Better yet with LibreTube you can remove shorts and download 1080p or higher

Currently I‘m sharing a premium family subscription with as many users as Google allows which is like 6€ for each user.

If Google ever cracks down on sharing or this gets much more expensive (because even 6€ is too much IMO) we’re probably just gonna cancel the subscription altogether.

They did crack down on my family. They realized we were all at different IPs and cut us off.

That sucks. For us it’s been working great for a few years already but we’re also all based in the same city, usually share a lot with each other, often meet (and log into the same wifi) and possibly most importantly, we’re based in the EU where tech companies are usually less anti-consumer as they’re more worried about fines.

Same, we were sharing with my father-in-law who lives like 10min from here, and he was cut off.

Home server with your own proxy, give your friends access

I think it’s country Dependant.

I have my sub shared across a couple different families in 4 different houses, in 2 different states. If they crack down, I’m dropping my subscription.

Do people really pay for this?

Lots. That's why the price is going up.

HAHA great point!

I pay for YouTube Music and premium gets thrown in for free. Why? It’s mostly momentum.

I used Groove back when that was a thing, and when it folded I could migrate my playlists to YouTube so it was easy and than $10 a month. Now it’s $30 but it’s still like buying a cd a month. I am slowly de-googling and some month will stop using the service. It just hasn’t been a top priority.

Ah so they bundle it in if you want it/use it that jives as they can bolster the “numbers” for a service no one is seeking out.

Now it’s $30 but it’s still like buying a cd a month.

it’s about twice as much as a mainstream cd at a brick-and-mortar or a random sampling of physical disc offerings at bandcamp.

But I don’t want random bandcamp samplings. I mean I like new music and go to a lot of Indy shows, but I want the ability to hear a song I like and then do a deep listen to the artist without committing to CDs or a trip to the library if it’s available.

If you did this, you’d have like 20 CD’s by the end of the year (way more id you can find used ones) that you completely own and no one can pull the license for later.

Ripping them is easy and allows you to play them anywhere, even without internet.

While true, I don’t have to do any work at all right now to listen to as much music as I want and new music is available immediately. I also don’t have to setup something to be able to stream music remotely so that I don’t have to store all of it on my space limited device.

I don’t disagree with you. But I have a lot of CDs already :) The rationale for me is that it’s all available. I watched a Billy Joel documentary recently (I know 🙄) but it made do a listen through his discography. I’m glad I didn’t buy those. It turns out I already knew the songs I liked and discovered 0 enjoyable deep cuts. But even at $15 a disc that would have been a $200 play through. And yes I’m aware of the high seas and the library.

I can stream more than 20cds worth from a catalog far more expansive than anything I could dream to store. It’s simply worth the money for my usage. Moreover, I don’t want to store anything locally, physically or otherwise. I’m ok with the risk of them pulling licensing, because after over a decade and a half of usage it’s been an issue thats come up fewer than 5 times, and each time there was an alternative track/release available (i.e. part of a newer album or rerecorded).

20 cds that don’t exist that I can’t buy and the artists don’t make. Would require me to lug around a cd binder again and jury rig a CD player in my car. Install a CD player in my pc. Etc.

CDs are a fucking dog shir medium anyways prone to getting fucked up and broke and scratched.

The correct fix it actual fucking digital files with no drm. If you have to go back to physical media as your argument then get a fucking idiot. The only reason to get physical media is because you personally enjoy it. But objectively it’s a fucking absolute fucking nightmare to deal with and a pain in the ass to use.

I make a list of things to learn. Get a 30 day trial and download every single video related, then cancel.

I am on email #8 doing this.

Only an email address? I have have no shit maybe 50 email addy’s for reddit for all my bans. I collect bans like its my job on that shit site.

They are getting crafty, I figured out the latest tracking and a lazy work around. Next will be a VM, I know that will make it easier.

i love you for doing this

Its an honest living trolling the shit out of that site. I only log on to fuck with them. Otherwise I’m logged out burning up their bandwidth w/ ad blockers.

NO REVENUE FOR YOU!

Hey at least you make their metrics look better. Look at all the new sign ups and activity!

Wait until you hear about Libretube, pipepipe, newpipe or any other Youtube OS alternatives out there

I have to ask, how are you getting around Google’s identity verification system? The last couple times I tried to make a fake Google account, it’s wanted an actual phone number. Not a virtual number, an actual phone number. So I’m curious what you are doing.

I am not creating new accounts, just reusing ones I have had for years created before all these phone verification bullshit.

darn, okay, well thanks for the response lol

Yes. But mostly because I know that my view pays the creators I watch orders of magnitude more that an ad based view

Being ad free is just a bonus I don’t really notice because I have ad blockers anyway

Fair point, never considered the creator revenue. My regular channels I’m part of their Patreon, but they are channels I learn from, makers.

That’s just an additional thing for me. I spend around 100 bucks a month on patreon, but it’s just not possible to do that with all channels I watch

Oh, and nebula of course

I'd rather give to creators directly than give Google a cut.

I just do both

Yes. I’m lazy and watch a lot of YouTube. I cannot deal with ads.

That said, I have prime video through Amazon prime and it asks for, like, $4 per month to skip ads. I stopped watching prime video because of this.

