Regarding pricing, they need to decouple it from YouTube Music. I have a music streaming service and I’m not changing. Currently the price is too high and imagine the bundling is part of the reason.
Of course, as soon as my credit card date needed to be updated, they kicked me off of the introductory pricing I was told I could keep forever. It's now about double that price (your price may vary for "reasons"). Then they killed Google Music in favor of the inferior YouTube Music.
I was excited about downloading videos for offline viewing, but it turns out I can't download them to my laptop (only to my phone), so that's a feature I won't use after all.
I'm not interested in the music streaming service or any of the other features, either.
So ad removal is the only feature I'm using. I would pay half of what they are charging currently for just ad removal alone, but since that's not an option, I am about to cancel the trial and return to traditional adblocking.
But they do it, and the market loves their numbers, so I suspect Google wants the same result.
Next day shipping depending on items can be from £2-3 pounds to over £10 and higher.
So depending on how often you shop on amazon you can save a fair amount on free next day deliveries alone.
The reason the market loves it I surpect is that it is saving people more than it costs to buy it.
Where as YouTube + music Saves people nothing but 5 seconds and a button click.
And for £12.99 a month it simply not worth it.
YouTube legitimately has better content library than any individual streaming service.
To me, that's way, way less valuable.
And it’s fine that people who ad block get the service for free but they’re going to be playing a cat and mouse game forever, the same way I could get the New York Times for free if I threw links at archive.is, but if I’m a regular reader that experience is going to suck to the point of a subscription being worth it.
I also think that all of these streaming services are so ridiculously affordable compared to most other life expenses. Nobody seems to mind spending $12 on one trip to McDonald’s or Starbucks for product that only lasts a fraction of a day but somehow a month of watching zero ads on YouTube with a few extra features thrown in isn’t worth the price.
I disabled adblock about a month before started my YouTube trial because I wanted to do a fair comparison. What I have found is that the removal of ads is simply not worth the $18/month YouTube Premium costs in my country. For that price, I would rather just see ads even without any adblocker.
There are a LOT of things I could spend $216 on that would give me more pleasure than not seeing YouTube ads for a year. Even better, I could just reconfigure my adblocker a couple of times a year (something I already do due to the malware arms race). That's way better than cutting $216 out of my hobby budget.
Now, if I had the option to get YouTube Premium (or some reduced version of that only offered ad removal) for about half the current price, then it would probably be worth it.
(And no, I do not buy fast food, either. It is more expensive and tastes worse than something I can whip together at home.)
Full premium is now the only option.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...