Hacker News Reader

Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to pay for YouTube but they insist on bundling it with YouTube Music and I already pay for Spotify.

Now maybe they are giving me YouTube Music for free and the price would be the same without it - but it doesn't feel that way and it's enough to make me not subscribe. This kind of shenanigans is enough to drive me and probably many others away.

It's £12.99/month. Would I pay that if the bundling had never been offerered? It feels quite high - I've hit my limit of streaming services I'm prepared to pay for at the moment. I'd probably pay half that for ad-free YouTube.

Surprisingly (to me at least) I'm actually finding enough good content on TikTok to make up for the fact that I can't block ads on YouTube any more. Thus the great cycle of enshittification continues.

View on HN

Youtube music is really just a UI on top on the existing YouTube features. Even if they didn't offer it as a bundle "service", you could access every song just through Youtube itself.

> I'd love to pay for YouTube but they insist on bundling it with YouTube Music and I already pay for Spotify.

This is kind of a weird way to think about it. Regardless of what's packaged with it, it's either worth the money for your use or it's not.

> It's £12.99/month. ... I'd probably pay half that for ad-free YouTube.

That makes more sense. For me, it's worth it, but YouTube is my primary video entertainment source.

> This is kind of a weird way to think about it.

Yes - I fully admit that it's a weird way of thinking about it, but the psychology around pricing has a lot of this stuff. I genuinely don't know if I'm an outlier or not. Responses to pricing are rarely about rational cost/benefit analysis.

> That makes more sense. For me, it's worth it, but YouTube is my primary video entertainment source.

I have a limit to how much I'm prepared to pay for video serivces each month. If I add one, something else would have to go. So the issues with YT Premium are a mix of the bundling psychology, the indecision about giving up another service - and the competition with TikTok for (sometimes) similar content.

For what it's worth, I would be willing to pay full price for YouTube Premium without YouTube Music. The value is there for me, but I voted with my wallet when they replaced a perfectly good music app with YouTube Music and I'm not willing to send a single penny to the replacement.

On the other hand, is this how much your personal data is worth to Facebook to sell? Do they really make £12.99/month/person on advertisement? Has to be more lucrative than I thought.

My guess is the people most likely to pay would be the most valuable to advertise to. This is why I’m doubtful a hybrid model will work out.

Just get a VPN and get the Turkish or Argentinan premium.

Please don't, with enough people cheating it this way, that will destroy my ability to use international cards. Google will start checking card procedence to prevent people from taking regional discounts.

I cannot use local cards because of banking issues

Reply on news.ycombinator.com