I like it... Maybe we should create a special day for that. The check your bloody credit card statement day... How many of us have subs buried in there we completely forgot about?
Golds Gym corporate has a term for these customers (ones on autopay with credit card who don’t use the gym): the sleeping giant. Whatever you do do NOT wake the sleeping giant meaning do not send them promotional materials, do not remind them to come back to the gym, do not do anything that would remind them they’re paying for something they don’t use.
All gyms seem to do that (cancel in person). However, I do get friendly emails from PF once a week or two letting me know of some new thing they're doing. So they don't seem to subscribe to the same philosophy that Gold's does. I had to write a freaking letter about why I was canceling back in the 2000's to get out of a Gold's membership. Fuck them.
> How many of us have subs buried in there we completely forgot about?
No offense but... do people really live like this? How do you NOT know that you're subscribed to a service? I watch my bank account activity like a hawk. I wish I was in a financial state where I could sign up for things willy-nilly and forget about them.
EDIT: apparently, keeping track of my expenses in an Excel sheet is.... not common?
You'd be surprised. For a lot of people the cost of a lot of subscriptions are so low they just don't think about it. Hell, most people probably don't look at their account activity, all they look at is how much is still in the bank so unless they're running short on cash, they simply don't notice how much they're spending on subs each month.
> For a lot of people the cost of a lot of subscriptions are so low they just don't think about it.
Or they just don't think about it, even if their income isn't that high. I know people who don't even think about having food delivered, groceries delivered, or how many subscriptions they have. I know others who don't know how much they spend on weed or alcohol. I can't relate. I'm not broke, but I know how much I spend on *coffee*. How much I spend eating out. I still eat out, but I am aware of the outlay.
You can buy an 8 tb hardrive for like 150$ on amazon, take that and an old pc + jellyfin or plex and a bit of yarrr yarrr and you have your free netflix
Google's sales department offers incentives and reduced pricing for Bulk / larger companies, so my pricing of $7.20 is likely much higher than that of a 500+ user account.
The only thing these companies have figured out is that people will just sit there and take it every time they raise prices/rent/fees, etc.
None of them believe there will be any consequences beyond people whining and doing nothing.
Why would you NOT do this?
The price increases were announced in February 2023. They also sent emails at the time about the upcoming change.
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/pricing-updates-and-more-flexible-payment-options-google-workspace
you mean like my car insurance? i was with geico in a few years it went from $50/month to $120/month. I noticed and I switched to State Farm. For $70/month I got both Car Insurance and Home owners insurance. I saved over $100/month.
insurance does this. Make sure to swap out every few years. they will just jack your price.
I love how every car insurance company will claim they'll save you money over the other guy - except for AAA. They're like yeah we're expensive, but we're worth it
they save you money at first and then raise prices. so you gotta switch frequently. Same with homeowners insurance. Probably same with rental insurance.
Yup. That's the trick to insurance. Moving around every 2nd to 3rd year. And it's why Florida and California are going to be so screwed in a year or two when they're down to a single insurer and \*can't\* move.
Yep. They will gladly spend 100 grand on lawyers to try to avoid fulfilling a 10k insurance claim that they both know there is no reason to deny and will loose the moment it hits a court room if it means they can save millions by deterring others from ever fighting in the first place.
Florida also just passed a bunch of laws to make it harder to sue and recover damages from insurance companies. In a completely unrelated development, the governor received millions of dollars in donations from insurance companies.
Yep. I use State Farm and they raised my prices by $20. After shopping around, they were still $30 cheaper than the next alternative while also having *more* coverage.
I've had State Farm for 35 years and have not seen significant rate increases over that time. In fact every time I check prices, everyone else is always more expensive. Usually they're like "we'll save you $700 a year on car insurance!" and I'm like, you sell car insurance for $20 a month? Turns out no, they don't.
This is how they will tell you:
"Join now! Introductory price for new members only. New low price!"
All of that will obscure the change like in shiny new menu at your favorite restaurant that raised the prices and taken one of your favorite items off.
> Corporate America won't be happy until we're all living in boarding houses again like the fuckin 1850s
This is why you have to hit them hard by pulling back BEFORE that happens.
HOA fees blow my mind. My dad is the president of his neighborhood and charges $70/year. That covers insurance for the sewer drainage field, annual mowing of said field, and a $75/year “salary” for himself to cover time spent documenting and filing paperwork for the neighborhood. He isn’t even super strict with the bylaws. Make sure your yard is mowed and doesn’t have trash all over, no fences allowed, and don’t be a dick to your neighbors. Can’t believe some places charge $300/month
HOA fees are all over the place. It depends on size of neighborhood, amenities like pool/tennis, what the city pays for, etc. And it sounds like your dad does the paperwork and perhaps accounting so that eliminates a big cost which is the management company fee.
As for why the HOA is raising their rates — it’s because everyone else — landscaper, insurance company, vendors, etc are raising their rates.
I have premium mostly for my tv and phone, I watch enough for it to be worth it. That new feature that lets you pick up where you left off on other devices is pretty nifty too
I've been using YouTube Premium for a couple of years, because I commute a lot and could download videos to watch on the go.
Recently I started working from home, so decided to cancel my membership.
And Jesus Christ, standard YouTube has become so user unfriendly. The amount of ads at the beginning and throughout videos is horrible. The way someone will be cut off mid-sentence while an ad plays infuriates me. And it's always the same ads that follow Spotify's method of being so irritating that you'd pay to remove them.
