The YouTube Premium Concept Is All but Done
hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
Paradoxically the target demographic willing to pay to be ad free is probably worth far more to advertisers than those who don’t— making it difficult to justify the product offering.
Though I’d certainly use YouTube significantly less if I had to sit through the ads.
I consume a fair amount of technical content, on YouTube. If I had to watch ads, I would probably stop rather than watch. I've seen some technical content with sponsored products etc., and as I understand in the broader pop-culture content sponsor ad reads are now quite common. So even with the Premium subscription, the L shortcut key to advanced in seconds is extremely useful... I assume it will be taken away next.
Yes. Nursery rhymes and other entertainment for toddlers is by far our largest use case for YouTube, and ads would frequently comprise things like the latest horror movie trailer. If we didn't have the option of YouTube Premium to make it so the ads didn't interject, we would've been done with YouTube a long time ago.
Kind of a non-issue for us now though -- since moving to an area serviced by Comcast and thus having a mandatory data cap, we just use youtube-dl to grab the video once and then stream them over the LAN through a Plex server.
Fortunately, the national broadcasting company here do a kid's show with no advertising, and seem to also have filtered out the shows that are just selling toys. The only problem is, they insist on making their own programming as well as showing cartoons they've bought from elsewhere. I can tell when the in-house production starts even if I'm not watching at the moment, because my kid will start going "I don't want to watch this!"
I remember watching the same show, and having the same aversion to the local content, as a kid. Now, as a parent, I wonder if they intentionally put in some low-interest stuff in to make the show less addictive and teach the kids some kind of life lesson... If so, it probably worked better on TV than it does on their streaming service, where you can skip at will.
Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play!
Oh, Paw Patrol. I smelled something is weird when I started finding PP-branded toys & stuffs in our local Walmart equivalent. Reading your comment, now I realize this must be it. The show is in part a vehicle for selling merch.
> Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play!
Great idea. I'm planning to go full "youtube-dl -> home media server, no Internet on devices" way with my future kids. An artificially scheduled programming is something I might try out.
There are a small handful of channels we allow them to watch. Mostly we watch through something like the Roku, but when on the computer, I wrote a little Greasemonkey apparatus to scan the channel name and automatically rickroll the children if they wind up on a non-whitelisted channel / video.
It is definitely reckless to leave a kid, really of any age, with unrestricted access to YouTube. The internet is a very scary place.
Source:
I live in a 'dense' suburb near Seattle (renting, but finally in a house that's not as noisy or otherwise hell as apartments can be).
I'm a Comcast customer (for lack of ANY OTHER actual high speed data competition; DSL is like 8M bit down and less than 1M bit up per second).
Their 1G bit plan gives me something like 25-30 M bit/sec upload, and comes with a VERY small 1T bytes cap. Not even /trying/, I easily come near to 700-800 M bytes per month.
I fully expect to exceed that during the holiday season when I have to liquidate my vacation time per my current employer's policy (or loose it) and have nothing better to do than binge on various legal video products.
Even Frontier is better than Comcast, at least in the data cap respect, and that’s saying something bad about Comcast...
Comcast is looking to recoup some of the income they've lost from cord-cutters by targeting users whose bandwidth consumption looks suspiciously like video. They seem committed to getting you to pay them for TV/video content one way or the other, while simultaneously discouraging further cord-cutting by raising the specter of potentially-unpredictable overages.
Their language: "After using these 2 courtesy months, if you exceed the plan you will be charged $10.00 for each 50GB of additional data provided, but charges will not exceed $200 each month, no matter how much you use."
I hit 700G last month. If I had to do a full backup or restore I'd definitely go over 1T. Annoyingly, they count both ingress and egress traffic.
It's much the same experience on the rest of the web, actually. I simply can't figure out how normal people manage to cope with the deluge of advertising that's plastered everywhere. And even with an adblocker, the various sponsored content and thinly-veiled promotional blogposts is still constantly spewing forth...
Instead, I support various people through Patreon, if I enjoy the content they make. That way, they get a much bigger cut, and aren't being screwed over by YouTube's over-eager demonetization policies.
> A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self.
At least I'd get my money back :(
But it's a great mental model.
That means someone can outbid you easily if it is predicted the ad will be clicked, and they have to pay a load of money if it's predicted the ad is very unlikely to be clicked.
Which in turn means, you'll effectively only be shown ads you're interested in, since the predictor thinks it's very likley you'll click (or watch the whole thing for a preroll ad).
Turns out, that predictor is mostly right - it did a good job of showing me ads that were funny enough to watch to the end, and correctly realised I would never watch an ad twice, so never showed me the same ad twice.
Side thing no one ever mentions about ads, they always play at 1x. I watch between 2-4x and ads seem so slow when they happen
I'm a Youtube Premium subscriber as well, and this is by far the #1 perk. However, it's technically wrong (you probably already know this) to call Youtube content ad-free just because we aren't seeing Youtube's ads. :) Almost all of the content creators I follow on YT simply advertise or product-place inside their videos.
Youtube Premium pays for the video hosting platform. Content producers advertise to support their content production.
