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Lemmy users when I mention I pay for Youtube Premium
(startrek.website)
Somehow paying for Netflix is fine but god forbid I want to watch a 10 hour loop of the DS9 intro without ads.
Thats one way to look at it.
The other way is to compare it to the free netflix tier... which doesnt exist.
IMO even being pestered to death I'm slightly amazed that its still free at all.
The problem with this point of view is that Netflix either produces its own content or rents content from other producers. YouTube doesn't produce its own content and also doesn't rent content from producers... it only pays them a percentage of ad revenue (to be comparable to Netflix, YouTube would have to pay creators up front regardless of ad revenue they generate). YouTube profits from the content production of its users, and doesn't actually pay a fair amount for it. For them to charge for access to that content is just... egregious.
People post their content to YT for 3 primary reasons
Hosting is free. (In which case they are implicitly giving YT permission to profit off them in return for not charging hosting fees.
They want the largest possible potential audience. Which YT spent a mind boggling amount of money and effort to build. (Although I do wish they had some form of legitimate competition, cant argue that point)
They want to make money off the advertising revenue. (Which aside from Floatplane, is next to impossible to do otherwise)
There is nothing stopping content creators from hosting their own videos on their own servers they pay for but they dont. Because how do you generate the traffic? How do you get clickthroughs? How do you generate income, or just cover expenses?
YT dont owe you anything for free. Its not egregious, its business.
You're not a musician, are you?
Because what you just described is just the classic: "Oh, we're not going to pay you for this gig. You're getting paid in exposure. Sorry kid, just business."
So dont upload your stuff to that platform or make sure you use their platform to make the exposure work for you to generate money. If you can name another service that will put you in front of 122 million daily users and 2.7 BILLION global users I'd love to hear about it.
Justin Bieber was discovered on YT, Linus Sebastian just rejected a $100,000,000 offer for the media company he built largely on Youtubes back and Mighty Car Mods makes an estimated $46k a month. Youtube is not a public service. If you dont like it, dont use it. If you do use it, make it work for you.
While I use piped myself I am k with their business model, its just degrading every year making the experience worse for everyone. YouTube can't be compared to Netflix if you look at the bandwidth and the amount of users who don't pay for it. Hosting such a huge video sharing platform for free will never be profitable and the only other way is to make it paid only like Netflix which is obviously not gonna happen. Yeah they have 0 morals, yeah google sucks ass, yeah they treat their users like pigs but wishing it should be completely free with no ads is just wishful thinking.
I want to bookmark this comment as my thoughts on this are basically the same but I'm sure I'll forget it the next time I need to put it into words.
Also, I don't think wanting everything to be paid is a good idea in the world we live in, although I can't think of a world where there's only a paid option is a good idea. What I mean is that there was a time when I benefitted from the free access to information that the internet provided, now things have evolved to be a bad version of that with widespread misinformation and really egregious ads; but that old internet with ads only there to recoup the hosting costs and people sharing information for the joy of it will always be something I'll argue for.
P.S. I am not opposed to a better internet than what we had but for that there are changes needed to the rest of the world that won't come any time soon, otherwise what we had was the ideal version.
I think there always will be free access to information in some form but video hosting specifically is simply too expensive when it grows to the size of YouTube. If you aren't paying for something and it isn't run by donations, you're likely paying it with your personal info or time. I personally wouldn't mind paying for a service like YouTube but the content I watch are simply nowhere else to find so piped is the closest thing I have now.
I pay for YouTube, so you won't find disagreement from me. Optional paid versions are okay to me, though I do wish ads weren't just so awful (scams, viruses, etc)