And simple functions like making the window smaller so you can use other apps in the background is gone, along with videos stopping if you lock your phone. I've also noticed the loading times go up.
If your business model is stripping features that should come as standard, that's not great for the customer. I don't even use Youtube Music so would happily strip that to reduce my monthly fee, but no dice.
I think that's exactly what they did, they introduced a problem (videos riddled with ads, in terrible places, and ads of increased length/quantity) and they're charging people for the solution
> And it's always the same ads that follow Spotify's method of being so irritating that you'd pay to remove them.
that google ad with the choir/opera lady singing.. holy fuck STOP ITS SOOOO ANNOYING AND LOUD AS FUCK
"There are a lot of chokepoints in the internet tubes and we use a lot of trucks to get content through those tubes and with the cost of fuel these days and...uhh...inflation and all that, ya know?"
I mean, server hardware has, at minimum, doubled in the the last 4 or so years. Datacenter GPUs have skyrocketed more, partly due to nvidia fucking SKUs, but probably mostly due to their price gouging.
To be fair digital services can definitely be impacted by supply chain issues. For example, a few years ago the MMO Final Fantasy 14 wanted to upgrade their server infrastructure to be stabler and handle more concurrent players, but they literally could not buy the type of servers that they needed because of supply chain issues. They actually had to stop selling the game temporarily because the existing servers simply could not handle any more people.
I used a free Indian VPN app on my phone, logged into my account, clicked on get premium, ordered with my (German) credit card and now have 1 year premium. Pretty easy and no restrictions whatsoever
They seem to require additional verification for India nowadays. At least I couldn't sign up from India last month. Turkey, Ukraine, Brazil, and Chile seemed to be the next cheapest.
Too many extra steps.
1. Log in to YouTube
2. Change account billing country settings to India/Argentina/wherever
3. Put in a credit card with no international fees
4. Now you have YouTube for ~$2 per month
I watch way more youtube than anything else $12 or $14 is definitely worth it to me, no ads, background playback on mobile, supports creators. I think its a much better deal than netflix.
ONLY reason I justify it is because I need to be able to close my phone. I listen to only YouTube videos and songs I can’t find anywhere else. But smh I remember when that wasn’t even a extra feature just apart of the free YouTube.
1. Spotify doesn't cost nearly as much. And offers better audio quality.
2. YT Music is shit. Lots of stuff I listen too doesn't exist there, the quality of many tracks is compressed garbage (because those are just tracks from old YT videos) and it's harder to organize the collection.
3. Paying for not having ads simply because YT keeps making it unwatchable without it isn't a benefit worth paying for - it's rewarding shitty coersive behavior and corporate greed.
That's not even mentioning how Google has ruined recommendations and utterly destroyed the search functionality. Premium won't bring those back.
I will (and do) gladly support creators that I watch by donating to them directly, but I refuse to give Google a single cent for intentionally ruining one of the best services on the internet.
Lot of music isn't on spotify either. If you have been using it for a decade like me, scroll back through your liked songs and you'll see some greyed out because spotify removed it from their services.
Nothing has changed for free users, but there's a new higher bitrate option on some 1080p videos for Premium users, that's probably what you're referring to
When they start offering premium LITE everywhere I'll consider.
Until then I have zero interest in anything YouTube Premium offers besides removing ads, and I'm not paying $14/m just to remove ads.
Edit: emphasized the word "LITE" so it's clearer.
Google is currently in the testing phase of recognizing ad blockers on YouTube. Several people have already seen the warnings from them that say something to the effect of: "if you don't disable the ad blocker on our site, you will be blocked from viewing content."
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23778879/youtube-videos-disabling-ad-blockers-detection
Twitch has been in an ongoing war with adblocking scripts for years now. As of right now, most common adblockers won't work on twitch out of the box, but there are some [very easy to install](https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions) third party scripts which do the trick just fine. They even override the "You seem to be using an adblocker, look at this blank screen for 2 minutes" thing that Twitch implemented a while back. Twitch has been updating their anti-adblock systems every couple of months which break the blocking again... and it's usually a day (at most) before the userscripts get adjusted to compensate.
The thing is, if you consider adblocking an arms race, the end user is *always* going to have the advantage, because they have ultimate control over what happens in their browser, and even how incoming traffic is routed on their local network. If google really wants to stop people from skipping its ads, it's going to be a neverending uphill battle for them.
I'm hoping the adblocker devs are taking this, in drove, as a challenge. We've seen a bunch already doing reverse psy-ops (like *actually* paying for ads promoting adblocking that'll show up pre/mid-roll on YT lmao) and even doing one-upsmanship races against the google anti-adblocker thing (not gonna name names, but I love seeing the few I used getting blocked one day then bypassing the block the next, etc.).
YT ads were tolerable a decade ago, but then they do double pre-roll ads, unskippable ads, etc. I started using adblockers when they aggresively up their ante and I suspect many people who don't pay for premium are in the same camp.
I’ve noticed a massive uptick in mobile websites that won’t display unless you turn your adblocker off. Many of them now can no longer be circumvented by reader view, everything is just shit these days.