And they wonder why torrents just won’t go away…

IPTV too.

i just use ublock origin for youtube ads, they havnt done anything to stop the adblockers yet.

I don’t watch in browser mostly. Else I would do this too.

Plenty. I don’t imagine ads cover the huge cost of hosting video in this day and age, especially with all the adblockers running around ( saw an ad revenue number in a study a while ago, google supposedly makes between 100s-10000s dollars per person, depending on their “value” ).

I for one am grateful to all the paying subscribers - it means google will more readily tolerate my shiny freeloading adblocking ass.

I have kids and parents who watch a lot of YouTube and I don’t want them watching ads, nor do I want to deal with helping them avoid ads in more creative ways. And the (per-person) price of a family plan isn’t as bad as an individual plan.

paying to not watch ads, means you pay more and more to watch ads. the problem with ads, is people are paying to not watch them which enforced charging more.

it’s a cycle of abuse and you have Stockholm syndrome as a result. break free…

in theory: that’s correct

in practice: I’m not picking this battle (for now, at least)

I understand the whole thing. just be happy

I use YouTube Music, and get Premium with it. Other people pay for Spotify, and don’t. Plus they also have to actually use Spotify instead, which is like a double negative.

YT has made the non subscriber experience for music so bad I wouldn’t consider it. Minimize the browser to check msgs and music stops, so dang annoying.

this… it’s a horrid experience without paying so why the hell would I ever pay… that and I know the price goes up with features being removed.

I’ll continue to subscribe to nothing

I used to have YouTube Premium.

The main reason for paying for it was that I don’t like having to sit through ads. A nice benefit of Premium over ad-blockers was that a part of the revenue from YouTube premium goes to creators in lieu of advertising revenue. YouTube gets money for running the service, the creators get money for making videos, and I don’t have to watch ads.

I stopped my Premium subscription not because it was getting too expensive, but because YouTube is an American company. Ever since Trump got elected for a second time I have been progressively working on cutting out products and services by American tech giants from my life, and YouTube Premium was a very easy one to cut out.

These days I just use an ad-blocker. If the creators want revenue from my view, they can upload to a platform that isn’t YouTube.

I do. Years ago it was just google family stuff. I share it with my parents and wife and sisters. We have a decent library of shared movies(we don’t buy those anymore) and we all use YouTube music. Ad free YouTube is a perk to it. If we cancel, we all lose it and I’m sure Google would not let us be a family scattered around the country.

Splitting the cost makes it worthwhile, we watch a good amount of YouTube and we enjoy our kids can also watch stuff on the tv ad free.

If you’re going to be paying for a music streaming service, you may as well go for YT premium as you get other things for barely any extra cost. Otherwise I don’t see the value.

I’m in the process of going local and replacing YT music though.

I pay 24 bucks a month for the family plan, as it’s my most used platform.

I get youtube music and no ads on YouTube, while sharing the benefits with 5 other family members. so, about 4 bucks I’m paying a month per person. I’m okay with the price

I do. The benefits are worth it to me. It is my main source of video consumption.

Ads removed on iOS without having to do work around is great. Not throttling me for using an ad blocker on desktop is also nice. Contributions to content creators I watch. Access to YouTube music which I use in my car.

For me it’s worth.

uBlock Lite is now available as an extension for Safari. I’m not sure what the Lite is about and saw other people complain about it, but for the past month Youtube on iOS has been a lovely experience for me.

That requires using YouTube through the browser. I use the YouTube app. It’s a different dynamic.

Check out “Unwatched for YouTube” on iOS. It’s a bit janky, but it works. Certainly better than paying for premium.

I stopped paying however many years ago it was that they killed Play Music. YouTube Premium was just a benefit to a music service I felt was worth the money. Once they sucked all the humanity and soul out of Play Music and pushed YouTube Music on everyone, I bounced. Been using NewPipe on mobile, TubeArchivist and Jellyfin at home for videos I want to retain and watch on my TV or whatever.

I accept that if I block adverts in add supported content that’s a problem. The creators get a cut of the money (way more than ads get them!) and accept most goes to Google because Youtube is hella expensive to run.

… if it gets ridiculously expensive then I will find somewhere else. I keep meaning to try Nebula…

I rarely use YouTube. Maybe twice a year using a separate android app so no ads or other shit. So for me this total obsession with YT is beyond me. What on earth do you watch everyday?

apparently yes, so they dont see ADS.

I really wish PeerTube would take off, or any other alternative.

So they, too, can enshittify your whole experience? Or are they somehow immune from capitalism??

Ah, it’s federated. Makes sense.

It’s a federated network of open source servers, anybody can host it. So, I think we are pretty safe. For now.

a certain instance can, but that won’t affect the network as a whole that much. you hop over to another instance and done. the developers also could, but it’s open source, it can be forked by dedicated server operators. It’s also developed by a nonprofit, so there’s not abig risk, and thry have a good track record.

I wish PeerTube worked. For a while I tried just leaving in running on the theory that it might help out, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Not sure if I’m doing it wrong?

What did you want it to do?

Did you set up a node? Did you promote it & grow a user base? Federate?

