Premium actually gives more money to creators you watch on YouTube than ads do. It's win-win IMO. Save yourself time, give them more money. Also comes with YouTube Music which is quite good (arguably worse than Google Play Music was but eh)
That's false.
I'm not a creator but a while ago there was this creator who was widely applauded on HN for their transparency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34225192 Scroll down a bit and you can see Google shows that they made $27,099.86 from YouTube premium.
I reckon you don't subscribe to premium because you think every random channel of every random video you happen to watch deserves your money? I certainly don't feel bad when my adblock prevents me from wasting any more of my time when I click on a clickbait-ty Linus Tech Tips video.
In fact, how about we all rally together and start encouraging addings ads on HackerNews to help pay for the servers?
If the costs of managing HackerNews is so high, sure let them sell ads or offer a subscription service. But if you are comparing HackerNews hosting costs to YouTube, you need a reality check. HackerNews probably costs less than 1000$ a month to host, everything included. I am sure YouTube spends more than that every second buying new storage servers.
I don't think most people realize the scale of YouTube - it's offering anyone on this planet to upload as many videos as they want, in resolution as high as 8K, while also offering the ability to monetize their content for creators. I think that is pretty damn impressive. I use YouTube often, and I am totally fine with them making money off my data via ads (when I am not paying for YouTube premium).
Same. Unfortunately, YouTube is a dopamine slot machine that makes money off ads shown on (often inappropriate) videos that keep kids addicted to their phones. It's also a site that constantly invades their users privacy. It also boosts often irrevelant and trashy channels to the front page. It's also a total CPU/RAM hog, its app is constantly getting slower, and generally a piss poor experience all around. Using Invidious/Newpipe/Youtube-DL makes all of this painfully obvious. If YouTube were a service that cost $5 a month, had no invasive tracking, and wasn't 95% garbage videos by "influencers" trying to hit the algorithm jackpot, I'd pay for it.
> If the costs of managing HackerNews is so high, sure let them sell ads or offer a subscription service. But if you are comparing HackerNews hosting costs to YouTube, you need a reality check. HackerNews probably costs less than 1000$ a month to host, everything included. I am sure YouTube spends more than that every second buying new storage servers.
My point is, none of us really know what it costs to host Hackernews, YouTube, or any website on the internet, and we don't know if any of these sites are struggling financially or need our financial support.
> I don't think most people realize the scale of YouTube - it's offering anyone on this planet to upload as many videos as they want, in resolution as high as 8K, while also offering the ability to monetize their content for creators.
Yes. Unfortunately, they don't do that for creators or users. They do that so they can sell more ads.
> I am totally fine with them making money off my data via ads (when I am not paying for YouTube premium).
I am glad you are fine with it. I just wish you were fine with people being able to choose what data their browsers download.
For youtube, we don't even have good estimates for how much data they're dealing with.
It's sad that the creators have to get caught in the middle of this, of course, but they can be supported through other platforms, like Patreon, ko-fi, etc., which kinda solves the issue. Or better yet, a YouTube replacement, like Nebula.
Still, I think you see my point.
What certainly is being proven in multiple courts, though, is Google's malfeasance and manipulation to create and abuse an advertising monopoly.