1. A quick google search shows 42% of internet users use adblock
2. Youtube would not try to fight adblock if only a few people were using it. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/youtube-tests-restricting-ad-blocker-users-to-3-video-views/
I don't understand their thought process. You earn practically nothing per free viewer, therefore you want to convert as many as possible to paid viewers. But your service is already on the pricey side. If they lower the price, I'd assume a lot more people could justify paying for YouTube premium. But raising the price, you're just milking the few people actually paying a little bit more. It seems like a losing strategy.
If I could get ad free and play video in background. I'd pay $5, but I'm not a fan of YT Music. I moved to Spotify when Google Play Music ceased.
That's what you get when everyone is measured on quarterly results. Hike the price without telling anyone, get a huge payday, any backlash is next quarter's problem (or the guy in line for your position cause you're promoted from the record high revenue).
I remember Buffett talking about this. passive investors always beat active ones because they dont care about quarterly earnings or performances.
People who care about short term gains always lose long term.
Depends on the shape of the demand curve - the number of subscribers they lose per $1 price increase may be outweighed by milking a dollar out of each remaining subscriber.
Google has economists on the payroll either full time or as consultants to map out strategies like these.
This is what truly boggles my mind about premium services, especially subscriptions. Subscription fatigue is becoming more widespread. More people are talking about cancelling services than they are talking about new ones. Raising subscription fees only makes prospective subscribers less likely to purchase, and gives existing ones another reason to cancel.
$14 for "premium" Youtube which is essentially just removing the ads that they crippled their own platform with is a total scam and not even remotely something I'd consider. $1.99/month? Maybe, its still something I'd think about but its much better than $14.
Maybe they figured out that “x amount of people would subscribe for lower prices” isn’t really a thing ? Look at the UFC PPVs as a comparison, the same people that paid $60 are now paying the $80 like they might have lost a few people due to higher prices but the majority that were paying $60, are going to pay the $80.
Never pay for 3rd party subscriptions through Apple lol. If it’s not an Apple subscription, then it’s best to subscribe directly through the company’s website.
**EDIT: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO NOTIFY ME THAT YOU GOT AN EMAIL SAYING YOUR SUBSCRIPTION PRICE IS INCREASING AFTER DECEMBER**
So glad I'm grandfathered in at $9.99 from an old Google Play Music+YouTube Red (remember YouTube Red?) promo years ago. $14 a month for YouTube is nuts.
E: Lots of people in here astounded by paying for products and services they use. Weird.
Locked in at $8 since I signed up for Google Play Music when the service first began. And somehow I can share access with my Google family even though it's the individual rate. Going to ride that out as long as I can...
You can use a VPN to sign up and get it cheaper. I live in the US and I signed up as if I lived in Ukraine. I signed up last month for YouTube Premium Family and I'm paying $4.03 (UAH 149.00). My credit card charges 3-5% for a foreign transaction fee so like $4.25 total.
Everything seems to be completely normal youtube. It's in English and we don't any strange locale behaviors.
It's cheaper for India and Turkey but my Turkey VPN was detected as Iran and India seems to require some additional verification.
(I think I changed my system clock to match the time-zone of the places I was trying but I don't recall if that was necessary.)
Same.. never touching that subscription.
The Premium family is certainly a better deal for groups, but how strictly do they enforce the “same household” rule?
Not at all. Ive been splitting a family account with 6 people, 4 of which don't live in the same address. They just had to temporarily change their address on file temporarily years ago.
Also dont know what this article is talking about, they gave ample warning that the price would go up
I swore I was "grandfathered" into the Youtube Premium Family plan when I subscribed back in 2018. As in it was legit advertised by Google as this will be your monthly price locked in when I bought it but those fuckers still raised the prices a few months ago. Anyone else remember this or am I having a Mandela effect?
I just got an email that my grandfathered in Google Play music rate is going away in December. I’m kinda tempted to go ahead and cancel now because I hate my kid watching YouTube and I only use the music part anyway.
I'm pretty sure there's some people still paying the $8.99 price from the initial version of Google Play Music
I'm personally grandfathered in from the $9.99 Google Play Music subscription. YouTube Red wasn't even a thing when I first subscribed
I’m grandfathered as well and just got the email that I have until the December bill at my $10 rate. Then it goes up to $14… My wife and I watch a lot of YT and I use YT Music so I already feel like it’s two subscriptions in one. I’m probably going to keep it and pay but a 40% increase is crazy regardless of what it is.
Now, I would probably pay for premium since I do watch a lot of youtube. But even then you're not free from adverts because every youtube channel has some kind of couple of minutes long promo's in them. If they want to offer ad free services then pay the content creators more and stop in-video promotions.
This burns my ass man. Ad free service while still having ads. Every fucking video has some bull shit sponsorship at some random interval in their videos and it's sickening.
This is mostly YouTube's fault. Fickle demonization made creators fear for their income streams and turn to Patreon and external sponsorships to assure steady income.
I’ve been paying $10/month since 2017 and was grandfathered in that price until now. They’ll be charging me the full $14/month but not until December.
Here’s what the email I got from them said:
Thank you for being a loyal member throughout our journey. We created YouTube Premium so you could enjoy all the videos and music you love without interruptions. To continue delivering great service and features, we are increasing the Premium plan price to $13.99/month.
As a long-standing and valued member, you are currently paying a lower rate for Premium than the rate available to new subscribers. To show our appreciation for your loyalty, we're giving you at least three extra months at your current price before the price increase will impact your plan. Your price will not increase before your December billing date. Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to notify you again at least 30 days before the new price is effective.