I wanted it to not be dog slow, because every one I tried spent all its time buffering. I’m not really sure how the architecture of it works but it seemed to suggest some kind of p2p thing so thought that leaving the window open might seed it? But either it didn’t or just nobody was interested.

Deleted by author

all its time buffering.

Could be a zillion reasons for this. Need an actual instance to debug

you are not seeding by just leaving the window open on any peertube page. you are only seeding the specific video you have opened, if you have opened one, and probably not the complete video just the last segments you still have cached. this p2p sharing is mostly for when a certain video gets popular, to help with peek load, and for live streams. if the video was buffering for a long time it’s probably because the server did not have enough upload bandwidth, and no other viewer had the video segments.

there is another load balancing system that peertube supports, they can clone videos fromneach other and help serving them: docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#p…

don’t know why you got downvoted, this is 100% truth

lol half the comments on lemmy have single downvotes. I don’t know what’s happening but I don’t worry about it

It’s the truth but it also is fantastic proof why the entire concept is doa. The fact this needs explaining at all or is even a problem. Means it’s a non viable system.

Even technical users aren’t going to want to have to fiddle and tinker and read documentation for base entertainment.

It either works or it’s worthless. That’s the bar you have to pass for basic entertainment.

Because one person made some bad guesses that they need to do something special, it’s worthless?

you follow a link, the video plays

tilvids.com/w/2VgZ8Tw2jcBj19cn4f8RKW

you don’t need to know more than that, you don’t need to fiddle.

If it takes off, people will setup more servers and probably setup caching for a fee.

It never buffers for me, but I do have a full gig and super low latency

I’m running a private, unfederated node; it works. I watch TILVIDS whenever I can find something on there.

This is not an “if you build it, they will come” scenario,

There’s no monetization, so there are almost no content creators.

Creators generally don’t do it for free.

Good creators rely on income from the videos to produce higher-quality videos

Youtube: surfaces creators’ videos pays creators hosts the videos handles CDN

Peertube: The creator pays to host the video (largely against their ISP’s wishes) There’s no surfacing There’s no payments If you’re lucky peertube doesn’t need CDN.

Even if they go all patreon, they’re still not getting that extra cash, surfacing, and free hosting that youtube does.

We need some kind of FOSS Patreon and to have Peertube do some kind of partner/recommendation engine.

I’m not shilling for LMG, but something like Floatplane would make sense. You pay per creator for their extra content and ad free viewing and the cut goes in favor to the creator. Of course Floatplane has to also make money. They’re not in it to serve you ads or use your data to make money. If that took off I could easily see people paying 3-5 creators monthly to watch their videos ad free with extras.

Nebula has more and is cheaper. I had some interest in Floatplane. Last time I looked at it, Youtube was cheaper for my use case and them not listing creators up front is bad news.

I’d rather money not be involved. There’s plenty of people willing to release good content regardless. I’d actually say YouTubes monetization is what made it shitty

There’s plenty of people willing to release good content regardless.

But there really aren’t. They would be all over the free platforms that have existed for years. But Peertube is nearly bereft of quality content, there are maybe a dozen regular creators that make anything interesting enough to 50% of the population to watch.

No money means no videos. That’s just facts, you can bitch moan and cry if you want. But till money gets involved your not going to see anything actually meaningfully grow.

Video production is just too costly to produce even on a hobbyists level. Either in time or money.

Poxlox “bitch and moan and cry” huh? Yeah that’s why it worked for youtube for 7 years from 2005 until 2012 when they openly monetized. Shut the fuck up.

Same, dude. The power users will assume everyone has the time to assemble/learn the skill of setting it up. That being said, it’s on my list of things to figure out one day!

yeah, one of the responses lower down made me realize why PeerTube is unlikely to be a success any time soon - it’s not something the typical YouTube user has to deal with.

You can’t really monetize PeerTube though, so you’re never going to get full time creators there. Media distribution has always been a choke point. Always will be. Short of a non-profit foundation and a unionized creators guild joining forces to operate a decentralized subscription video platform, you’re never going to have a real alternative. I mean… there’s Nebula which is basically that, but who goes to Nebula, it’s full of lefties and educators and theatre people.

You can’t really monetize PeerTube

Lots of channels have a link to their Patreon or a tip jar; lots do live reads.

Sure, but then you’re still bringing a for-profit company into the mix. PeerTube is your loss-leader and Patreon is your main platform.

Some channels use Ghost instead of Patreon, including one of my favorites Anders Puck

I’m with GreenBeard on this and was always saying that monetization is the biggest peertube problem. Patreon and such are not an ideal option, subscription is IMO. A subscription that would be distributed through authors fairly, but that’s not an easy task I suppose.

Like I said, Nebula does it and it’s pretty good. Hard to get on as a creator unless you have a proven follower base elsewhere though. They’re still mainly using YouTube as a farm league.

Might be interesting to see Nebula set up a fund for PeerTube creators and start using that as a farm league, but I don’t know that they have the subscription revenue for that yet.

liberapay can do that already. but apparently they don’t have the necessary API for integration: github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1586#issuec…

You can monetize PT with Patreon, but you can monetize YT with Patreon and get paid twice.

That’s why YT has 5 9’s of the creators.

They could still get sponsors and have “ads” during the stream. Though most already do that in addition to YouTube monetization.

