Its funny how we cant use VPNs but companies will go to the country with the lowest wages to get workers.
Companies are free to use labor from anywhere, but make sure we can’t get their products from anywhere.
I mean no one is stopping you from moving to another country.
Oooo, lies
I’ve never seen a company SO devoted to get me to not use their service. $2-$3 a month is worth not seeing ads in my mind. They’ve made their website SO user hostile and their prices are just too damned high to justify paying them - I can just go without.
If I could get Youtube Premium for $2-3, I’d probably pay. I don’t use it enough to justify spending $10 or whatever it is these days, so I block ads. If that stops working, I’ll stop watching Youtube.
I would even pay the 11,99€, in fact I did in the past. Youtube’s algorithms made me stop.
Spotify for example caters to my preferences. It took a bit to train it, but the weekly selection is spot on with lots of a variety, and they don’t try to shove pop music or other mainstream stuff into my face.
YouTube tries to suckme into a shit hole of craziness at every turn. It tries to make people dumber.
How did you manage to make Spotify not a steaming pile of garbage?
It was hard work, but a general rule is to like only songs that you could listen every day to, make playlists for everything else.
That’s definitely what I’ve done, but it recommends country daily despite my immense hatred for it.
Makes sense and probably all companies that do regional pricing have a rule for this, Steam explicitly states to not do this as well
You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.
Thinking how this affects the people living in those countries is the best solution
Blows my mind that to this day, companies don’t realize it’s a service issue. Like it’s straight up regressed. Adobe and Microsoft used to encourage piracy to help their bottom line. Now you have stupid PMs who realize they can get a good performance review by talking about how much money they’ll make/save from doing stuff like this
They realize it’s a service issue, they’re trying to corner the market so that they don’t have to care that it’s a service issue.
YouTube pretty much has that market cornered. It would take a lot of capital to start up a viable competitor, especially one that didn’t resort to ads and had some other kind of monetization scheme to support the sites existence and pay for all the storage servers.
This really is not a service issue. This is not a privacy issue.
YouTube as a service is … actually a great service, it pays creators well, it’s fast, it has decades of content, and it has tons of features.
It’s monetized with ads, you either watch those ads or you pay them. Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.
Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.
The internet’s most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs. So as much as I hate Google, i find nothing wrong with this.
that’s abuse of regional pricing
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.
Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.
So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.
Why wouldn’t high income areas be more expensive to serve?
Don’t they have to have local servers all around the world to even allow this instant-like transfer of videos for anyone to watch at anytime?
I actually don’t know the back end stuff so you might be able to explain this part.
Yes, but for companies like Google, the vast majority of systems administration and SRE work is done over the Internet from wherever staff are, not by someone locally (excluding things like physical rack installation or pulling fibre, which is a minority of total effort). And generally the costs of bandwidth and installing hardware is higher in places with a smaller tech industry. For example, when Google on-sells their compute services through GCP (which are likely proportional to costs) they charge about 20% more for an n1-highcpu-2 instance in Mumbai than in Oregon, US.
Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base? I haven’t seen much discussion around how to fairly set prices for any kind of service/good. Seems most people agree they should make a profit of some kind, and I’ve heard some rough rules suggested but it almost seems like the logical conclusion is that prioritizing profit is always bad for society.
Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base?
A business being in a position to be able to implement differential pricing (at least beyond how they divide up their fixed costs) is a sign that something is unfair. The unfairness is not how they implement differential pricing, but that they can do it at all and still have customers.
YouTube can implement differential pricing because there is a power imbalance between them and consumers - if the consumers want access to a lot of content provided by people other than YouTube through YouTube, YouTube is in a position to say ‘take it or leave it’ about their prices, and consumers do not have another reasonable choice.
The reason they have this imbalance of market power and can implement differential pricing is because there are significant barriers to entry to compete with YouTube, preventing the emergence of a field of competitors. If anyone on the Internet could easily spin up a clone of YouTube, and charge lower prices for the equivalent service, competitors would pop up and undercut YouTube on pricing.