While we hope that you continue to be a member, you can cancel your subscription at any time here. To check the status of your account and billing information, go to your Settings > Purchases and Memberships page.
You can find more information on the latest updates in the YouTube Help Center.
Thanks for being a YouTube Premium member.
Sincerely,
The YouTube Premium team
It and Google are starting to look like 90s internet AOL homepages with all their ads and banners. There’s no such thing as infinite growth. Once the market is saturated it’s death by a thousand ads and fees. Ad-blockers are modern day angels.
I'd estimate 80% of my video entertainment comes from YouTube. I would rather pay for YT Premium than Netflix (even though I still have to because my family uses it).
YouTube Premium is the best of all subscriptions services I pay for. As someone who exclusively watches YT it’s worth every cent to not see the ads and watch picture-in-picture
We watch so much YouTube in my household premium is 100% worth it. We rotate our other streaming subs based on what new shows we want to watch, but YT premium sub always stays on.
Better yet, install an ad blocker. If you're on Android, Firefox will allow you to install UBlock Origin to block ads and allows background play out if the box. If you're on iOS, lol.
Nothing to do with the strike.
For a long time a lot of things on the internet were able to persist running at a loss or barely breaking even in the pursuit of increasing their user base because interest rates were low and debt was cheap. We got used to everything being free, relatively Ad-light, or being a really great value.
Interest is now higher and debt is no longer cheap, advertisers have pulled back considerably on their web ad spending, and platforms and streaming services are forced to change to a business model that is profitable, raising prices, adding new ways to nickel and dime users, cutting nonprofitable services, etc, even if it means losing users. Same reason driving Reddit’s aggressive move against third party apps.
This is the right answer and I would add that many of these services have essentially topped out their available user bases. Netflix and YouTube aren’t gaining subscribers they way they were years ago and shareholders are wondering where the revenues and profits are going to come from.
Yep, this is when you as the consumer are expected to display price elasticity. Either it's fine and you're willing to pay that, or you put your foot down and tell them to fuck off.
YouTube makes more than enough money from ads, seeing as how they made [$29 billion from ads in 2021](https://www.tubics.com/blog/youtube-revenue). Raising the prices is bullshit.
"Subscription-cutter" will be a common term soon like "cable-cutter" was a few years ago.
I like it... Maybe we should create a special day for that. The check your bloody credit card statement day... How many of us have subs buried in there we completely forgot about?
Golds Gym corporate has a term for these customers (ones on autopay with credit card who don’t use the gym): the sleeping giant. Whatever you do do NOT wake the sleeping giant meaning do not send them promotional materials, do not remind them to come back to the gym, do not do anything that would remind them they’re paying for something they don’t use.
I'm positive planet fitness does this too. They also make it so you have to go into the fucking gym to cancel, the assholes.
All gyms seem to do that (cancel in person). However, I do get friendly emails from PF once a week or two letting me know of some new thing they're doing. So they don't seem to subscribe to the same philosophy that Gold's does. I had to write a freaking letter about why I was canceling back in the 2000's to get out of a Gold's membership. Fuck them.
> How many of us have subs buried in there we completely forgot about? No offense but... do people really live like this? How do you NOT know that you're subscribed to a service? I watch my bank account activity like a hawk. I wish I was in a financial state where I could sign up for things willy-nilly and forget about them. EDIT: apparently, keeping track of my expenses in an Excel sheet is.... not common?
Comments like this make me realise how blessed i am. I just moved out of my parents home and i feel poor af
You'd be surprised. For a lot of people the cost of a lot of subscriptions are so low they just don't think about it. Hell, most people probably don't look at their account activity, all they look at is how much is still in the bank so unless they're running short on cash, they simply don't notice how much they're spending on subs each month.
> For a lot of people the cost of a lot of subscriptions are so low they just don't think about it. Or they just don't think about it, even if their income isn't that high. I know people who don't even think about having food delivered, groceries delivered, or how many subscriptions they have. I know others who don't know how much they spend on weed or alcohol. I can't relate. I'm not broke, but I know how much I spend on *coffee*. How much I spend eating out. I still eat out, but I am aware of the outlay.
Make it on Prime Day
Not me, I make a habit of not signing up for any subscription services lol. When I do, I put a note on my calendar to cancel at a specific day.
I've already started to dump a lot of my subscriptions. The increases don't mean that much to me financially but I can't stand being nickel and dimed.
You don't like paying more and more money for zero extra value?
Cord-cutter, but sure, maybe. Cord-cutters went to streaming though, I don't know where else they could go from there.
Yarrr, I have an idea where they'll go, matey!
You can buy an 8 tb hardrive for like 150$ on amazon, take that and an old pc + jellyfin or plex and a bit of yarrr yarrr and you have your free netflix
Raising prices without telling anyone is a crap thing to do.
They just raised their google workspace pricing too. Went from $5 to $7.20 per user 😫
Wait what!! That’s a way bigger deal to me.
Sure is, especially when you have 30+ users under your admin account
Extra $800 a year for 30
there goes the popcorn machine you were planning for the break room.
*and the pizza party*
Nah, you’ll still get that in lieu of an annual compensation increase
You guys are getting compensated?
What is compensation?
