No, you see this is different from when google puts their headquarter in a different country to where they are working to pay less taxes because that’s … uh … just pay your 17 bucks and stop complaining.
Absolutely correct decision. YouTube is just so incredibly poor. They really need money guys. In fact, we should set up a donations page to support this great organization that totally respects its users and artists while being very strict against spam, dangerous misinformation and state funded propaganda! /s
They are so poor and so small that they can’t curate the content and ads, it’s just too much with only billions of dollars of profit to work with.
That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.
At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone’s pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It’s just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.
Not approving of any corporate behaviours here, but extracting the maximum price a market will bear has been the basis of pricing and supply/demand since such concepts existed which is at least 250 years.
I don’t disagree but it seems to me it’s going crescendo, with de facto monopolies running the show and buying anything that could be an obstacle, be it other companies or policymakers.
So if it makes sense to charge people in India 1/4 the people in the US why can’t we pretend we are in India? People travel to other continents for healthcare.
Novel take, I agree though I’m sure it will b controversial.
If anyone wants to keep going with this, try Google Play Gift Cards for said countries. You can pay for it via gift card balances, You can find them in key selling websites, or have someone you know in those countries buy gift cards.
Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.
There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.
I get what you are saying, but I just can’t get too upset about it in this case for some reason.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It sounds like the jig is up for YouTube users who snagged cheaper Premium memberships by obscuring their location with virtual private networks (VPNs).
In the U.S., Google charges individual users $14 per month for YouTube Premium, which limits ads and offers a few additional features.
But that price varies widely across locales, and some Reddit users say they once managed to snag better deals by pretending to access the service from other countries, PCMag and TechCrunch reported.
Google charges the equivalent of $3 per month or less in places such as Argentina, India, Turkey, Ukraine, and the Philippines, according to Android Authority.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter, but the internet giant’s support staff reportedly told PCMag that YouTube recently started cancelling premium plans “for accounts identified as having falsified signup country information.” A YouTube Help page directs would-be subscribers to turn their VPN off if they get an error while signing up for Premium.
Google also recently escalated its crackdown on ad blockers by making YouTube videos unwatchable for users of services like AdBlock.
The original article contains 264 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 31%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Where are you getting that from? YouTube premium is ad free (so far).
The link I posted said this:
In the U.S., Google charges individual users $14 per month for YouTube Premium, which limits ads and offers a few additional features.
So it ‘limits ads’ which means there are still ads.
It’s a poorly worded article. YouTube premium “limits ads” as in being completely ad free (besides in-video sponsorships). YouTube hasn’t gone down that route yet.
YouTube hasn’t gone down that route yet.
And if they ever do, I’m sure at least 90% of premium users will cancel immediately. I like the quality of the curated channels I subscribe, but I won’t die if I don’t watch YouTube anymore. In the end it’s just the same type of content that could be a blog just as well, but unfortunately most people nowadays don’t read anymore.
Generally an Unpopular opinion, but I think this should include creator ads (or at least an option per creator to support them by turning on their own ads).
Defaulted to off , I don’t want to watch a random videos AG1 ad. That said there are a couple creators I watch I would be willing to enable theirs strictly to support them.
Because if I’m paying for ad removal it should be complete ad removal.
I don’t think it’s an unpopular opinion, but I’m not sure how YouTube can deal with it best. There’s sponsor block, but it’s relying on crowdsourced data.
Force the creator to flag the sponsor section and then filter it out. Then compensate the creator for the view using the $17 premium subscription.
The creator is already compensated as of now. They earn more if a premium user watches their video than a free user with YouTube ads.
So the sponsor is giving them more money regardless of whether the user is premium or not, which for them is probably a good deal but for us it feels like being double charged.
No. The only ads are the sponsors the creators have within the videos.
doesn’t that first more in the end considering you have to pay for yt premium and a vpn? i fail to see how that would be a better option…
You assume there is no other use for the VPN? And honestly, you can get a free trial of a VPN if you want to, to handle this, it doesn’t need a yearly re-up or anything, just when your card expires.
I don’t currently use a VPN but my impression is that nowadays I’d be greeted with captchas everywhere, is that wrong?
Depends on the site being used. Google? Most likely. But I’ve used dozens of others without any issues.
paying for youtube
