YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

YouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.

It's by far the best value of any of the streaming media services.

Yeah, I will unabashedly shill for YouTube Premium. It’s cheap, it pays video creators more than ads do, and it includes YouTube Music so you can ditch Spotify.

Still has a nefarious algorithm.

Paying 13 bucks per month, which is a non trivial amount for a lot of people if it competes with other subcription services, merely to block ads on a website that doesn't even produce its own content is in my opinion one of the worst deals on the internet.

That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?

A family plan says it's $23/month. That's well over the cost of a 3 lb tin from Costco ($18.69 by me), which is several weeks if not a month of cold brew.

> doesn't even produce its own content

How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?

We're kind of getting off track here, but a 3-lb tin of preground coffee is not going to taste very good by the time you finish it, if it ever tastes good at all. It's pretty likely to be low-quality and stale before you even pull it off the shelf.

I assume with the same amount of magic as they do at all the other streaming platforms, but they still manage to serve up original content. Hence, as a consumer, this seems like a shoddy deal. You're basically paying for ad-free slop, which by the way like Amazon these days you have to crawl through an entire mountain of because the site barely has any content management features either

And tracking.

We're comparing two different companies here. Netflix et al, are in the business of producing original content (good for them), while YouTube et al are in the business of serving user-generated content.

That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.

Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

the entire point is that in this analogy youtube is quite literally the mega chain self serving restaurant on the most decrepit corner, somehow charging you premium prices despite you having to refill your own water.

They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food

I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.

Netflix costs around double of Youtube Premium for the technical equivalent experience (No ads, UHD playback). It's not like they're charging the same amount for some much better service.

It's interesting to see such different experiences.

To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.

Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.

> you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food

Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?

I might be convinced here, I was under the impression that even after you bought premium you would still see ads

People make the videos, and then sometimes youtube pays them for it.

Whole bean is the same price

People make videos because there is a platform which makes it incredibly easy to share that video all across the planet without cost to them. And in turn that platform has an enormous base of viewers for that content. To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.

there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.

meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.

> To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.

It could be ludicrous, if that argument were being made.