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Comment by SlackingOff123 | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering, how much does the average YouTube viewer generate in revenue by watching ads? $0.1 a month? $0.25? $0.5 if avid viewer? Given that I'm not an avid viewer and I do not care at all for YouTube Music, I just find the monthly cost of YouTube Premium too high. I don't know what the right price should be, but by comparing with other digital subscriptions I have, I think I would be OK with paying something like $5 a month. It could be like a lighter version of Premium. Just ad-free and none of the other "benefits".

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It looks like the average revenue is $1/user/month. However, the "average" isn't very interesting because the typical person that signs up to this would likely be far above average--no one is going to pay $5/month if they watch a single video, but if you watch 2 hours/day that's a great deal. So it's hard to say what a "fair" price would be.

Others in the thread have pointed this out, but they did have a lite plan that wasn't rolled out broadly for some insane reason. They axed it this month:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...

Oh. I wasn't even aware this existed and I live in one of the countries where it was supposedly available.

Yet another one for the Google Graveyard collection, I guess.

I did some napkin math on this and I think 5 USD will not replace the ad revenue or even half of it. Keep in mind that this is the price only in the developed world and in the developing world both the YouTube premium price and ad price are very low and generate little revenue.

Paying $20-40 per thousand views isn’t unusual on the advertiser side.

If you watch 100 videos that’s $2 if there’s 1 ad per video. But these days it’s more like 2-3 ads per video (or dozens for long videos)

It depends what kind of content you watch. Home improvement ada pay well. Finance ads pay well. Video Game ads pay much less.

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