- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
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I use to care, but then I just use Peertube. Oh but there’s not as much content on Peertube. Put the type of content you like on Peertube make a channel it is free. Another tip is, look for specific types of content, and not specific content creators. and if you happened to find a creator you know or knew, follow them on Peertube!
I have plenty of tech that keep me up to date on Peertube, and it’s a type of platform that will never have ads or go a direction I don’'t want it to as a whole in terms of federation of servers and being an opensource video platform.
Server can surely make some unwelcomed decisions, and I can just change servers easily. Better then Youtube no ads, and your experience does not get throttled.
Peertube is a crazy impressive piece of tech. Just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it needs something to happen to push users over to it (or something like it). YouTube keeps doing stupid things like this, so one day users will be pushed away from it and the creators will have to follow or die.
I realize they charge what people are willing to pay, but can someone explain to me why YouTube costs just a couple USD a month in some countries and almost $20 a month in the US?
Are operating costs cheaper in those countries? Are they taking a loss in those counties? Or are they just price gouging in the US?
If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.
If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.
That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.
In theory the service operating costs could be spread across region differences such that in other areas it was at a loss to build and preserve market share and in richer areas it was making up for that.
But yes, in reality it’s just exploitative “what we think we can get away with” pricing to “maximize shareholder value” (which is largely BS as the vast holders of shares are very small clusters of the population but people with a handful of shares in their 401k think that statement is talking about them).
Some media companies called it piracy even if you’re doing it to get paid access content they aren’t offering in your country 🤷
Thanks. That’s something I hadn’t thought of.
I’m sort of more moderate when it comes to paying Google to access YouTube. I’m happy to pay for products that I use. I want Google and creators to be rewarded for services rendered, but the prices are double what they should be.
I’m one of the people who used the VPN to get Premium at an affordable rate even though I have Ublock and know about other options.
My Premium account did get canceled. I was able to sign back up via another location, but if they push me out again, I would just revert to adblockers.
I suspect other users who signed up with a VPN are like me. We are the few who know how to get around the ads but want to pay, if we can. Just a guess though.
Well they are charging a premium for the service everywhere and more so in certain countries which can afford it but a big part is that in some countries people may only earn a few USD a day so they would not be able to afford it otherwise. I can’t speak on whether or not they are taking a loss in those countries, but i can’t imagine that they have a problem due to existing infrastructure from google all across the world.
I’ve never seen a company SO devoted to get me to not use their service. $2-$3 a month is worth not seeing ads in my mind. They’ve made their website SO user hostile and their prices are just too damned high to justify paying them - I can just go without.
If I could get Youtube Premium for $2-3, I’d probably pay. I don’t use it enough to justify spending $10 or whatever it is these days, so I block ads. If that stops working, I’ll stop watching Youtube.
I would even pay the 11,99€, in fact I did in the past. Youtube’s algorithms made me stop.
Spotify for example caters to my preferences. It took a bit to train it, but the weekly selection is spot on with lots of a variety, and they don’t try to shove pop music or other mainstream stuff into my face.
YouTube tries to suckme into a shit hole of craziness at every turn. It tries to make people dumber.
How did you manage to make Spotify not a steaming pile of garbage?
It was hard work, but a general rule is to like only songs that you could listen every day to, make playlists for everything else.
That’s definitely what I’ve done, but it recommends country daily despite my immense hatred for it.
Blows my mind that to this day, companies don’t realize it’s a service issue. Like it’s straight up regressed. Adobe and Microsoft used to encourage piracy to help their bottom line. Now you have stupid PMs who realize they can get a good performance review by talking about how much money they’ll make/save from doing stuff like this
They realize it’s a service issue, they’re trying to corner the market so that they don’t have to care that it’s a service issue.
YouTube pretty much has that market cornered. It would take a lot of capital to start up a viable competitor, especially one that didn’t resort to ads and had some other kind of monetization scheme to support the sites existence and pay for all the storage servers.
This really is not a service issue. This is not a privacy issue.
YouTube as a service is … actually a great service, it pays creators well, it’s fast, it has decades of content, and it has tons of features.
It’s monetized with ads, you either watch those ads or you pay them. Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.
Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.
The internet’s most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs. So as much as I hate Google, i find nothing wrong with this.
no company would accept that.
Except for a company that understands going after these people won’t benefit them?
Literally read about regional pricing and how important it is. It’s incredibly ignorant to be against regional pricing.
The alternative to regional pricing is people just don’t have access at all.
You’re getting down voted, but you are mostly correct.
I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.
The thing is, Google isn’t dumb. They’ve user tested this strategy and they know it results in higher revenue.
And the enshitification continues…for those that don’t pay
I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.
I do agree but their costs have also skyrocketed because the resolution and frame rate of videos has skyrocketed.
