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Comment by lyu07282 | Hacker News Reader

But it's not like there was an ad-powered version of cable that you paid to get out of. The entire point of premium is to not see ads, why would anyone still pay for premium if it had ads?

Or is it like the free users see 40min/hour ads and the premium users see 20min/hour? But then why wouldn't they just let me pay extra to see 0min/hour? Like that's what Prime Video did. It ended up just being a price increase in their case.

> the most valuable customers are those that will pay not to see ads

Yes like me, but the point is, I would always be willing to pay them more not to see ads than they would've ever made from me watching the ads in the first place.

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> But it's not like there was an ad-powered version of cable that you paid to get out of. The entire point of premium is to not see ads, why would anyone still pay for premium if it had ads?

that was the point of cable.

Regular TV over the airwaves was "free", supported by the ads, but you could pay cable providers for their "premium" channels that had no advertising.

Until they did. Just a few at first, but it went on from there, as these things always do.

edit: I didn't even notice the second part of your message:

> I would always be willing to pay them more not to see ads than they would've ever made from me watching the ads in the first place.

This plus infinite gullibility is the only reason why they have a business model. They will keep making it worse and worse and still raising the price forever, and it's only because people keep handing them more money whenever they ask.

I thought you paid for the premium content, like there wasn't a free ad-powered version of HBO I thought?

> This plus infinite gullibility is the only reason why they have a business model. They will keep making it worse and worse and still raising the price forever, and it's only because people keep handing them more money whenever they ask.

That's a separate argument, the assumption was that they will no longer give you that option, to pay for ad-free YouTube and I still don't see that happening.

But also yes obviously, eventually everyone who is willing to pay for premium is paying but they still have to make more profit so they going to raise prices indefinitely. Duh.

> I would always be willing to pay them more not to see ads than they would've ever made from me watching the ads in the first place.

You cannot afford it. There’s an advertiser willing to pay more than your net worth on a campaign.

> But it's not like there was an ad-powered version of cable that you paid to get out of.

It was called "broadcast television".

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/11/us/advertisers-look-close...

I think it's free users see 20 mins a hour, and YouTube premium users see a banner ad for NFL Sunday.

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