The biggest barrier is network effects - YouTube has the most users because they have the most content. They have the most content because people only upload it to them because they have the most users. So this becomes a cycle that helps YouTube and hinders competitors.
This is a classic case where regulators should step in. Imagine if large video providers were required to federated uploaded content on ActivityPub, and anyone could set up their own YouTube competitor with all the content. The price of the cheapest YouTube clones (which would have all the same content as YouTube) would quickly drop, and no one would have a reason to use YouTube.
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers
And right there I’m done with your comment. Regional pricing is incredibly important, without it everyone pays the US or EU price and there is no service provided period.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
Even if true, that’s not what this hoopla is about. It’s about someone from say … the US using a VPN to get Kenyan pricing. As another person said “The internet’s most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs.”
Regional pricing is the only reason people in these countries even stand a chance at access to the service (because ultimately their costs might be a bit lower in these countries but not by much … I would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark). People in other countries abusing those slashed prices threatens the whole system.
This is people in “first world” countries trying to rig the system: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/15hz5ys/found_country_that_works_to_get_youtube_premium/
Someone in Uzbekistan for instance would feel as the average US consumer would if a year of YouTube premium was $829.
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would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark
And in the efficient market, that’s how much the service would cost for everyone, because otherwise I could just go to a competitor of YouTube for less, and YouTube would have to lower their pricing to get customers, and so on until no one can lose their prices without losing money.
Unfortunately, efficient markets are just a neoliberal fantasy. In real life, there are network effects - YouTube has people uploading videos to it because it has the most viewers, and it has the most viewers because it has the most videos. It’s practically impossible for anyone to compete with them effectively because of this, and this is why they can put their prices in some regions up to get more profit. The proper solution is for regulators to step in and require things like data portability (e.g. requiring monopolists to publish videos they receive over open standards like ActivityPub), but regulatory capture makes that unlikely. In a just world, this would happen and their pricing would be close to the costs of running the platform.
So the people paying higher regional prices are paying money in a just world they shouldn’t have to pay, while those using VPNs to pay less are paying an amount closer to what it should be in a just world. That makes the VPN users people mitigating Google’s abuse, not abusers.
My main concern is that they sometimes serve ads that redirect to porn, even if you aren’t signed in, and that’s not the type of ad I want to see, especially if I’m watching a video about cooking. By this alone I wouldn’t want to use YouTube, but as they practically have a monopoly on video streaming it’s not really viable to boycott them without giving up on user generated videos
You’re getting down voted, but you are mostly correct.
I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.
The thing is, Google isn’t dumb. They’ve user tested this strategy and they know it results in higher revenue.
And the enshitification continues…for those that don’t pay
You can pay to have less ad, but you’re still also paying with your data. Bet pretty soon it will be pay and have ads, or pay more again. They have a captive market. They can extract and extract.
I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.
I do agree but their costs have also skyrocketed because the resolution and frame rate of videos has skyrocketed.
Linus Tech Tips did a video about this … which agree with his conclusions or not, he paints a clear picture about how YouTube is more expensive to run than it used to be https://youtu.be/MDsJJRNXjYI
Google also isn’t in the business of “running things at a loss in hopes of future profit” anymore … so they need YouTube to be profitable. Maybe it’s “too profitable”, maybe they could cut down on the amount of advertising they use … but you’re absolutely right that they do test this stuff and find the threshold between “annoying but profitable” and “annoying but we’re losing users.”
More competition is always good … but Google isn’t stopping competition from showing up, just like Valve isn’t stopping competition from showing up, they’re just providing a better service that creators keep coming back to (because it’s ultimately good for those same creators to get their content out there and monetize it).
no company would accept that.
Except for a company that understands going after these people won’t benefit them?
Literally read about regional pricing and how important it is. It’s incredibly ignorant to be against regional pricing.
The alternative to regional pricing is people just don’t have access at all.
I realize they charge what people are willing to pay, but can someone explain to me why YouTube costs just a couple USD a month in some countries and almost $20 a month in the US?
Are operating costs cheaper in those countries? Are they taking a loss in those counties? Or are they just price gouging in the US?
If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.
If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.