Even though it’s no longer tractable for the casual hobbyist (me) to run a node, Invidious is still usable thanks to absolutely heroic effort by the ~4 organizations still willing and able to invest the crazy infrastructure needed to prevent GOOG from blocking them.

https://docs.invidious.io/instances/

I think PeerTube should be for hobby purposes. I mean, here’s where I am coming from. I am from a period of the internet, where you were not meant to be e-famous. I still at times, believe this. Look at what happened when the idea of the tiniest bit of fame and success people allow to get to their heads when they realize that they can just make videos and profit off of them.

Nebula.tv has been pretty good. I’m considering the lifetime subscription.

There’s a lifetime subscription? Maybe I should be considering that too

I tried to use it a few times but it’s truly god awful. Both performance-wise and in terms of discoverability.

Nebula is pretty legit but you won’t be able to find everything you want to watch there.

Peertube while a neat idea might be the single biggest fucking joke I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s so beyond a pipe dream that it wraps around into absurdity.

To be perfectly frank a lot for the open source/federated stuff is basically a comically unuseable joke.

A handful manage to get barely half way useable like lemmy because it basically just a repost dumping ground from the big social medias. Or a more modern version of a old internet format.

But it’s still at best half useable. That still makes it more useable then what a lot of the corpo alternatives are. But when your only saving grace is that the other options are worse by virtue of being shit.

It doesn’t make you actually good. It just makes you less worse.

Newpipe user for many years. Started to donate some small amount on a regular base. Totally worth it, still way cheaper than YT Premium and money doesn’t go to big tech.

PipePipe is a fork of Newpipe that has more features (such as SponsorBlock) and gets fixes faster whenever YouTube changes something.

It’s only a matter of time before Invidious and Materialious stop working…fuck…

… and people keep subscribing. Good argument for saying it is an addiction

Or people like music and video streaming and don’t like ads, and they consider the price acceptable.

Damn I just use Revanced for both. Took about 5 minutes to get it all set up and working. No ads, sponsorblock, and I get all the premium features, too.

Cool! I’m glad that works for you. My usual use case is on phone or TV apps, so I’m limited.

Kind of unrelated but youtube adds new free movies all the time. Sometimes over 100 per day…other days 15. This site shows all newly added movies:

www.justwatch.com/us/provider/…/movies

And premium dorks deserve every single cent of it.

/shrug

They raised my price here in the US a few years ago. $27 for the six adults on our family plan. Probably four who actually use it. Totally worth the value for my situation.

You do you, though, I genuinely could not possibly care less whether someone else does or does not pay for YouTube premium. It’s weird that you do.

People paying for premium really just encourages Youtube to be even more greedy. The only way I’m paying for content on Youtube is donating money to creators directly because the platform is robbing them. I care about that and if you think that’s weird then I really don’t care.

It’s hilariously sad to me how many rubes easy marks people are still paying Google for the pRivIlEge to not have their eyes and brains assaulted by ads.

Either use a front-end without ads or stop using it, your continued excuses for why you NEED to give daddy google money fall on deaf ears.

“but it’s such a value!” no it isn’t, you’re just gullible and naive. Or complicit. Which is worse.

Edit: forgot the word “not”

It’s hilariously sad to me how many rubes easy marks people are still paying Google for the pRivIlEge to have their eyes and brains assaulted by ads.

What ads? If you mean normal YouTube ads, no, Premium removes those. If you mean sponsor sections of video, it’s no SponsorBlock but now if you start skipping ahead during those sections of a video you can click a button that jumps you to the end of the ad. This is a Premium feature.

Edit: Oh, I forgot they added a “Premium lite.” I can understand why that might appeal to a subset of users, but that’s definitely not for me.

Either use a front-end without ads

Easy enough on PC, but my usual use case is the video playing on my iPhone, so…no.

or stop using it

Why? It’s a service I enjoy and find valuable to me.

“but it’s such a value!” no it isn’t

I’m pretty happy with the value I get for premium. I watch/listen to a shitload of educational content and political commentary on YouTube. It also includes YouTube Music so I have my music streaming covered there, too. I probably get more value-per-dollar out of my premium subscription than my Nebula subscription (which is also fantastic, by the way).

you’re just gullible and naive.

Yeah, how dare I spend my money on something useful to me and in the process help support the people who make the shit I watch. (Though admittedly, while premium views are worth far more than ad views and literally infinitely more than ad-blocked views to channel creators, that isn’t the bulk of their revenue, which comes instead from sponsor deals and Patreon/channel member subscriptions.)

Or complicit. Which is worse.

Complicit in what?

You do you, my friend, but don’t act like you’re better than others because you disagree with how they consume content compared to you.

Complicit with google’s shitty business practices, their tacit support of genocide, take your pick. If you’re cool giving your money to them, thats on you.

My days of not giving YouTube money have certainly come to a middle

My whole family uses my google account with a grandfathered $7.99 price from the GPM days lol. I’m fairly certain they lose money on us.

no, they aren’t losing anything.

they don’t take in as much

there is a huge different.

They make up what you think is a loss by harvesting your data.

Re vanced! For the win!