I'm not looking forward to our 500+ company learning about this.
at 500+ employed the extra 1200buck extra a year are peanuts Edit: yes my bad should be 1200/month, still peanuts for a company that size
Google's sales department offers incentives and reduced pricing for Bulk / larger companies, so my pricing of $7.20 is likely much higher than that of a 500+ user account.
[удалено]
1200 extra per month. 14,400 per year.
You should check your math. That's 1200 a *month*
Casual ~50% price increase
Everything has gone up 50-300% in the past 4 years except my pay at work. I make the same.
I'm sure they are discussing *maybe* rolling out 2% raises by 2026.
I legit got a 1.5% raise this year. They called it a "market adjustment". I wanted to ask what fucking market they went to.
The only thing these companies have figured out is that people will just sit there and take it every time they raise prices/rent/fees, etc. None of them believe there will be any consequences beyond people whining and doing nothing. Why would you NOT do this?
They're still having COVID related supply chain issues. /s
But chip shortage /s
Maybe if we stopped ordering guac so much we wouldn’t have a chip shortage
Nobody could have predicted supply chain..
[удалено]
The price increases were announced in February 2023. They also sent emails at the time about the upcoming change. https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/pricing-updates-and-more-flexible-payment-options-google-workspace
Damn, that’s costly for business that were probably trying to save money using google
you mean like my car insurance? i was with geico in a few years it went from $50/month to $120/month. I noticed and I switched to State Farm. For $70/month I got both Car Insurance and Home owners insurance. I saved over $100/month. insurance does this. Make sure to swap out every few years. they will just jack your price.
I love how every car insurance company will claim they'll save you money over the other guy - except for AAA. They're like yeah we're expensive, but we're worth it
they save you money at first and then raise prices. so you gotta switch frequently. Same with homeowners insurance. Probably same with rental insurance.
Yup. That's the trick to insurance. Moving around every 2nd to 3rd year. And it's why Florida and California are going to be so screwed in a year or two when they're down to a single insurer and \*can't\* move.
Insurance shouldn't be a for profit industry anyway, to many perverse incentives to fuck people.
Yep. They will gladly spend 100 grand on lawyers to try to avoid fulfilling a 10k insurance claim that they both know there is no reason to deny and will loose the moment it hits a court room if it means they can save millions by deterring others from ever fighting in the first place.
Florida also just passed a bunch of laws to make it harder to sue and recover damages from insurance companies. In a completely unrelated development, the governor received millions of dollars in donations from insurance companies.
Whenever I try shopping around, my current provider is still the cheapest, and it's not even close
Yep. I use State Farm and they raised my prices by $20. After shopping around, they were still $30 cheaper than the next alternative while also having *more* coverage.
Insurance does not do this. That would be illegal. They send you a renewal each year with updated rates that you can review ahead of time.
I've had State Farm for 35 years and have not seen significant rate increases over that time. In fact every time I check prices, everyone else is always more expensive. Usually they're like "we'll save you $700 a year on car insurance!" and I'm like, you sell car insurance for $20 a month? Turns out no, they don't.
[удалено]
This is how they will tell you: "Join now! Introductory price for new members only. New low price!" All of that will obscure the change like in shiny new menu at your favorite restaurant that raised the prices and taken one of your favorite items off.
How is this even legal? I guess some email had to go out at least in Europe?
I am in Europe and no price has risen on my account so far.
Honduran (Central America) here. I just confirm my family plan is still 11 bucks.
Not if it only applies to new subscriptions. But I'm not sure if it is, article's light on details.
Well, Premium is still $5 in my country ($8 family, $3 student).
Price doesn't seem to have changed here.
I've had three things rise in price this week. My HOA, My cell phone bill and now YouTube premium. This sucks.
The only thing that hasn't increased substantially in three years is my salary. That hasn't increased at all.
Corporate America won't be happy until we're all living in boarding houses again like the fuckin 1850s
> Corporate America won't be happy until we're all living in boarding houses again like the fuckin 1850s This is why you have to hit them hard by pulling back BEFORE that happens.
This. People need to stop spending money. Even if you have the money, stop spending it!
HOA suffering from a chip shortage too huh
HOA fees blow my mind. My dad is the president of his neighborhood and charges $70/year. That covers insurance for the sewer drainage field, annual mowing of said field, and a $75/year “salary” for himself to cover time spent documenting and filing paperwork for the neighborhood. He isn’t even super strict with the bylaws. Make sure your yard is mowed and doesn’t have trash all over, no fences allowed, and don’t be a dick to your neighbors. Can’t believe some places charge $300/month
HOA fees are all over the place. It depends on size of neighborhood, amenities like pool/tennis, what the city pays for, etc. And it sounds like your dad does the paperwork and perhaps accounting so that eliminates a big cost which is the management company fee. As for why the HOA is raising their rates — it’s because everyone else — landscaper, insurance company, vendors, etc are raising their rates.
No fences? How do you keep dogs in their yards?
