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Comment by saltyoldman | Hacker News Reader

What frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month.

Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NOT. It's a fucking scam to make us pay a premium.

I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...

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My guess is that the $2/user/month thing is an average across all of the users, and the fact that you use YouTube enough to even consider to pay to go ad free puts you in the much higher range of dollars-per-month users such that $14/month may even lose them money.

Yes it's a very broad global average. Advertisers pay much more for North American users, then European users.

And the ones they want to reach the most are the same ones willing to pay for a subscription to remove ads.

FWIW, YouTube Premium Lite is $8/month. It removes ads from most content, just not music, and doesn’t include YouTube Music. For me it’s well worth it.

Presumably because advertisers won't continue to pay $2/user/month for a pool of users that has been denuded of all the users with three bucks a month to rub together for ad-free YouTube.

Unless you have some first hand information that I have, you are more than 10x off.

> I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...

There in lies the problem. Your eye balls (assuming well employed with $$$ disposable income) is another 10x worth to advertisers.

If I were to make a guess, Youtube for sure will lose money at $14/month on your specific browser.

You are literally subsidizing internet for, let us say for arguments sake, some zip code in rural america or <sub any rural part of the world> 's Youtube streaming needs.

At least in my case, I had Youtube Red and would watch a few hours of content per day. Then I canceled and found the ads so unreasonable that I just stopped using youtube altogether. Now they make no money from me.

There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.

Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).

The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.

----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.

By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.

I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.

I think that's the angle I'm going for. If Youtube was $25 per year or even $50 per year, it would be a no-brainer for me to pay that. Even if 50 does NOT outbid the advertiser, wouldn't YT rather have guaranteed income rather than trying to constantly find high bidders.

Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"

And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.

What if they dropped the average price of YouTube Premium to $2? And charged you $20 but people in Africa $1. Then it’d be more comparable to ad revenue. Would you be happier then?

What if?

That's exactly what they do. It's 80c/month in Argentina.

Indeed, so what’s OP complaining about?

...And you'll find that when you do so magically you seem to get logged out more frequently, and because of their UI, you likely won't notice until the sneaking suspicion the quality of your recommendations has dropped catches up with you

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