Beware having dislike button re-enabled. It’ll fuck up playback

Oh good too know. Recently, I uninstalled and reinstalled because it was locking up and saying playback issues.

Aren’t we on morphe now?

I can’t argue with that

As much as I hate this, yt premium is probably one of my most used services of anything streaming. I suck at lot of bytes down from them so I guess at least I might be getting what I pay for?

The trick is to use family plan. I and bunch of friends made one, each pays around 4€.

EDIT: Just make sure you actually live in the same city.

This is my setup, and we are spread across 4 houses in 2 states. Never been an issue.

Nor will it, to be honest. I don’t see Google shooting themselves in the foot like that.

Netflix did something similar with the password crackdown a few years ago and while it worked out in their favor, I don’t foresee YouTube having the same results. YouTube isn’t really providing much of a service aside from removing ads, so chances are if they crack down on that, it’s not going to equate to people in other households buying a membership to continue it. It’s just going to be less income/revenue. YouTube would need to bet on at least two of the people running family plans are going to convert over to a YouTube premium account. Which I don’t think is a safe bet for the prime canadates that went out of their way to set up the family plan, because if they were going to do that they would have done it in the first plac

For sure. I’ve already contemplated switching to a different streaming service for music, but while I have YT premium I’ll keep using YT music, although they keep making that interface worse and worse. My YT consumption will just plummet to only a couple of channels, and I’ll just work through my backlog of the terabytes of media I have on my Plex server. Hell, might even go outside and see what that’s all about, but I don’t want to rush into anything.

I attempted this because it is a good deal, but unfortunately the rest of my household didn’t care that they got ads, and my mom was too much of a penny-pincher to get anyone in her household to want to do it.

Sure but it’s the opportunism and greed that grates. They pay literally zero for the overwhelming majority of their content, and very little for the rest.

If you Writer-Produce-Star in a TV show that gets 2 million viewers on NBC or ABC, you’re well into the five figures per episode in individual take-home pay, maybe even six. YouTube on the other hand you might just about hit $10,000 for 2M views depending on niche, but they cover zero of your expenses and take none of the up-front risk. If you’ve got more than one person working on making that show, or you had any expenses attached to it, you’re pretty much screwed.

Google could VERY easily keep turning a profit on the old price, but shareholders demand infinite unending growth.

Hey I didn’t say I like this, just trying to pull a lemon out of the lemonade but it’s more like a mud ball out of a swamp.

getting what I pay for

GOOG and all its affiliated advertisers – essentially, every corporation on this planet – now knows not only all your browsing and watching habits, but also that you are a likely good return on investment for more mining, more fine-grained targeting, more scrutiny.

and also to train AI scraping the comments, and the videos themselves.

I paid for premium until I started getting ads out of nowhere. YouTube changed their policy to include ads in my previously ad-free package.

I cancelled and started using smartTube f-droid. It has sponsor block integrated. Auto-skips all ads, not just the ones injected by YouTube.

I had been paying for YouTube Premium for about six years because I fell for the trap when I bought my S9 at launch. (in fairness, I do spend an extreme amount of time a year watching YouTube so at the time it did make cost-effective sense) They gave two years of YouTube premium as a benefit of getting it then I never cancelled. I finally canceled about five or six months ago because the price I had been paying originally was close to $10 a month. I had over the years jumped up to almost 18 a month and a little while I had survived ongoing on a student discount. But when the student discount plan jumped to almost $12 a month, I said screw this, cancelled and installed grayjay and tizentube/tizentube cobalt.

Any reason I should go for grayjay instead of Morphe? In context of youtube since I don’t use any other video streaming platform that Grayjay offers.

I have never used morphe so I couldn’t tell you, but I like how grayjay let’s me make playlists and download offline across multiple platforms while still allowing sign in, plus, I know a lot of people won’t like this, but I do like the ability that it still allows to give me personalized results, which is something that I noticed the other YouTube front ends don’t do without workarounds. it also gives me those personalized results across all platforms.

If I’m understanding you, Google got ~ $500 out of you over the course of 4-ish years? Say it ain’t so!

PEOPLE! Install Firefox, Waterfox, any *fox and install ublock origin on your mobile devices RIGHT NOW!! Is there some feature that you can’t use in a mobile browser that these apps do and I’m just too old to understand?

I finally replaced it but until several months ago I was watching a lot of YouTube on a ~2018 Amazon Kindle tablet… one of the reasons I replaced it was because YouTube on Firefox chugged on that thing near the end. NewPipe managed to get like six more months of semi-acceptable use out of it (I was still sick of the ads and preinstalled app-ads) until I found a good deal on a used Pixel tablet locally. A dedicated app is less bloated than the web interface, but I guess this is more of an argument for NewPipe and other third party frontends than Google’s still bloated app.

Mostly unrelated, but anyone got suggestions for repurposing an old Kindle fire? Might be interesting to see how much ADB can debloat it and maybe turn it into a retro emulation device since I don’t need a digital photo frame.

To me it was worth the 10-12$ a month for the ease of access and not needing to find alternative frontends for youtube, especially with smart tv’s. It’s just the company started getting too greedy for their own good and I felt it wasn’t worth the value it was providing, which was ultimately why I cancelled. When it hit 13 a month I looked into student discounts and found it it, but then when it moved to almost 12 again with student discount I thought “man this isn’t going to get cheaper” and just cancelled like I mentioned.

