YouTube premium is great, I'm surprised it's not more popular. I'd cut my Spotify subscription way before YouTube, but that's not what I typically hear from my friends.

Spotify = Streaming music $12/month YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.

It’s not popular because it’s incredibly expensive. For $12/month you get:

- No ads

- Minor usability improvements to the app

- “premium” content

- YouTube Music

The “premium” content is trash and YouTube Music is the worst music app with any significant effort put behind it, in addition to being a significant step down from Google‘s previous offering.

Most people would rather deal with the ads.

If youtube premium allowed you to access _all_ member's only videos on all channels, then it's be worth it.

It's not popular here because "YouTube Premium is not available in your country"

Also, I'd rather not feed the monopoly even more.

YouTube Music is a joke.

Really? I get my best music recommendations from normal YouTube. I figured their music service would be solid. Apple Music which I primarily use can’t find me new artists that I like, and when I had Spotify it was awful.

Really? I get the total opossite. Spotify keeps letting me find amazing bands with just 2 years if learning my taste. Youtube keeps telling me I want to watch the same music videos over and over.

YouTube premium is great - I wish I could pay for ad free Twitter.

Being able to pay for a service without ads is worth it.

Users complaining about a free ad subsidized service come across as unreasonable to me (and maybe a little entitled).

The most annoying part to me about ads on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram is just how hard it's pushed. You get 1 piece of content in your feed before an ad. The ads always use rich media so they'll take up 2x the space of a typical tweet for example so you get 1 person's post, followed by 2/3rds of your screen taken for an ad. Let me see like 3-5 posts from accounts I care about you fucking vultures.

I am happy with ads, but you probably have never been hit by a 30 min sponsored video at the beginning of a youtube video.

The ads turn the whole watching experience into a remote-searching minigame. I'd much rather have unskippable, but reasonably long ads.

How does this comment make sense as a reply? Obviously he has never been hit by one of those because he pays for Youtube and gets the ad free version. Same as me.

The real problem with that model, I think, is that the people who can afford to pay to opt out are the same people that are most valuable as ad recipients.

It's not really a problem when the model is to focus on making a great experience for paying users and just dumping ads on free users.

The revenue generation focus and incentive alignment is with paying users not advertisers. If the ads don't make as much money or have a more limited audience that's fine.

Obviously the entirety of Google is structured so this isn't the case, but in products I like better than Google products (Substack, Spotify, Apple) the focus is on paying customers. Ads, if they exist at all, are only on freemium versions of the product.

Twitter doesn't include ads in their API, so all 3rd-party clients are ad-free (unless they include their own ads)

Nitter is great for avoiding ads.

For me, the biggest plus of YouTube Premium is supporting the creators. Almost every initiative to pay a large number of blogs and creators at once has failed because it's too difficult to get them all to sign on and distribute money to all of them. YouTube is a monopoly for better and worse, so it was easier for them to implement ad-free for almost every video creator.

I wish Google Contributor could live up to the same promise, but Google killed it and replaced it with a different version. It made you a participant in the bidding process for your own ad views. So unless an advertiser was bidding a crazy amount of money, you would win the bid and an empty ad (or no ad at all) would load instead. Like YouTube Premium, this took advantage of the existing ad payment infrastructure while removing almost all the ads from your pages and videos.

The content creator is much better off being paid directly via a donation, or for the viewer to purchase merch.

Youtube premium is utter trash due to the way the money is split.

Opportunity costs can only be considered if you could (and would) monetize your extra time. It's not the case for most people.

plus, you still support the content creators whereas adblockers do not.