Edit: Since you guys are downvoting my post, I'll assume my post does not belong here, because I represent a POPULAR opinion. Remember "ah yes, this is unpopular = upvote" "wait no, everyone likes nutella with butter, popular opinion = downvote"
YouTube Premium is a good deal for most regular YouTube users.
I don't think there's much of a debate here, yet most people seem to disagree with me
Pricing: Absolutely fair IMO. Think about other streaming services. Netflix is more expesive, even music streaming services are barely cheaper. If you can't afford the single pricing, get a family plan, share with whoever you trust enough. How many videos do you watch in one month? How many minutes of ads is that? Likely quite a few minutes.
Who gets the money?: What did you expect? A lot of it goes to YouTube -> Alphabet/Google. Of course it does. Hosting a seemingly unlimited amount of on demand fullHD or even 4k videos and streams for a MASSIVE userbase is not cheap. Still, content creators do report that YouTube premium earnings per viewer are way more valuable than YouTube free earnings per viewer. So, I fail to see the problem.
Financially supporting Alphabet/Google: I mean, yeah, they aren't the greatest company, I'm with you on that. If you have a problem with supporting such a company, don't use their services. If you don't pay for them with money, you pay with time by watching ads. If you do neither, you're basically commiting petty theft. The victim being a "bad" company doesn't make that better.
Using AdBlock: Like I just said, that's petty theft and it's not okay just because you're doing it to a big bad company. Running YouTube costs money, if more people use it, it costs more. If nobody pays for it, it's dead. Additionally, if nobody pays, no content creator earns money. That's a secondary effect, as you could still pay creators directly.
Paying creators directly: If you do that, good on you, good on the creators. If everyone uses AdBlock with that, say bye to YouTube. Creators will use another hosting platform, either like YouTube (rinse and repeat) or selfhosted.
Content creators host their own content: That would be so so bad. The overlap of "content creator", "able to selfhost" and "willing to selfhost" is small. Anyway, even if everyone pulled it off, most would go out of business for sure. Also, have fun browsing videos if everyone selfhosts. We'd need a global platform for browsing now:)
YT premium paywalls features: Yes. So? Heard of Bitwarden? People love that company for their generous services. Even they paywall features like TOTP and emergency contacts. Paywalling features is normal. In fact, it's to be expected. Just because something was free once doesn't mean it should still be free. Just because a part of it is free doesn't mean everything about it should be free.
The YouTube App sucks / YT Music sucks: Nobody forces you to use it. But if you do, clearly you see some value there. Pay for it in some way if they request you do so.
Tell me why I'm wrong.
I found my self in the last few years to be an avid YouTube content consumer and I can say that yes, the premium is worth it because most of the content I consume is on the TV and I have not found an easy way to do it otherwise. I could go the piped tube route but I’ve got kids and its the only reliable way I’ve found to shield them from ads and have some kind of control to what they access etc (parental control have become really good in recent years). Sure, It’s not perfect but it’s one of the only 3 subscription I pay for (again, for the kids convenience more than anything). I wish all good content creators migrated to nebula or other similar platforms but that doesn’t look like it’ll happen anytime soon. I wish a YouTube-like fediverse would take hold and prosper but YouTube has huge momentum for the time being and, at the end of the day, servers and their operating costs are not nothing. It’s an unpopular opinion but it is valid.
I think there's SmartTube for smartTv's. Not sure how parental control stuff works.
Yeah, Nebula is great. But other than being not Google, their platform works in similar ways. You pay, you get content.. I mean, how could they even change that anyway?
Yeah I recently switched from the shieldTV to Apple TV so my choices have become rather limited on that front, all for the convenience of use.