Linus Tech Tips did a video about this … which agree with his conclusions or not, he paints a clear picture about how YouTube is more expensive to run than it used to be https://youtu.be/MDsJJRNXjYI
Google also isn’t in the business of “running things at a loss in hopes of future profit” anymore … so they need YouTube to be profitable. Maybe it’s “too profitable”, maybe they could cut down on the amount of advertising they use … but you’re absolutely right that they do test this stuff and find the threshold between “annoying but profitable” and “annoying but we’re losing users.”
More competition is always good … but Google isn’t stopping competition from showing up, just like Valve isn’t stopping competition from showing up, they’re just providing a better service that creators keep coming back to (because it’s ultimately good for those same creators to get their content out there and monetize it).
You can pay to have less ad, but you’re still also paying with your data. Bet pretty soon it will be pay and have ads, or pay more again. They have a captive market. They can extract and extract.
that’s abuse of regional pricing
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.
Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.
So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers
And right there I’m done with your comment. Regional pricing is incredibly important, without it everyone pays the US or EU price and there is no service provided period.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
Even if true, that’s not what this hoopla is about. It’s about someone from say … the US using a VPN to get Kenyan pricing. As another person said “The internet’s most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs.”
Regional pricing is the only reason people in these countries even stand a chance at access to the service (because ultimately their costs might be a bit lower in these countries but not by much … I would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark). People in other countries abusing those slashed prices threatens the whole system.
This is people in “first world” countries trying to rig the system: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/15hz5ys/found_country_that_works_to_get_youtube_premium/
Someone in Uzbekistan for instance would feel as the average US consumer would if a year of YouTube premium was $829.
would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark
And in the efficient market, that’s how much the service would cost for everyone, because otherwise I could just go to a competitor of YouTube for less, and YouTube would have to lower their pricing to get customers, and so on until no one can lose their prices without losing money.
Unfortunately, efficient markets are just a neoliberal fantasy. In real life, there are network effects - YouTube has people uploading videos to it because it has the most viewers, and it has the most viewers because it has the most videos. It’s practically impossible for anyone to compete with them effectively because of this, and this is why they can put their prices in some regions up to get more profit. The proper solution is for regulators to step in and require things like data portability (e.g. requiring monopolists to publish videos they receive over open standards like ActivityPub), but regulatory capture makes that unlikely. In a just world, this would happen and their pricing would be close to the costs of running the platform.
So the people paying higher regional prices are paying money in a just world they shouldn’t have to pay, while those using VPNs to pay less are paying an amount closer to what it should be in a just world. That makes the VPN users people mitigating Google’s abuse, not abusers.
deleted by creator
Why wouldn’t high income areas be more expensive to serve?
Don’t they have to have local servers all around the world to even allow this instant-like transfer of videos for anyone to watch at anytime?
I actually don’t know the back end stuff so you might be able to explain this part.
Yes, but for companies like Google, the vast majority of systems administration and SRE work is done over the Internet from wherever staff are, not by someone locally (excluding things like physical rack installation or pulling fibre, which is a minority of total effort). And generally the costs of bandwidth and installing hardware is higher in places with a smaller tech industry. For example, when Google on-sells their compute services through GCP (which are likely proportional to costs) they charge about 20% more for an n1-highcpu-2 instance in Mumbai than in Oregon, US.
Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base? I haven’t seen much discussion around how to fairly set prices for any kind of service/good. Seems most people agree they should make a profit of some kind, and I’ve heard some rough rules suggested but it almost seems like the logical conclusion is that prioritizing profit is always bad for society.
My main concern is that they sometimes serve ads that redirect to porn, even if you aren’t signed in, meaning children could be shown these ads. By this alone I wouldn’t want to use YouTube, but as they practically have a monopoly on video streaming it’s not really viable to boycott them without giving up on user generated videos
YouTube doesn’t want your money.
and other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself
They want you to pay a higher price but since you have choice of paying nothing then the message seems clear to me. You can see comedians on there for free, they tell real jokes.
…whoosh
no u
So a person is not allowed to be part of their home country and get service and then move? What if their job stays the same and they don’t make any extra? Evil google.
They are perfectly free to do that. They just have to resubscribe from their new home country at the new rate. Just like with telephone service or cable tv. It’s not like they will get in trouble or would be prevented from moving.
Operation costs differently in different regions. Advertising spend differs in different regions. You’ve moved from a region with cheap operating expenses and no ad spend to another region with more expensive operating expenses and higher ad spend. Congratulations on your move, now the cost to provide you service is different, and you’d need to pay more to cover the operating expenses + expected margin.
Alternatively, procure a local credit card (I.e. the same one you used back home), billing address (i.e the last place back home), and always do everything through a VPN back home. Then you’re at least using services from where the operating expense reflects the pricing.