“YouTube said the hike will “allow us to continue to improve Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube.”

Bullshit, bullshit and more bullshit. They say that every single time they raise the prices. It’s the same dogshit excuse.

Yeah what a fucking joke. The one and only feature they’re selling (especially since they bailed on original content like 2 years after they started) is ad-free viewing. You need a price hike every 18 months to ensure the “don’t show this guy ads” line in my profile config stays set to True? Fuck off.

Honestly, the biggest selling point for me, and pretty much the entire reason I do have premium, is that they pay the creators you watch way more than a regular view. I guess the alternative would be to sign up to their patreons for a dollar.

According to this page:

Creators earn money from these subscriptions through a dedicated pool of revenue for each subscription type: 30% of the net subscription revenue for Premium and 60% for Premium Lite. This allocation factors in the costs of operating and promoting the service, including amounts we pay to music partners. This pool is distributed to creators based on member watch time and views, and from that distribution creators receive revenue share: 55% for long-form videos and 45% for Shorts.

TLDR: YouTube premium pays out to each content creator about A$0.23 per month. Regular ad watching gives A$0.09 per month.

Current price of premium is A$16.99 a month in Australia. 30% of $16.99 totals $5.10 monthly pool distributed across every content creator you watch. 70% or $11.90 of your monthly fee goes straight to YouTube and royalties to maintain their music platform you may or may not use. The math gets really speculative here, but let’s say you watch 20 different content creators, half of them make long form videos like Reject Convenience, half of them make shorts. You watch an even mix of 10 minute videos and shorts. Each long form content creator will receive ($5.10 • 0.55) / 10 = $0.28. Each shorts creator will receive ($5.10 • 0.45) / 10 = $0.23. Per month. It’s a pittance really. In comparison, an ad view gives about $0.03 per view, which if you watched 3 videos from each creator, would total $0.09. So premium gives more, but it’s like 14¢ per month more per person. I can’t be bothered converting all these numbers to USD, sorry. You can roughly calculate it for your own situation using this formula: C = (P • 0.3 • F) / N Where * C is Content Creator Payout (each) * P is price of YouTube premium for you * F is form of content. 0.55 for long form, 0.45 for shorts * N is how many content creators in the same group of F you watch per month

thats why most of them supplement thier income with brand deals, promotions, , collabs,etc and patreon.

It’s math like this that convinces me that you can contribute more to the ecosystem by paying even a single dollar to a creator’s Patreon (even when Patreon takes 30% off the top) and watching w/ adblock than paying a monthly subscription to YT.

I think you’re right. Even with the same math (20 subscriptions), you’re paying only $3 more per month as a consumer. Meanwhile, each actual creator gets significantly more income per month, even after the Patreon cut: $0.70, or 304% more. Also they’re not forced to create 3 videos per month just to eat

Honestly, after sitting down and doing the math, I’m a bit disheartened. I thought I was supporting my favourite creators more with YouTube premium, but 70% goes towards subsidising the music app I don’t even use, which is insane to me. Really it should be called “YouTube music (plus ad free)” or something

Funny you mention that. It occurred to me that the handful of things that would really make me sad to lose if I just bailed on YouTube were all things I could indeed support on Patreon. So now I’m doing that haha. I don’t think my current Patreon load costs me anything more than I used to pay for Premium.

well, doubling the minimum watches to pay people blocking ad blockers harder and halfing the rates at which they’re getting paid does fit the text they gave

They allegedly give 55% to he creators and pocket the rest… And this is AFTER paying creators fractions of a cent per view and shoving expensive ads down the huge majority of their visitors throats.

They are a massively shitty company. The amount of money they steal from content creators is WILD.

content creators mostly cant live off it, they have promotions and brand deals that is seperate from youtube. also patreon accounts, or thier own website.

Despite what their marketing says the service gets worse every time the price goes up. The word enshitification is overused and often misused but not where YouTube is concerned.

Paid for Premium for ten years. Then, moved to a family plan since my brother offered and my wife had moved in with me; it saved me a little money and got her Premium. Then they did the thing they’re all doing where they said “you don’t live in the same house so you’re not a family” and I said, “there’s no way in fucking hell this household is paying $25+ for fucking YouTube, a thing we watch too much of anyway because it’s algorithmically mind-fucking us everyday,” and then we just let it lapse. We’ve got SmarTube on the Android TV for the occasional ad-free video, and it’s clunky enough that we don’t get sucked in, and I’ve got uBlockOrigin on my browser because obviously, and they’ve gone from getting some money out of me to never getting a penny again.

And the fucked up thing is that’s not across the board, for example I’ve been using family premium since it basically came out and my users are located all over the place. Two of which have never even been to my place, and live 4-6 hours away.

It’s shitty, because I wish everyone could have the experience I have had with it.

Smarttubenext on nvidia shield

Revanced youtube on android phones

Ublockorigin on browsers

No more ads.

Also grayjay, new pipe on android

vacuum tube for smart TV.

There is so many project to just get rid of YouTube’s ads

Unwatched for YouTube on Apple devices.