That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.
Some media companies called it piracy even if you’re doing it to get paid access content they aren’t offering in your country 🤷
Thanks. That’s something I hadn’t thought of.
I’m sort of more moderate when it comes to paying Google to access YouTube. I’m happy to pay for products that I use. I want Google and creators to be rewarded for services rendered, but the prices are double what they should be.
I’m one of the people who used the VPN to get Premium at an affordable rate even though I have Ublock and know about other options.
My Premium account did get canceled. I was able to sign back up via another location, but if they push me out again, I would just revert to adblockers.
I suspect other users who signed up with a VPN are like me. We are the few who know how to get around the ads but want to pay, if we can. Just a guess though.
In theory the service operating costs could be spread across region differences such that in other areas it was at a loss to build and preserve market share and in richer areas it was making up for that.
But yes, in reality it’s just exploitative “what we think we can get away with” pricing to “maximize shareholder value” (which is largely BS as the vast holders of shares are very small clusters of the population but people with a handful of shares in their 401k think that statement is talking about them).
Well they are charging a premium for the service everywhere and more so in certain countries which can afford it but a big part is that in some countries people may only earn a few USD a day so they would not be able to afford it otherwise. I can’t speak on whether or not they are taking a loss in those countries, but i can’t imagine that they have a problem due to existing infrastructure from google all across the world.
The only thing VPN’s are good for anymore is hiding torrents. That’s it.
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Nah, my company doesn’t allow torrenting movies so a corporate VPN is useless
Couldn’t you secretly hook up with the boss’s wife and give her the most intense orgasm of her life, so she’ll do anything for you, and you use her to ask her husband he should allow torrenting or else she will get a divorce, so he’ll allow torrenting and then the VPN would become useful?
Solid 1980s movie strategy
Also good for getting to pornhub.com if you live in one of the states they’ve blocked.
If you have an iPhone or iPad you don’t even need to use a VPN to get cheap Premium. Just make an new Apple ID with an Indian address, top it up by buying a digital Apple Card on Amazon.in and redeeming it to your Indian account in iTunes on a computer. Then on your iPad or iPhone go to your Apple ID in the settings, log out of Media and Purchases and login with the Indian account. Then you can buy Premium in the YouTube app with your Rupees, you don’t even need to change your YouTube account.
I can do even better. I can hook you up with a free lifetime account, but I’m having a problem with my bank account this week. But I’ll send you $6000 dollars if you just send me $5000 back. Yeah I know it sounds weird but I’m really not hard up for cash I just can’t get my cash out of the bank at this moment so I need your help. Hit me up and we’ll figure something out, and I’ll get you that free lifetime subscription.
/s missing
I’d rather not use youtube than give them money for it or even sit through their intrusive ads. There are infinite ways to entertain myself.
I mean… that is the point.
Pay for premium, watch ads, or don’t watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree that YouTube wants their platform to shrink. Even if you don’t watch ads you are still giving them your data which they can monetize.
Personally I would be willing to pay for YouTube premium but not under the current terms. 1. If I’m paying for the service they should no longer collect and sell my data. 2. Allow me to have a YouTube-only account not connected to other Google services and 3. The current pricing is a bit high.
They can offer these terms or I’ll continue to use them logged out with Adblock. Or they can continue to enshitify and eventually their platform will start to shrink which will make the data they sell to advertisers less valuable.
I was actually offered by Google to separate my Google Services and their associated data from each other. I immediately took that offer, of course. Might just be an EU thing tho, idk.
Their platform won’t shrink. You and I may care enough to stop using it (very skeptical personally tbh) but 99.9999999999999999999999 percent of people don’t give a flying fuck and there’s more users being born every day.
That’d be well and good if they didn’t have a monopoly.
It’s not a pure monopoly by choice. While it’s true Youtube has a monopoly in terms of number of creators, viewers and content, it’s still not a profitable venture. I heard it was burning through money to keep up with the sheer amount of content they have to deal with. Youtube is doing all this monetization now because they have ran out of VC money and upper management decided that it needs to be self-sustaining. Even the obscene amount of data Alphabet is gathering from Youtube does not create enough revenue to generate profit. But it’s a “too-big-to-fail” product now so Alphabet will continue to invest. Competitors saw all of this and just noped out.