(it's actually even more complex than that, since if you had been shown that ad, the advertisers daily budget would have been debited, meaning that advertiser might have reduced their bids on other users to have the same overall spend. The payment has a correction to take that into account).
So in France they took the most famous youtubers out there, and tasked them with creating 2 series.
Both were pretty uninspired derivative work. You could see that there was way more budget than on these people regular videos, but that the whole thing was mostly a paycheck, not a passion project.
I don't think Youtube even has to produce any content to be honest. No ads and Play Music ? That's already a great value proposal.
If on top of that you add a video streaming service which actually has a library that only grows (instead of a rolling one like netflix) and that actually contains different cuts of each films, bonuses, cut scenes, etc, I might be willing to just let go of Netflix and go with them.
Channels that insert their own ads into video are a step too far though, and I've started unsubscribing from them. Patreon is fine, affiliate links in the description are fine (if they're relevant, eg tools you used, items you showed in the video), and I actively participate in both to support channels I like. But sitting there talking about "random product dot com forward-slash channelnamehere" as though they're the most exciting thing since sliced bread, just cheapens the identity immensely, and is the modern day equivalent of seeing your favourite sports/hollywood star hawking off some random crap on the shopping channel.
For instance, Glenn Fricker (Spectre Sound) talks about music production on his channel, and he has a short "sponsored by" segment in most of his videos, about a music distribution service that gets your music onto just about every streaming service in one go. That's genuinely useful for his target audience, and there's a small signup fee rebate to be had. I usually skip over the 10 seconds or so now, but it's an example of appropriate sponsorship.
I don't remember a single marketing message mention that they'll remove ads, and in fact, your post is the first time I heard about it. I doubt I'd pay google for premium YouTube content, but I probably would do so to remove ads.
Maybe YourTube's problem is more about messaging than content/price.
1. No ads.
2. Backgrounding, for listening to audiobooks while I sleep.
3. Download tech lectures and audiobooks for the car.
As other have said, I would pay double too.
Do you feel like you get subconsciously smarter by hearing content during sleep? Is there a reason for listening to books while sleeping?
For me, lack of attention is a key reason why I don't listen to audiobooks. I can read and focus on the content, but when it's just played back to me I'll lose track of it.
I usually listen to the news for a country I have no connection to to avoid the problem of hearing names / events I know IRL. Easy to jump in and out, the content is always fresh, and the speakers are calm and collected.
Many people don't seem to realize just how lucrative advertising can be, and how little they would be able to compensate considering how much media they consume every day. A single youtube video could be 5 or 6 figures in production and you can flip through a dozen without issue. That's a serious amount of value in return for ads.
The actual "Youtube premium" is basically a non-factor in whether they would keep me, although I'll admit I did really enjoy season 1 of Cobra Kai.
It's not that higher production values wouldn't be accepted, but that those come with hired writers, actors, directors, high costs, and mass marketing to recoup those costs. The market can only support so much high-cost content, which means less variety than people want. Conversely, the market can support enormous variety in low-cost content.
It just says that the YT Original content is going to also be available via an ad supported model for non YT Premium subscribers.
Its central claim is that YT couldn't make compelling case for original scripted long form content to be a selling point for the premium subscription, mostly due to it being dominated by short form content.
BTW. that's literally the single dumbest thing about YouTube app, and I can't fathom why it's the case.
So why didn't I bother signing up for YouTube premium, even though I was excited to the level of shouting, "This! This is what I wanted!" when it was first announced?
I have zero confidence that Google is willing to keep their experiments like this one alive for more than a year or two. This result seemed obvious and inevitable. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety, but I'm now far more likely to try out a random probably-not-going-to-be-around-next-year startup with a neat idea than an interesting looking Google experiment.
Google used to have a reputation for being clever and innovative. It was fun to try out their new products. They had features that were original and helpful rather than gimmicky and "me too." Product updates added features without throwing away old functionality that was obviously still important. Products lasted longer than one or two promotion cycles.
These days it's just frustrating.
> I have zero confidence that Google is willing to keep their experiments like this one alive for more than a year or two....
This seems like really silly logic. It's not like youtube premium is a big commitment, and there's zero chance that google is going to actually just rob your money and not give you the product you paid for. So what if you get ad-free YouTube for just a few years and then it goes away? You're back where you started with no real loss. It's not like they cancelled a service that has stickiness (e.g. e-mail history, chat network effects).
On the other hand, I think it's good to buy things that are actually good. Anyone that allows me to pay for content at a reasonable price instead of seeing ads is a good thing and I'll buy it (if I use it of course, which I do use youtube).
There's an emotional component. People are upset that Inbox is going away, that Hangouts is going away. Google Reader was a bigger commitment, since it required you to curate a list of feeds, so that doesn't really count.
But honestly at this point using Google services is like letting your third-time-rehab cousin live above your garage. He's not hurting anyone, but you're just waiting for that moment when your uncle calls to tell you he's going to be gone for another 30 days...
> there's zero chance that google is going to actually just rob your money and not give you the product you paid for.
I don't know, remember when Hulu didn't show ads?
This was genuine good will that the Google brand used to have, and they threw it away -- the blame here lies squarely with Google.
