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Comment by gundmc | Hacker News Reader

I fear this will only encourage the frankly absurd number of ads that have been on Youtube videos lately.

You can see this kind of comment in every YouTube related posts, please, there's no free lunch, either pay for the subscription or use tools to block the ads.

I was paying for the subscription but then they cancelled Google Music. Ad-free youtube was just a nice perk of that.

The replacement in YouTube Music premium* does not come with the bonus of no ads on youtube videos, which I think is some straight crap. I had forgot they existed, damn near.

*Unless there is another tier of subscription I haven't noticed.

Time to look into adblocker for my phone.

Nothing changed for me. I still have no ads on YouTube after my Play Music switched to YouTube Music.

Welp, that's weird. Time to do some digging I guess.

I think they actually have a support you can contact - https://support.google.com/youtube/gethelp?hl=en

Now that's weird.

No kidding! My biggest fear was that I'd be dealing with the Google Support Blackhole. Thanks so much for the link.

I have no problem with some ads. I have a problem with midroll ads every 5 minutes and ads >> 2 minutes long when I've stepped away from my device and can't skip.

YouTube premium is available in tons of countries and they have family plans. I’ve been using it for years with my wife and it’s best money ever spent.

Just pay for the content. You aren’t forced to watch those ads.

If you give Alphabet money directly, you’re just encouraging them.

To do what? Treat me more as a paying customer, and less as a product they resell to advertisers?

I’ll happily encourage them to do that.

What does that even mean? If you watch YouTube, you're just encouraging them.

Why not just pay for the service?

Because despite the common request to "let me pay a monthly fee to not see ads", the vast majority of people are too cheap to pay up. This is why ads are as prolific as they are.

Okay, but how is that relevant in this case, where you can pay to remove the ads, regardless of whether other people do?

Because people are too cheap to pay. I thought that was clear in my comment.

For me it's a bit of a Catch-22. I don't watch much YouTube content anyways, but I've reduced my consumption over the years because of the ads. From what I can tell, there's nothing I want to watch anymore because I no longer know what's there (and of value to me). So the prospect of paying is absurd for me as I'd be buying something with no real value except to remove an annoyance on the few occasions each month I bother to watch something on YouTube. If I had a clearer reason to increase my YouTube consumption, I'd entertain paying.

Other video services have clearer value to me in the content they provide so I pay for them. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

Yeah, If you are just watching videos rarely it can be tough to justify it.

I still have some channels that I regularly consume plus travel and cooking/baking videos that I watch a lot so it made sense for me to pay for it.

There is no free lunch for youtube either. Customers being less satisfied and whining about it on the internet is the cost of increasing the number of advertisements. If it wasn't, google would just put infinite adverts.

There is a market for infinite adverts. You remember ShopTV and other TV marketing channels streaming advertisements 24/7?

what makes you think you are entitled to using youtube for free? The ad-free experience in Premium is great.

And don't forget they are paying a huge sum to the content creators as well - it is a delicate balance.

I find it annoying that lots of content creators still put sponsored ads in their videos which are shown to me as a premium user. IMO those should be skipped automatically when Premium, but alas...

I don't think YT should interfere. As I see it, YT is a pipe for content. If you pay for it through ads/subscription you are paying for the pipe not just the content. The content creator should be free to monetize their videos as they choose to like TV channels can show ads for a TV show.

But I'm not just paying for the pipe. Part of my money already goes to content creators.

If things were set up correctly you'd expect the content creator to want to use YT's ads. They can be personalized to the user, can change over time, etc. The fact so many embed their own ads shows some failure in the system IMHO.

Demonetization has nearly killed any channel with a whiff of controversy or edgyness... The types of videos everyone wants to watch anyway.

I'm not why you expect YouTube to skip sponsorships which are directly integrated into the video...

Also, content creators do it because brand deals are generally a big chunk of change.

> I'm not why you expect YouTube to skip sponsorships which are directly integrated into the video...

As a user, I don't care how or why the ads appear - they're ads regardless.

NewPipe

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

Youtube is almost unusable without uBlock Origin or you have to call it Adstube.

Pay the $10 a month or whatever for Youtube premium and never see an ad again.

It's a decent deal if you also want the YT Music (Formerly Google Play Music) library, not a great deal otherwise.

(I do want the music library, so I've been a subscriber for a very long time.)

You can also get an ad free experience for about 3 dollars a month.

In the UK it is £12 a month for YouTube premium which is more like 15USD. Feels quite expensive when Netflix is about half of that.

How much is Spotify? YT Premium ~= YT Music + Ad free videos + YT Originals.

Isn't YouTube Premium $11.99 per month?

It’s a fixed number. So EU/UK people pay more. Same thing with games 60 dollars vs. 60 euros

A family plan is 15 for 6 people.

IMO they show you those annoying ads (two in a row recently) to make you subscribe to the ad-free premium service.

Check out YouTube Vanced, it's a YouTube app with all the advanced functionalities and no ads.

EDIT: https://vancedapp.com/

Can we please stop suggesting apps and extensions to circumvent these ads?

They offer a paid service, exactly what people on HN wanted. You are stealing from creators here.

Most creators make peanuts from these ads that Google insert everywhere. The real value is in sponsorships that I actually watch because it's part of the content.

I don't feel the need to pay 10$/month to watch LinusTechTips which is itself 20 minutes long advertisements for PC parts, sponsored by their respective manufacturers.

This whole thread is about google making $40B. They don't need your money. Keep it and give it to somebody who does.

I think you read the comment you're replying to incorrectly.

You are stealing from creators here

I don't want to avoid ads entirely - I still want to support creators and the success of the platform. It just seems as if the length, number, and frequency of ads has been ratcheted up to 200% lately.

Props to you for sticking to your principles. For what it is worth, I only started using it after the increase in ads.

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