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Comment by mmind | Hacker News Reader

Many people here suggests other services, including services you can pay for to bash Google. The reality is that Google offered Google Contributor and now offers YouTube premium but most people prefer free content with ads. And that is fine. I find very surprising the HN folks complaining about the tech companies making ads-based money for their services when they are not willing to pay for the ad-free version. It is disappointing that they feel using ad blockers is the reasonable thing to do. $9/month yearly subscription) for ad-free YouTube is an absolutely fair price IMHO. Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs, same as downloading movies or books.

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> Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs, same as downloading movies or books.

Well, maybe I don't want to watch ads so that binary-tree-inverting MIT/Stanford graduates could get their 6-figure compensation packages for participating in a natural monopoly?

Well, the creators of the content you watch do have to eat too. They are the ones that make most of the money from those ads, and the ones that hurt most if you do not support them.

I haven't used Youtube Premium myself, but I've heard many reports of both ads and promotional crap that gets through to premium users.

I'm also pretty sure that data collection is still on, meaning that you'll get tracked and ads elsewhere (such as on Google.com) based on tracking your youtube premium behavior.

I've had Youtube Premium for as long as I can remember. I subscribed to Google Play Music, and they had a promotion for free Youtube Red with a subscription to GPM. I've kept it continuously since then, for free, and I've never seen an ad. I forget that Youtube even has ads until someone else puts a video on. I've also watched a lot of Youtube. I've seen every RedLetter Media video at least twice. This is all anecdotal of course. Maybe I've just gotten lucky.

I have the same experience. I watch lots of educational YouTube content and share my premium subscription with my wife and kids. I could never go back to ad-based YouTube.

Try it, is free to try. The experience is quite great without ads but do not trust me or others, try for yourself if you watch YouTube and want to support creators but hate the ads.

What are you basing tour thoughts on? Also, what do you find fair about ad free youtube (which BTW I pay)?

I am paying the same for youtube, which is a platform that takes content created from others, adds ads to it and the make me pay to remove them than for Netflix, which partially produces its own content.

I sometimes think that youtube premium is the best idea to make money without doing anything else than make you think that they are helping you to clean the crap they have created.

Well, I assume creators think that Google brings value or they would simply host their videos in a CDN themselves, at least when they already have an audience. I think YouTube provides creators a reach that others can't. Probably because of the hundreds of video clients they support or the quality of the stream even in the most hostile network conditions.

> Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs

Just ask Google, how much money do ad blockers steal from content creators, lots of people reporting how their sites now produce way less money than they used to.

>Just ask Google I don't think that the company that made a quarter of a trillion dollars from ads in 2021 is an objective source on ad blockers.

>less money than they used to So many things changed on the internet in the last few years; I don't see how you can reasonably attribute lower total incomes by creators specifically to ad blockers, as opposed to stronger competition or different consumer behavior.

Also, I hear home taping is killing music.

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