The core principals of the company seem pretty firmly rooted now. There's everything related to the advertising and tracking side of the business, which nobody really likes and which they try to keep hidden, but that pays the bills a hundred times over.
Then there's the "cool new technologies" side of Google, which used to be run by sensible intelligent people. This was the glamorous side of Google, so a lot of the attention seeking sociopaths ended up here. Most wannabe-Googlers are interested in this side of the company, not ads.
So now this side of the company is full of bozo politicking PMs with no original ideas other than to make shitty clones of everything Apple does, and the smart people are either frustrated or gone. Google corporate dangles the most ridiculous, foot-shooting promotion structure anyone has ever seen, and so their non-ad product roadmap is a complete circus.
So it doesn't matter that this particular product happened to be around for three years before getting axed. Google's non-ad product strategy is essentially that every product will get killed or replaced by a "new and improved" product, designed by a completely different team, that's demonstrably worse. Fuck that.
(I'm the same, but I'm trying to be better that the other grumpy old men by simultaneously getting those pesky kids off my lawn and knowing that I do it because of the conflict of generations)
Yes, I am more cynical these days, but I attribute it to stopping paying attention to what tech could be, and instead observing what it is, and how it actually gets used.
Google's general radio silence when it comes to support/evangelizing these products is just crazy. I have more faith any day of the week using the latest and greatest toys from Amazon (AWS), IBM, and Microsoft compared to Google because they usually have clear EOL cycles and suitable warning periods for things going away if there is ANY level of interest.
The only products I feel like are going to be there in six years is Search (because it keeps the lights on) and Gmail (because it is entrenched, popular, and enterprise pays for it).
You can often catch some pretty severe cases of dead eyes.
Some websites have also taken to add their own ads on top of the youtube player, which is equally infuriating.
It's so bad that occasionally I'll ask myself if the overt and relatively easily defeated ads exist in part to obfuscate the more subtle advertising most content has become rife with.
Even if the review was absolutely genuine, and this was a reviewer espousing love for an otherwise universally-ignored game, I couldn't help but feel I was just watching an advertisement and promptly closed it.
I don't blame anybody for this, but this is seriously ruining my ability to enjoy YouTube content.
I stumbled on a video yesterday about how Tesla was so far ahead of its competition .. and I could not help to wonder how much this youtuber has been paid to say that.
With video you have the advantage that someone has to watch the video in wall clock time so you can run a bid/re-edit/display process in seconds instead of having to choose an ad to show in milliseconds.
You could even use the identity information that Google has to run all of this server side to create a targeted ad fully in a first-party way.
On top of that, Hollywood is a very self-reinforcing system, where industry connection is super valuable at getting funding, securing talents, rights and other things needed to deliver a successful project. Outside funding will have a hard time competing against existing investors, and will end up either overpaying or settle with less promising projects with trouble securing funding otherwise.
It's not so much that the audience isn't interested in paying for long form storytelling (or at least myself), but maybe just not interested in paying YouTube for it. YouTube is a place for short videos, I go there when I want to watch tech reviews, recipes, or something silly. When I want longform storytelling, I go to Netflix or something else that I pay for.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but YouTube hasn't done a good job of advertising or raising awareness of Premium content at all. The most I see is a few thumbnails of things that I need to pay to watch on the homescreen. I would be happy to be proved wrong, but I have low expectations of drama or any longform content on YouTube - I expect it to be low budget and badly acted, so I may as well just go elsewhere.
Perhaps ad blockers are a double whammy against YouTube Premium. I don't see ads on YouTube anyway, so I don't need to pay to get rid of them. And maybe they're advertising Premium content on there, but I've not seen them anyway. I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable.
Still, it wouldn't take much for them to draw more attention to Premium videos, whether it's from ads, creating more social media buzz around them, or just putting a larger section on the home page that at least gives me a description of the content that I'm missing. As always, YouTube relies too much on their algorithm of placing more of the same content in front of you. When the experience is designed to just keep you clicking on though the recommendations of videos like the ones you just watched, it's no wonder that they're not getting eyes on original content. And yet it should be so easy for them.
Not only would that force them to enter a game of cat-and-mouse with developers, it would also give an opportunity for ad-free/ad-light competition.
My intuition would be that they want to wait until "paying for not having ads" becomes sort of a norm, before prematurely forcing ads on desktop users and potentially encouraging an exodus.
I pay for YouTube content. YouTube just doesn’t get a cut of it. I pay for it on Patreon. There is so much great short-form educational content waiting to happen, but instead we get more long-firm scripted crap.
I have a friend who makes original, scripted, television-length episodic content and he can't get noticed, despite having a whole season already up on YouTube, link below. This sort of serious production isn't really viable for the sponsorship model of most YouTube channels, which stick to 10-20 minute videos that can use what a TV crew would consider a barebones production staff.
YouTube should be reaching out to people like my friend like they reached out to my mom shortly after all the crafting TV shows started disappearing in the early 2000s. I think they just lost their nerve, but still don't have the resources to truly do what Netflix is doing.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/vid...
That’s one model that’s clearly working at some scale, and it could be easy expanded to “subscriber only videos“