This is just business, and should be expected. Food is dirt cheap back in Asia, they’re more expensive here in North America. Like it or not, if I’m living here, I need to pay the prices here. If I don’t want to pay the prices here, I can move back to Asia.
Except food is a physical good that needs to be transported, while the service is still provided by low wage workers from across the globe.
If a corporation gets to provide the service from where it’s cheaper, they can’t be mad people buy it from where it’s cheaper.
Internet isn’t free. It takes copper or fiber cable, switching and routing equipment, labor to operate and install them, and electricity to run it all. Those costs are also lower in other countries.
So if you subscribe in a low-cost country, does it make sense for them to let you use the high-cost infrastructure?
It is just some Telcos that price for data usage and put in usage caps. But this is only a way to price gauge customers. In the EU most ISPs operate without datacaps and are much cheaper month to month than in the US (my 1gb symmetric fiber connection without datacaps costs around 30 euro per month).
Sure a data connection in a datacenter is more expensive, but is either shared across datacenter customers or a customer gets their own. And again, global players have framework contracts with other global players… so maybe Orange Business Services provides the internet connection for their DC operation globally.
The cost for the things they have to source locally is highly overestimated. Usually budgets they spend locally on stuff like advertising are much higher.
Service provider must acquire hardwares for the data centre at local vendor pricing.
Service provider must hire someone local to work in your local data centre.
Service providers need to pay local electricity and bandwidth rates.
List goes on. Just because you don’t interface with the local aspects of business doesn’t mean they don’t exist and add extra costs.
If you want to pay lower rate, as I stated earlier, make your narrative work: use local payment methods, billing address and use the service locally to the locality you’re paying in. Then they’ve got nothing to argue against you as you’re using services in that lower cost region.
Except the hardware is purchased using a global framework contract that uses the volume as a reason for deep discounts.
It gets put in a rack by a local guy and then remotely provisioned by some person from a low cost country.
Electricity in datacenters is purchased at wholesale prices and muchuch cheaper than what consumers pay…
The list goes on and on.The higher prices in countries has only very marginally to do with the higher costs.
Money grabbing corporations will charge what the market will bare.
Without violating my NDA with media companies (YouTube being one of them, incidentally), all I can tell you is you’re wrong about these. I’ve been in this exact sector for over a decade and the operating expenses are much higher comparatively speaking, and the objectives are different depending on region.
If you’re so inclined to pay the discounted rate, make the narrative work so they have no way of flagging you. Otherwise don’t be surprised if you’re asked to pay local rates.
So, where does it differ? Cost of hosting the machine and the data?
On purchasing servers; I don’t know about Google specifically, but most media partners I’ve worked with doesn’t have global acquisition as an option for hardwares — not because they don’t have the purchase power/volume, but rather the vendors have region specific distributors with their own sales teams and pricing. Even if you have the personal contacts of VPs high up the chain, someone from IBM China cannot even sell to companies in Canada, and vice versa, for example.
On people side of things… With YouTube specifically, you’re also not only dealing with their own DC but getting their hardware into local ISPs centres. Logistics around that is not something cheap remote labor can arrange, need actual boots on the ground to facilitate.
Ad sales is also something that’s kind of localized. YouTube has American teams selling American creator inventories for example. Not something that’s outsourced out.
So yea… Although from the outset it’s all just “YouTube.com”, there’s actually a lot of localized touch points that creates different costs to provide service in different regions.
Okay? Just shoot yourself in the foot then.
You can use NewPipe or Tubular for Android
Also there is https://piped.video/trending for watching in browser and Revanced on Android
And for anyone using YouTube Music there is Desktop app for Linux,MacOS and Windows https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music
LibreTube is also a good one. Basically an app for piped
They did not get me yet 🥳 (I don‘t Know why)
Is there an automated bot to archive channels from YouTube and upload them to Peertube?
There are repos on GitHub that pull the videos and metadata, not sure about posting to Peerhub, though if that’s possible to post via an api you could probably script it easily enough. Likely a risk of other “issues” doing so, but I’m sure some datahoarders could chime in.
I’d run this on a VPS if I could do it over the TOR network (don’t want to get caught with my CC on the line), but there’s the problem of needless duplication if this happens, so it’s likely the best if relevant authors do it themselves
I always thought Invidious was downloading the source video from YouTube in the background when given a YouTube video ID and it’s not already downloaded, but I might be wrong.
BitLaunch let’s you rent a VPS with crypto currency
I’d prefer XMR
kycnot.me lists a bunch of providers that accept XMR directly.
Same, but you can always use Trocador to convert your XMR to other coins. Alternatively there are some ways to anonymously acquire BTC.
Had never heard of it, thanks. I prefer DEXes for crypto (XMR only now)
It’s not perfect, there are some conversion fees, but it should be ok. I use it from time to time to pay for my seedbox.
What about renting a VPS itself over Tor using Monero, and then letting the VPS do its work normally in the clear?