I’ve never had revanced last more than a week. Bad luck i suspect. Newpipe->greyjay->brave

Three seperate active dev teams fighting off the bastards.

I don’t want to use brave, but it’s never been down for me, so it’s weapon of last resort.

I am a bit worried that, with Google’s upcoming changes, they’ll be a walled garden within a year.

I Just run YouTube via my browser with adblock instead of trying to fiddle with an app. And i have another extension so videos doesn’t stop playing when i turn off my screen.

no wrong answers

This is the way. I don’t give the apps any space on my devices. Everything is through my browser with extensions.

Ublock on firefox mobile seems to work well for youtube, never had that break

Does it work with the screen off, or is there another mobile plugin that supports that?

What is wrong with brave?

Brave is just Google but one step removed and a shitty pr team. Brave has no more power to stop Google then you or me. The only upside to brave is you get to enjoy features a little bit longer because brave doesn’t update to new versions that remove them.

Eventually they have to give in just like every other chrome browser. Because brave isn’t an actual web browser. It’s just a chrome skin with a plugin package.

This is a bit of an overstatement. Brave has competent software developers - they created their Rust-based content blocker, and kept it as open-source. It’s one of the most powerful blocking mechanisms, often working in places where even the rightfully praised uBlock Origin doesn’t (good examples are in YouTube itself last year when they’ve made a big attempt to stop adblocking by changing the underlying mechanism of how ads are being served in videos).

They were perfectly capable of developing advanced software before AI coding agents were a thing. They’re skilled and delivering.

and ProTube on IOS devices

I was not aware protube was available again. I used to use that app 10+ years ago but Google sued them.

Well i still pay for it for two reasons- no ads and music. I use YouTube music as the music service since it has more artista from my country as for example spotify. And ads free since I and my family love watching each specific videos and are subscribed to different creators. I could switch to Spotify for music but then getting all devices, mostly our tv with chrome cast a solid app that somehow blocks ads without any issues… I would do that. And what about the iOS devices? I don’t want alternative stores on my iOS infected devices just to get an alternative app running. Then again, I don’t want to have pihole being my single point of failure on the complete home network. But the pi hole thing is completely different story (and out if scope).

You might want to check out Metrolist. It’s working well for me.

Metrolist will have one limitation. I don’t think Google allows for High quality music streaming (which I think is 256 kbps on their part) on free accounts, so it would be impossible for the app to bypass that.

Though if someone has YouTube Premium, one can as of now, use yt-dlp to download songs from YT Music in High Quality via --export-cookies flag.

Not for me it’s not!

It will never be enough. Line must go up.

I sometimes feel bad for bypassing all this, then I see the in video sponsors they all have. So now I run Sponsorblock…

tbf, their sponsors don’t know they’re being skipped.

And they don’t pay for you skipping them, which is a win for advertisers, but a loss for Google.

I assume smeeg was talking about inline sponsors not associated with google who don’t get metrics if what you saw/skipped

I used to pay for this. Started a long time ago, when YouTube’s content was… well, better. But now they’re pushing EVERYTHING towards “Shorts” and it’s pure garbage. Not only does it NOT curate for the people watching it, like how many times do I have to say “not intereste”, “don’t show me this channel anymore,” or just fucking report channels for their “algorithm” to get a clue. AI being spammed left and right, and they claim they can’t do shit about it, meanwhile, you whistle 3 seconds of a Nintendo song and your channel already has a strike against it.

The amount of content farms that’s just pulling crap from reddit, putting dumb pointless videos behind it, while AI reads a made-up story. The amount of content where it’s just some fucker who’s just staring at the screen like a creepy fucker, meanwhile something from the MCU plays in the background… they’re adding nothing. Or the pre-recorded “masked” heads (like Spider-Man, Iron Man, etc.) randomly gesturing at… fuck all.

People used to make things. YouTube had content. Not saying it was all great. Since TikTok got big, I feel like YT chasing after them things started to go downhill. And then “AI” comes out and the quality just fucking tanks.

I don’t pay for YT Premium anymore. PiHole + AdBlock is used everywhere now. And if a YouTuber promotes anything, literally, fuck that product/company as well. Fucking scorch earth on all those fucking advertisers and the algorithm.

Dang, I keep forgetting that suckers still pay for this…

Just gonna drop this off here:

https://morphe.software/

Keep paying guys, someones gotta do it. Thank you for your service. Keeps YouTube available for the rest of us.

One day there will be only 10 people left paying 1million dollar a month

In my country, it’s $1.5. So I am paying so that you guys can get videos for free.

Here it’s appearently $17 81 now… Not exactly value!

all the people in the reddit keep repeating, pay for prenium to avoid ads went quiet now.

Consider these open-source front-ends:

• FreeTube (Desktop)
• FreeTube (Mobile)
• LibreTube (Mobile)

No ads, no tracking, very customizable. You can import subscriptions, but signing in isn’t supported except in FreeTube Mobile. Also these apps sometimes don’t work for a few days whenever YT changes its back-end.

Thank you! I have ad block for PC but am forced to use mobile for awhile and was dreading the incessant ads on mobile.

I guess it’s not too great of a coincidence though; YouTube is always making the platform worse, so these recommendations are flying around pretty often.