Other commercial video services, like Nebula, have popped up but they are subscription-oriented right from the get-go, like Netflix. This means they have a very small audience and it will take years to build up an audience like Youtube. So I don’t see them growing, at least in the near future.
This very much feels like disloyal competition. If you burn through your money in the hopes of sweeping out the competitors, and then you have to dial back on your competitor’s practices, it’s a dead giveaway you’ve done something fishy
Yup, but that is quite literally the name of the game in Silicon Valley.
they have ran out of VC money
You know YouTube is owned by Google, not VC firms right?
Big companies sometimes keep a division / subsidiary less profitable for a time for a strategic reason, and then tighten the screws.
They generally only do this if they believe it will eventually be profitable over the long term (or support another part of the strategy so it is profitable overall). Otherwise they would have sold / shut it down earlier - the plan is always going to be to profitable.
However, while an unprofitable business always means either a plan to tighten screws, or to sell it / shut it down, tightening screws doesn’t mean it is unprofitable. They always want to be more profitable, even if they already are.
it’s still not a profitable venture
Source? My understanding is that Google doesn’t publish Youtube’s expenses directly but that Youtube has been responsible for 10% of Google’s revenue for the past few years (on the order of $31.5 Billion in 2023) and that it’s more likely than not profitable when looked at in isolation.
I guess, no one NEEDS a video streaming platform. It’s not like a transportation or a food or power company monopoly, it’s one specific form of entertainment. Try going outside?
I guess, no one NEEDS a video streaming platform.
Nobody NEEDS social media, but when a social media does something harmful, they need to be regulated.
Not quite. Google doesn’t want competition or content creators to be elsewhere.
There is nowhere else. The only other companies that can consider a YouTube scale product already noped out.
A decentralized apporch: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
Yeah…
How often do images “not load” when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.
Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive…).
And it is why the various “youtube alternatives” like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don’t have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.
And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.
I feel like the true decentralised approach to video that may work… Are torrents. Don’t know if PeerTube works that way, but if you’re allowing people to eat your bandwidth with direct streaming, you’re gonna run into problems sooner or later.
Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.
Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.
And it also doesn’t work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but… it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM “for the lolz”
There are free alternatives like odysee, but creators have no incentive to move there
I specified intrusive ads. They could have non-intrusive ads, like a little banner or something. Instead they put up multiple video ads before and during videos. No thanks.
Don’t forget after! Man I hate that when I have to sit through an ad if I don’t realize the video is all the way over yet, or I don’t change it in time
I mean, it is great that you have very specific rules in terms of what kind of ads you will tolerate. You should write a letter to John Google about that.
But also? We have been through all this before. Back in the day, ads on websites were incredibly unobtrusive. A small png at the top of the page that everyone skimmed past. But people still wanted to block those because only the evil sites were sellouts who needed to pay for hosting and blah blah blah. Which more or less started the ad war we have going to today. First they were simple jpegs. Then they were animated gifs. Then they were annoying animated gifs. Then they became flash ads. Then they became flash ads about how this shitty age of empires ripoff totally has boobs. And so forth.
Because if people aren’t looking at ads? The people who buy ads know that. So we get ads that are harder to look away from. Until they are ads we can’t look away from because they are embedded in the videos themselves.
And, until we live in a post scarcity society where energy is infinite, it is going to cost money/resources to host web content. Ads are still the closest thing to an “effective” way to pay for a lot of that. And that means a war to have ads that get past ad blockers and ensure eyes get on them.
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What really started the ad war was the endless drive for greater profits. Let’s say I accept youtube’s terms and sign up for premium. Sooner or later they will introduce ads into premium as well. We’ve seen this process happen with many other services before. I didn’t start using an ad blocker until quite a bit after pop-ups were rampant and malware-infested ads became an issue. There’s a point where it becomes too much and people will seek out alternatives. An entire generation grew up with convenient streaming services and they’re generally less knowledgeable about piracy than the generation before them. That will likely change as those streaming services continue to jack up prices while making the experience worse all in the name of profit.