[удалено]
I have premium mostly for my tv and phone, I watch enough for it to be worth it. That new feature that lets you pick up where you left off on other devices is pretty nifty too
I've been using YouTube Premium for a couple of years, because I commute a lot and could download videos to watch on the go. Recently I started working from home, so decided to cancel my membership. And Jesus Christ, standard YouTube has become so user unfriendly. The amount of ads at the beginning and throughout videos is horrible. The way someone will be cut off mid-sentence while an ad plays infuriates me. And it's always the same ads that follow Spotify's method of being so irritating that you'd pay to remove them. And simple functions like making the window smaller so you can use other apps in the background is gone, along with videos stopping if you lock your phone. I've also noticed the loading times go up. If your business model is stripping features that should come as standard, that's not great for the customer. I don't even use Youtube Music so would happily strip that to reduce my monthly fee, but no dice.
I think that's exactly what they did, they introduced a problem (videos riddled with ads, in terrible places, and ads of increased length/quantity) and they're charging people for the solution
[удалено]
[удалено]
> And it's always the same ads that follow Spotify's method of being so irritating that you'd pay to remove them. that google ad with the choir/opera lady singing.. holy fuck STOP ITS SOOOO ANNOYING AND LOUD AS FUCK
UBlock Origin and SponserBlock will be your new best friends then
This is great for computers but I watch most of my YouTube through roku
Maybe smarttube is your friend then
YouTube Revanced (for Android)... haven't seen ads in **years**
"look we aren't immune to supply chain issues" -youtube/google
"There are a lot of chokepoints in the internet tubes and we use a lot of trucks to get content through those tubes and with the cost of fuel these days and...uhh...inflation and all that, ya know?"
I mean, server hardware has, at minimum, doubled in the the last 4 or so years. Datacenter GPUs have skyrocketed more, partly due to nvidia fucking SKUs, but probably mostly due to their price gouging.
Redditors when they learn internet services actually require hardware
Don't forget network device back orders. We're still waiting on some Cisco routers that were ordered in January with no ETA yet.
To be fair digital services can definitely be impacted by supply chain issues. For example, a few years ago the MMO Final Fantasy 14 wanted to upgrade their server infrastructure to be stabler and handle more concurrent players, but they literally could not buy the type of servers that they needed because of supply chain issues. They actually had to stop selling the game temporarily because the existing servers simply could not handle any more people.
I would pay if it was a reasonable price like 5-7 but 14 is way too much.
Have you considered paying in Indian Rupees? I have youtube premium for $14...for a whole year
i'm enjoying the Turkish lira going to shit ;)
Argentina $1 a month my beloved
You got me beat 🤣🤣 I think I’m at $1.20 via Turkey, so I won’t complain.
Can I pay in Zelda rupees instead? I have tons of those, about 999 (I have an Adult Wallet).
how would someone do that?
I used a free Indian VPN app on my phone, logged into my account, clicked on get premium, ordered with my (German) credit card and now have 1 year premium. Pretty easy and no restrictions whatsoever
They seem to require additional verification for India nowadays. At least I couldn't sign up from India last month. Turkey, Ukraine, Brazil, and Chile seemed to be the next cheapest.
It no longer works in Turkey, India or Brazil, but Chile seems to work still.
Interesting, I bought my account 3 months ago. Maybe they changed it. Weird that they didn't change it for the other countries
Too many extra steps. 1. Log in to YouTube 2. Change account billing country settings to India/Argentina/wherever 3. Put in a credit card with no international fees 4. Now you have YouTube for ~$2 per month
I watch way more youtube than anything else $12 or $14 is definitely worth it to me, no ads, background playback on mobile, supports creators. I think its a much better deal than netflix.
I justify it because Premium + YT Music is a better value than Spotify alone. If Spotify moves up in price, I'll have a decision to make.
ONLY reason I justify it is because I need to be able to close my phone. I listen to only YouTube videos and songs I can’t find anywhere else. But smh I remember when that wasn’t even a extra feature just apart of the free YouTube.
Use Firefox. They play YT videos even when your phone is locked.
1. Spotify doesn't cost nearly as much. And offers better audio quality. 2. YT Music is shit. Lots of stuff I listen too doesn't exist there, the quality of many tracks is compressed garbage (because those are just tracks from old YT videos) and it's harder to organize the collection. 3. Paying for not having ads simply because YT keeps making it unwatchable without it isn't a benefit worth paying for - it's rewarding shitty coersive behavior and corporate greed. That's not even mentioning how Google has ruined recommendations and utterly destroyed the search functionality. Premium won't bring those back. I will (and do) gladly support creators that I watch by donating to them directly, but I refuse to give Google a single cent for intentionally ruining one of the best services on the internet.
The inability to disable censored tracks on YT music also sucks.
Lot of music isn't on spotify either. If you have been using it for a decade like me, scroll back through your liked songs and you'll see some greyed out because spotify removed it from their services.
[удалено]
Peacock just added $2 to theirs. Amazon Music went up $2 recently.
I noticed some video bit rates were locked behind premium.
Nothing has changed for free users, but there's a new higher bitrate option on some 1080p videos for Premium users, that's probably what you're referring to
racial summer six hobbies support liquid forgetful sulky panicky teeny ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
if youtube gives me 4k & 6 channel surround sound i'll pay TV prices for it
seemly deserve muddle fragile chop flag employ tie snow caption ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
When they start offering premium LITE everywhere I'll consider. Until then I have zero interest in anything YouTube Premium offers besides removing ads, and I'm not paying $14/m just to remove ads. Edit: emphasized the word "LITE" so it's clearer.
Give me ad free YouTube on a family plan, without music, for $15. I’m with you, I don’t need or want to pay for their music service.