If you’re on iOS, check out Orion browser—it can install firefox extensions, including ublock. I’m pretty sure there are ways to get this done on Android, too, but I’m not familiar with them. I haven’t seen an ad on youtube in years, on desktop or mobile.

Newpipe is another option

New pipe says it’s dipping out after the Google changes no?

Lets see what happens

NewPipe is shite compared to Morphe.

At least its fully foss, doesnt requir an account, no microG shit, can downlload(actually download) videos, forks have sponsord block, doesnt take up 1.5GB,

Newpipe and Grayjay are great options!

I use this for Android. github.com/A-EDev/Flow/

Be a pirate

DO WHAT YOU WANT CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE!

I’m free

YARR HARR Fiddle dee dee, being a pirate is alright to be!

Then pay and get tracked

your using the internet you are getting tracked.

Well im pretty much confident it’s not that much for me

if you have an active internet connection your data is being tracked.

Then don’t

Use dockers app as you can. Jellyfin and others are your friends.

Tho, i can understand that’s hard for most of people to setup a server.

github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

YouTube was actually my only subscription. Which I of course, canceled. When it was cheap enough, I didn’t wanna bother. I did invest some effort, but I’m not paying anything anymore.

Morphe.

i have iOs

LOL.

It wasn’t really worth it before, now it’s even less worth it?

Revanced works perfectly fine on Android and on desktop I use an adblocker.

You don’t even need Revanced. Just use Firefox on both.

I like Revanced. I can listen to stuff even while the screen is locked and have sponsor block and other addons if I want. I think half the time I spend on my phone is watching Youtube and it’s heaps better than Firefox with an adblocker on Android.

I have yt premium and still use revanced. Sponsor block is so goated

YouTube morphed

This is the way

Does Adblock work for YouTube?

uBlock on Firefox

So just downloaded revanced should i download all the patches or select through?

Or just do some looking online and work it out from that for what i want?

Read the documentation. Just selected is enough, just make sure you have sponsor block selected. I don’t remember if it is selected by default.

What exactly does revanced do to what programs? The website is no help.

Repackages and patches an older version of the Android ytb app as well as some other apps. The patches do different things for different apps (usually remove ads).

Holy shit $16 / mo?? Did I see that right?? Wow. Just last year my partner and I really considered getting premium cuz we have some YouTubers we’ve been watching for like a decade. But ultimately decided against it cuz it was like $8.99 / mo.

That sub is already alotted to Netflix, for the ads version too. 🫩

We just had news about Bilibili going global, and their reaction is to increase prices even further?

Time to quit, just unregistered

The only way to stop price increase is unsubscribing, Google need to know it’s a loss, not a win.

I stopped paying when they started to openly support Israel. I’m fine with paying a service to maintain itself and Youtube is storing a LOT of high quality video, but giving away millions worth of support to a genocidal state is not something a streaming service’s operating costs should include sooooo fuck ‘em. Ads suck, but I can live with them.

Ads suck, but I can live with them.

I was fully onboard with everything you said until this. It pretty much defeats the point of a boycott to continue using the service in a way that makes them profit.

People pay for YouTube premium?!?!

For me it was debating what music service I wanted to pay for and I decided ad-free YouTube without having to get around anything was a fine bonus. And it was a decent trade to my brother and cousin when I was in their HBO and Netflix families. But I’m not going to say it’s “great” or anything. In fact if they ever cut my brother or cousin from my family plan (we’ve moved around the U.S. since I first got it,) I’m dropping it.

I do for years and I think it’s great value

I get the same thing for free, so it’s actually a terrible value for you.

I don’t mind content creators getting paid for their work. That’s part of the value of paying.

You don’t get that value.

I contribute directly to those who I can, with patreon. I don’t watch advertisements, and I try not to give money to corporations.

Does this also include YouTube music subscriptions?

I have had premium family since it was red or something. It is my last streaming sub if you don’t count nebula which I never use. I still need to use smarttube and Firefox+ublock and various extensions as modern YouTube is a disaster.

I want to send google a message that here is someone prepared to pay money for a decent experience but they don’t give a shit. Its going to be very tough to win me back as a customer when I go which won’t be much longer.

They don’t give a fuck as long as you’re still paying them lol.

The reason I’ll never pay Google a subscription fee is because they still spy on you and make money off your data even if you pay them.

The deal is supposed to be either:

• I get your service for free, you spy on me and sell ads to cover the cost of the service

OR

• I pay for your service, you will NOT show me ads or sell my data

Any service that doesn’t fall into one of those two categories can GTFO.

I would be so happy to drop youtube, which is one of my last subscriptions. A nice bonus would be to get my “smart” TV off the internet. But I feel like everytime androidTV or whatever comes up, I get confused as to whether there is a decent solution. What hardware do people use? My RaspberryPI 3 does not seem sufficient, even though people seem to say otherwise. Is Kodi still fine? What I need is something that just works, I can’t have my TV going down like all my other funny selfhosted business. The wellbeing of my entire household relies on that.

And then the youtube alternatives: There are so many words floating around and I never know what to do. I do have a server and would be able to get into my network via tailscale, so this would not be an issue. Invidious? That would mean I don’t have to deal with the music either 🤔