Again, there is an endless supply of entertainment these days. If companies think they can endlessly jack up prices and/or worsen the experience, they’re contending with practically infinite supply, the consequences of which are obvious in when it comes to supply vs demand.
Were the ad companies interested in increased profits? Of course they were. But they also aren’t a charity. And when they are buying ad space for a web comic but having zero impressions, they are going to be pissed. They aren’t running a charity (well… some actually ARE but that is a different mess).
Again, this has been going on well before subscription models were even a thing.
That said, I do agree that it is a generational “problem”. Youtube has been around for almost 20 years and, arguably, in its current form for almost 10. Significant parts of the internet have no memory of anything else. Like, my niece and nephew literally throw tantrums when they see tv commercials when their father is watching a football game. Whereas my sister and I remember the fights over who got to use the downstairs bathroom during the second commercial break in The Simpsons that week.
But… I am an old. I remember heartfelt blog posts from some of my favorite webcomics and gaming news sites that were basically “Look. Hosting costs money. Especially as we are getting a lot more popular. I go out of my way to curate what ads we run on this site and have an inbox set up in case a company sneaks a bad one in. Please whitelist me in your ad blocker so I can keep doing this in the evenings”.
And… I dunno. It is just REALLY frustrating to watch people pretend they care about… anything all while dicking over “the little guys”. Because Google is going to get their cut. The pewdiepies of youtube will also get their cuts because they have literally been doing this for years in the form of sponsored videos. But the low/mid tier creators? They aren’t getting the massive sponsor deals (unless they want to do raid shadow legends or better help) AND are going to not be getting their ad revenue or youtube premium money because no ads were run.
I keep saying it. Privacy invasive, targeted advertising has got to be barely worth the cost of maintaining it. Why else is Google trying to put more ads in places, kill ad blockers on chrome, force expats out of subscriptions, and experiment with unskippable ads if not to try and invent some kind of additional value to advertisers out of nothing.
Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What’s happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.
YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube’s losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.
But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.
And this is what it looks like.
As for risking competition, at this point, I don’t think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.
I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There’s a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That’s what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.
NewPipe, no problems.
Tubular is better. It’s a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock built-in.
That’s how it’s called now?
Yes. The NewPipe x SponsorBlock repo is archived and there’s a message in the README saying:
Development Has Stopped
This fork is old and no longer maintained. See Tubular, a new fork of NewPipe.
They did not get me yet 🥳 (I don‘t Know why)
You can use NewPipe or Tubular for Android
Also there is https://piped.video/trending for watching in browser and Revanced on Android
And for anyone using YouTube Music there is Desktop app for Linux,MacOS and Windows https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music
LibreTube is also a good one. Basically an app for piped
Less reason to subscribe then!
Is there an automated bot to archive channels from YouTube and upload them to Peertube?
If one does that, be prepared to defend yourself against the copyright infringement lawsuit that’s coming your way eventually.
Read my comment on doing it over TOR. If you have a trusty VPS, encrypt your LVM with LUKS and use that for scratch storage.
Not that I know of but I could create something. I would feel icky if I didn’t get the creators approval first however.
There are repos on GitHub that pull the videos and metadata, not sure about posting to Peerhub, though if that’s possible to post via an api you could probably script it easily enough. Likely a risk of other “issues” doing so, but I’m sure some datahoarders could chime in.
I’d run this on a VPS if I could do it over the TOR network (don’t want to get caught with my CC on the line), but there’s the problem of needless duplication if this happens, so it’s likely the best if relevant authors do it themselves
BitLaunch lets you rent a VPS with crypto currency
I’d prefer XMR
Same, but you can always use Trocador to convert your XMR to other coins. Alternatively there are some ways to anonymously acquire BTC.
Had never heard of it, thanks. I prefer DEXes for crypto (XMR only now)
It’s not perfect, there are some conversion fees, but it should be ok. I use it from time to time to pay for my seedbox.