Not that I know of but I could create something. I would feel icky if I didn’t get the creators approval first however.
If one does that, be prepared to defend yourself against the copyright infringement lawsuit that’s coming your way eventually.
Read my comment on doing it over TOR. If you have a trusty VPS, encrypt your LVM with LUKS and use that for scratch storage.
NewPipe, no problems.
Tubular is better. It’s a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock built-in.
That’s how it’s called now?
Yes. The NewPipe x SponsorBlock repo is archived and there’s a message in the README saying:
Development Has Stopped
This fork is old and no longer maintained. See Tubular, a new fork of NewPipe.
If you pay for YouTube premium, you’re a clown and you’re only fueling the enshittification.
Ads are bad (I agree).
Paying for things is bad.
Then what’s left? YouTube should somehow be ad free and free of cost for the user forever and ever? Who’s gonna pay for the enormous costs of operating the service?
People are going to start yelling at me about capitalism and enshitiffication. Both of which are cause problems, but what do you propose here? Magic?
I propose YouTube make a MUCH better premium product and price it correctly. Paying for things is fine. Paying for things to get crappier? Na
How is YouTube getting crappier for me as a paying customer? I feel like it hasn’t really changed in years.
Glad you enjoy it. Keep doing your thing. But are you seriously def to the rising chorus of complaints about YouTube? This thread contains many examples of youtube’s enshitification over the few couple years. Your question feels disingenuous at best to me
Name one complaint, other than blocking people with ad blockers. How has the actual product changed?
I’ll still call someone a clown for paying even if I’m able to acknowledge that someone has to hold the bag. Just ain’t gonna me or hopefully anyone I care about.
I’m not opposed to paying for online services in general, I’m just not going to pay them to make the site worse with every update. (Plus I kinda categorically refuse to give Google money at this point.)
If you watch ads instead of paying a modest fee to remove them then you’re a clown. Companies do need to make money for the services they provide, I just disagree with the amount.
“Modest?” $14 a month? $5 would be modest. I literally pay less for whole as streaming services.
I pay less than 5usd for a family plan, I just subscribed through a developing nation with a VPN.
Which, as the article states, they are starting to end that practice.
That was my comment about the amount that should be charged. I’ll happily pay $5/mo, but not $15. I’m happy to pay for services, just not the amount that many want to charge.
If you watch enough youtube per month to see an hour of ads and you can’t block ads for some reason, you may actually be losing time/money by not paying the subscription. That said, there are ad blockers for almost every platform so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find one that works.
I’d probably pay $5, and I’d certainly pay $2-3. But I don’t watch enough to justify $10+/month.
They make enough off of all my data they collect. I’m not paying them a cent for anything and I’m not watching a single ad. If you want to watch ads for shareholders, you are most definitely a clown.
Youtube might be the literal most valuable site in my life, up there with Wikipedia and search engines.
A large part of my payment also goes to the channels I view.
Really? I watch very little Youtube, so I’d rather not use it than pay $10+ for it. I’m currently able to block ads, so I’ll watch as long as that’s an option.
Yeah, it has news, educational, and entertaining content. It’s a lot of value for me.
Unpopular opinion, but I also use YouTube almost exclusively.
It has my podcasts, my political livestreamers, late night shows, and multiple channels that I follow.
I also enjoy YouTube music as well.
I bought a full year, which lowers the price a little.
I keep saying it. Privacy invasive, targeted advertising has got to be barely worth the cost of maintaining it. Why else is Google trying to put more ads in places, kill ad blockers on chrome, force expats out of subscriptions, and experiment with unskippable ads if not to try and invent some kind of additional value to advertisers out of nothing.
Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What’s happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.
YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube’s losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.
But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.
And this is what it looks like.
As for risking competition, at this point, I don’t think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.
I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There’s a long-term strategy here to nuke and blocking permanently. That’s what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back.
I have a very sinking feeling that websites will be streamed in the future (SHTTPS) and it will be pioneered by Google :'(
Enshittification
Less reason to subscribe then!
If you have an iPhone or iPad you don’t even need to use a VPN to get cheap Premium. Just make an new Apple ID with an Indian address, top it up by buying a digital Apple Card on Amazon.in and redeeming it to your Indian account in iTunes on a computer. Then on your iPad or iPhone go to your Apple ID in the settings, log out of Media and Purchases and login with the Indian account. Then you can buy Premium in the YouTube app with your Rupees, you don’t even need to change your YouTube account.
I can do even better. I can hook you up with a free lifetime account, but I’m having a problem with my bank account this week. But I’ll send you $6000 dollars if you just send me $5000 back. Yeah I know it sounds weird but I’m really not hard up for cash I just can’t get my cash out of the bank at this moment so I need your help. Hit me up and we’ll figure something out, and I’ll get you that free lifetime subscription.
/s missing