[удалено]
Next month's headline would be: "Google baffled by increase of ad blocker extension downloads"
More like, Google fully rolls out anti-adblocker. That's why they're getting bolder. They're confident adblocks will not work in the near future.
Every adblocker in the world works just fine with Firefox.
Google is currently in the testing phase of recognizing ad blockers on YouTube. Several people have already seen the warnings from them that say something to the effect of: "if you don't disable the ad blocker on our site, you will be blocked from viewing content." https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23778879/youtube-videos-disabling-ad-blockers-detection
Twitch has been in an ongoing war with adblocking scripts for years now. As of right now, most common adblockers won't work on twitch out of the box, but there are some [very easy to install](https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions) third party scripts which do the trick just fine. They even override the "You seem to be using an adblocker, look at this blank screen for 2 minutes" thing that Twitch implemented a while back. Twitch has been updating their anti-adblock systems every couple of months which break the blocking again... and it's usually a day (at most) before the userscripts get adjusted to compensate. The thing is, if you consider adblocking an arms race, the end user is *always* going to have the advantage, because they have ultimate control over what happens in their browser, and even how incoming traffic is routed on their local network. If google really wants to stop people from skipping its ads, it's going to be a neverending uphill battle for them.
What I do, is if the adblocker doesn't work and the ads keep interrupting me, I leave.
Ublock origin already blocks the popup.
I'm hoping the adblocker devs are taking this, in drove, as a challenge. We've seen a bunch already doing reverse psy-ops (like *actually* paying for ads promoting adblocking that'll show up pre/mid-roll on YT lmao) and even doing one-upsmanship races against the google anti-adblocker thing (not gonna name names, but I love seeing the few I used getting blocked one day then bypassing the block the next, etc.). YT ads were tolerable a decade ago, but then they do double pre-roll ads, unskippable ads, etc. I started using adblockers when they aggresively up their ante and I suspect many people who don't pay for premium are in the same camp.
I started a 1:02 long video. It has two 15s ads upfront, and 20s in, it rolled out another ad. Fuck YouTube.
I mean I've been using Adguard and ublock and still have no issues.
I’ve noticed a massive uptick in mobile websites that won’t display unless you turn your adblocker off. Many of them now can no longer be circumvented by reader view, everything is just shit these days.
[удалено]
1. A quick google search shows 42% of internet users use adblock 2. Youtube would not try to fight adblock if only a few people were using it. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/youtube-tests-restricting-ad-blocker-users-to-3-video-views/
I don't understand their thought process. You earn practically nothing per free viewer, therefore you want to convert as many as possible to paid viewers. But your service is already on the pricey side. If they lower the price, I'd assume a lot more people could justify paying for YouTube premium. But raising the price, you're just milking the few people actually paying a little bit more. It seems like a losing strategy. If I could get ad free and play video in background. I'd pay $5, but I'm not a fan of YT Music. I moved to Spotify when Google Play Music ceased.
That's what you get when everyone is measured on quarterly results. Hike the price without telling anyone, get a huge payday, any backlash is next quarter's problem (or the guy in line for your position cause you're promoted from the record high revenue).
I remember Buffett talking about this. passive investors always beat active ones because they dont care about quarterly earnings or performances. People who care about short term gains always lose long term.
Depends on the shape of the demand curve - the number of subscribers they lose per $1 price increase may be outweighed by milking a dollar out of each remaining subscriber. Google has economists on the payroll either full time or as consultants to map out strategies like these.
Capitalism- Always more, never less.
This is what truly boggles my mind about premium services, especially subscriptions. Subscription fatigue is becoming more widespread. More people are talking about cancelling services than they are talking about new ones. Raising subscription fees only makes prospective subscribers less likely to purchase, and gives existing ones another reason to cancel. $14 for "premium" Youtube which is essentially just removing the ads that they crippled their own platform with is a total scam and not even remotely something I'd consider. $1.99/month? Maybe, its still something I'd think about but its much better than $14.
Maybe they figured out that “x amount of people would subscribe for lower prices” isn’t really a thing ? Look at the UFC PPVs as a comparison, the same people that paid $60 are now paying the $80 like they might have lost a few people due to higher prices but the majority that were paying $60, are going to pay the $80.
I think mine was 17 lol Edit: Ah the Apple tax. Guess I should go to the website
I’m still locked into 7.99/mo from when I joined back during YouTube Red
Same here, they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
Never pay for 3rd party subscriptions through Apple lol. If it’s not an Apple subscription, then it’s best to subscribe directly through the company’s website.
Same, well thought I was paying 15 and saved a dollar from the price hike lol
I was paying 16 this entire time and had no damn idea it was because of Apple…
**EDIT: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO NOTIFY ME THAT YOU GOT AN EMAIL SAYING YOUR SUBSCRIPTION PRICE IS INCREASING AFTER DECEMBER** So glad I'm grandfathered in at $9.99 from an old Google Play Music+YouTube Red (remember YouTube Red?) promo years ago. $14 a month for YouTube is nuts. E: Lots of people in here astounded by paying for products and services they use. Weird.
Locked in at $8 since I signed up for Google Play Music when the service first began. And somehow I can share access with my Google family even though it's the individual rate. Going to ride that out as long as I can...
I was a tester before it was officially released. After that, my cost was 4.99. It still is for some reason.
