our premium subscription because the price is an abomination so we've got to come up with a cheaper plan.
Not only that, but their plan last year to overwhelm ad-block developers like uBlock with daily changes to their anti-adblock code failed. Instead of crushing their spirit, people seemed to rally around the uBlock team. If uBlock would accept donations, I imagine they would have seen massive influx last year from disgruntled YouTube users alone.
I'm always willing to strongly consider paying for something I like, but I completely reject advertising as a means to do that. I pay to support a couple of news
Funny thing... (Score:2)
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Found the Alphabet employee!
Ads? What ads? (Score:2)
This tier already ezisted (Score:1)
What, YouTube has ads? (Score:2)
What, YouTube has ads? (looks over at uBlock Origin icon in the Firefox address bar...)
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YouTube ad blocker works also (Score:2)
Youtube is essentially unusable (Score:2)
I have a few 3 hour long YT music links saved and trying to listen to them has become a disgrace. You might get through one, maybe two songs, before an ad tries to kick in (blocking only helps so much).
About the only thing I can listen to uninterrupted at this point are individual songs, but having to change them every three minutes is a pain.
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Meanwhile Content Creators Get Paid Squat (Score:2)
Ad-paid version of YouTube? (Score:2)
Ad-filled version of YouTube?
Wait, I get that already though...