Hacker News Reader

Comment by dividedbyzero | Hacker News Reader

> Hacker News threads are filled with users arguing that they gladly pay a lot just to avoid advertising.

In my experience, quite a few people say such things elsewhere as well, but if you actually give them the opportunity to do so (even if it's not "a lot", but actually a pretty small fee), such offers tend to perform badly, even among the people who initially requested such a tier, unless ads are very, very intrusive (Youtube of late might be such a case) or it's bundled with other, actually useful functionality, more content etc., or rolled out as an increase of existing pricing instead of a separate offer people have to actively pick (risky in itself).

People in general appear to be much more price-conscious when it comes to such things than they themselves seem to realize.

View on HN

Yeah, I'm that guy. I would prefer not to see ads and claim that I would pay for the privilege. Ads on YouTube didn't used to bother me but as they ramped up the number of ads on each video I couldn't take it anymore ... until I saw the price of the Youtube Premium subscription. I balked at paying so much for the "minor inconvenience" of seeing 5 ads with each video. I figured I'd just watch less video instead.

Side note, Youtube Premium includes music that I wouldn't have used, so maybe the cost of the service makes sense for people who use that.

Ye there is a huge prize difference between what Youtube gets for you nominally watching the adds and what you have to pay to not get any adds.

Using public numbers (references below):

The average YouTube user (>18yo) spends 41 minutes per day on YouTube. Let's guess that an average view duration is 10 minutes (~80% of an average video of 11.7 minutes). That gives us 4 video views per day.

The average per view is $0.18, so $0.72 per day. Multiply by 30 to get a month, and you end up with $21.60.

YouTube Premium is $11.99/month. So yes, there's a huge prize difference - the advertising revenue would be ~$10 more than the YouTube Premium price.

https://blog.hootsuite.com/youtube-stats-marketers/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-ca...

https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-mak...

The income YouTubers get from the paying customers is nothing. A rounding error. I don't have a link for that.

Yes. As I've said elsewhere - very few people want to pay their way out of ads - in this case, buy YouTube Premium.

Newest public data I can find says there are 20 million YouTube Premium subscribers. There's 2 billion monthly actives on YouTube - ie, 99% are not YouTube Premium subscribers.

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-tops-20-millio...

https://www.youtube.com/intl/en-GB/about/press/

I think that might be way off. Most adds are skipped. And 18/1000 is 1.8 cents not 18 cents.

"On Average the YouTube channel can receive $18 per 1,000 ad views. This equates to $3 - $5 per 1000 video views."

I.e. 0.3 to 0.5 cent per video of which Google pockets 68%:32% which gives about 0.2 cent per video for Google per video view.

The first stats site says about 9 views per visit and day, so 9 videos a day is about 1.8 cent, times 30 days is 54 cents.

A year would be 6.5USD for the average user - about half a month of Premium.

You're right - $18/1000 is 1.8, I was just copying the number from the article. So that's off by me.

However, as far as I understand, Google pays out the ads for premium customers, so you shouldn't count just the "to Google" portion. That's off in your calculation, to a factor of about 3. Using $4 (the average in $3 to $5) and 9 videos per day, we get 0.4cents * 9 * 365 = $13.14/year - a bit over a month of premium. Still devastating to my argument, of course.

I'm a long-time Google Music subscriber (at the original $8/mo price point) and had no idea that it even came with YouTube Premium until I realized I hadn't seen any YouTube ads in years.

uBlock Origin extension (and I'm sure others) in chrome blocks all youtube ads. I am always dismayed when I see ads in the YT mobile app, which I don't use often because I haven't seen them on desktop in years.

I guess mobile is where most people use Youtube (by a very, very generous margin, too); for me, it's on an Apple TV, which also can't run adblockers. On mobile, even with DNS-based blocking, I wasn't able to block Youtube ads in the iOS app.

Ah, thats a bummer. I'd thought about trying out Pi-hole to block ads on our mobile devices and smart TV.

It's probably psychology. For example, myself quite frugal, I would probably not pay explicitly to remove ads. But if you raised my internet subscription by $1.50/month, with the same intent, I wouldn't bat an eyelid.

It's all about putting the price in context.

I also just don't want the mental overhead of deciding which of my 20 subscriptions I'm getting value from. Yes, I used to have that to some degree with magazine subscriptions. But most Internet subscriptions actually tend to be pricier for less content--probably in part because so few people pay you need to charge those who will a fair bit to make it work.

I also observe that I do get some free newsletters and my usual pattern is I read them regularly for a bit and then they go into being read less and less frequently. (Which was admittedly often my pattern with magazines as well.)

> In my experience, quite a few people say such things elsewhere as well, but if you actually give them the opportunity to do so (even if it's not "a lot", but actually a pretty small fee), such offers tend to perform badly, even among the people who initially requested such a tier,

I used Blende and was ready to spend quite a bit more on it, but they changed their rules and also had do little relevant content that at some point I gave up.

Recently found out one of the linux magazines sell digital articles as well as full digital so I will be probably be spending some money there, both for usefulness, entertainment (yep) and to support a good cause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com