I feel like a simple middleground is youtube charging creators to host their video catalogs. Storage space isn't free but it is relatively cheap — like a couple bucks per 100gb or something. There's enough incentive to upload videos to justify the cost, and for full time creators it's just drop in the bucket. Then give free youtube all the functionality that premium has (like queues which should just be built into the app). In this tier you can keep like a mid roll or something and make youtube premium have 0 ads and 4k video

by Anonymous 8 months ago

Like you said, storage is cheap. The real expense is streaming the video, especially to an international audience at scale.

by Anonymous 8 months ago

paying for storage would still offset the cost a decent bit

by Anonymous 8 months ago

Storage may be cheap, but who knows just how many terabytes it takes to store every YouTube video out there. There are videos going as far back as 2005 still on the site, and now 4k videos are getting more common than ever (1 hour of 4k video takes roughly 23GB). Not to even mention all the streamers that reupload their VODs that lasts multiple hours each.

by Anonymous 8 months ago

$5/mo would be a good deal, $10/mo would be acceptable. I'm not doing $14/mo right now. I have Amazon prime and it's $7/mo through discount.

by Anonymous 8 months ago

Youtube ads wouldn't be a big problem if they didn't force me to watch 2 15 second unskippabe ads every time I watched a video. And then I'm going to have ads at points throughout the video.

by Anonymous 8 months ago

Oh sweet honey child, google is doing fine without showing malware and hoaxes down every throat.

by Anonymous 8 months ago

Well, I'm paying ~3.6 USD but that's with a 40% student discount AND I live in a country where it's already cheap

by Anonymous 8 months ago

If they had a YTTV and YT premium combo I would jump on that.

by Anonymous 8 months ago

For the ads that play for like 15 seconds before you can skip it? You're paying 15 bucks to skip 15 seconds ?

by Anonymous 8 months ago

I split the cost with a friend, hehe. Plus i use youtube quite a lot, for audiobooks, podcasts, etc. So it would be expensive at 15, but half of it is fine by me

by Anonymous 8 months ago

I am playing for YT+, but started doing it for YT Music. I dont use Spotify. Having no adds on YT was a nice bonus.

by Anonymous 8 months ago

They pay full royalties for YouTube music

by Anonymous 8 months ago

>Of course the amount of Advertising can often be overwhelming, but this could be directly related to the amount of income they need to generate. Alphabet needs to structure their business so that each aplication can sustain on their own, Google, Youtube, Drive and so on... This isn't true. They just try to maximize shareholder value. How that is done is not a totally predictable thing. I've always been surprised at how many people do not understand prices. There is no such thing as a "fair" price any more than there is a "fair" table or a "fair" baseball cap or a "fair" day at the park. Something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and what is paid is the price. Prices are only in certain circumstances related to production costs and such a relation cannot be generalized.

by Anonymous 8 months ago