I was shown some of the notes they had on napkins about creating it, and somehow my rate is still just 1.99/mo.
My name is Sergey Brin and my rate is 69 cents a month.
I sucked Brin's dick at Burning Man in 1998 and I still pay that much too.
4.99 is the student plan as long as you don't stop paying it your locked it.
I'm in the same boat as you. Locked in at $7.99. How exactly are you sharing it with the family?
You can use a VPN to sign up and get it cheaper. I live in the US and I signed up as if I lived in Ukraine. I signed up last month for YouTube Premium Family and I'm paying $4.03 (UAH 149.00). My credit card charges 3-5% for a foreign transaction fee so like $4.25 total. Everything seems to be completely normal youtube. It's in English and we don't any strange locale behaviors. It's cheaper for India and Turkey but my Turkey VPN was detected as Iran and India seems to require some additional verification. (I think I changed my system clock to match the time-zone of the places I was trying but I don't recall if that was necessary.)
grandfathered plans will only retain the old rate for 3 months according to Google, and then it will go up to $14/mo automatically.
40% increase is simply too much for no added benefit. I've had a premium account for something like 6 years now. Oh well, time to cancel
Same.. never touching that subscription. The Premium family is certainly a better deal for groups, but how strictly do they enforce the “same household” rule?
Not at all. Ive been splitting a family account with 6 people, 4 of which don't live in the same address. They just had to temporarily change their address on file temporarily years ago. Also dont know what this article is talking about, they gave ample warning that the price would go up
Are you paying $22.99? I was "grandfathered" in at $14.99, but they upped the price earlier this year.
[удалено]
I swore I was "grandfathered" into the Youtube Premium Family plan when I subscribed back in 2018. As in it was legit advertised by Google as this will be your monthly price locked in when I bought it but those fuckers still raised the prices a few months ago. Anyone else remember this or am I having a Mandela effect?
You're not, they stopped grandfathering family plans
Yep. But they did announce they were doing that.
I just got an email that my grandfathered in Google Play music rate is going away in December. I’m kinda tempted to go ahead and cancel now because I hate my kid watching YouTube and I only use the music part anyway.
They actually grandfathered people into YouTube red? I'm surprised.
I'm pretty sure there's some people still paying the $8.99 price from the initial version of Google Play Music I'm personally grandfathered in from the $9.99 Google Play Music subscription. YouTube Red wasn't even a thing when I first subscribed
That'd be me. Never touching that. RIP Google Music and the worst migration ever to YT Music.
It was originally $7.99. I've been grandfathered into that since like 2013 or something.
I’m grandfathered as well and just got the email that I have until the December bill at my $10 rate. Then it goes up to $14… My wife and I watch a lot of YT and I use YT Music so I already feel like it’s two subscriptions in one. I’m probably going to keep it and pay but a 40% increase is crazy regardless of what it is.
I watch YouTube a lot so I pay for premium but I pay 15.99 and if I go to look at plans it says 18.99 where is it 14$??
Are you paying via iOS youtube app? if so you're paying the apple tax. if you plan to pay for it dont pay via apple apps.
Wow thank you! Every dollar counts today 🥲
Now, I would probably pay for premium since I do watch a lot of youtube. But even then you're not free from adverts because every youtube channel has some kind of couple of minutes long promo's in them. If they want to offer ad free services then pay the content creators more and stop in-video promotions.
This burns my ass man. Ad free service while still having ads. Every fucking video has some bull shit sponsorship at some random interval in their videos and it's sickening.
This is mostly YouTube's fault. Fickle demonization made creators fear for their income streams and turn to Patreon and external sponsorships to assure steady income.
My Adblock is free.
I’ve been paying $10/month since 2017 and was grandfathered in that price until now. They’ll be charging me the full $14/month but not until December. Here’s what the email I got from them said: Thank you for being a loyal member throughout our journey. We created YouTube Premium so you could enjoy all the videos and music you love without interruptions. To continue delivering great service and features, we are increasing the Premium plan price to $13.99/month. As a long-standing and valued member, you are currently paying a lower rate for Premium than the rate available to new subscribers. To show our appreciation for your loyalty, we're giving you at least three extra months at your current price before the price increase will impact your plan. Your price will not increase before your December billing date. Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to notify you again at least 30 days before the new price is effective. While we hope that you continue to be a member, you can cancel your subscription at any time here. To check the status of your account and billing information, go to your Settings > Purchases and Memberships page. You can find more information on the latest updates in the YouTube Help Center. Thanks for being a YouTube Premium member. Sincerely, The YouTube Premium team
Thank fuck I don’t pay a penny.
It and Google are starting to look like 90s internet AOL homepages with all their ads and banners. There’s no such thing as infinite growth. Once the market is saturated it’s death by a thousand ads and fees. Ad-blockers are modern day angels.
I pay for YouTube premium. It seems like I’m in the minority but I don’t regret it at all.
I'd estimate 80% of my video entertainment comes from YouTube. I would rather pay for YT Premium than Netflix (even though I still have to because my family uses it).
YouTube Premium is the best of all subscriptions services I pay for. As someone who exclusively watches YT it’s worth every cent to not see the ads and watch picture-in-picture
We watch so much YouTube in my household premium is 100% worth it. We rotate our other streaming subs based on what new shows we want to watch, but YT premium sub always stays on.
I would, but it's not available in my country so fuckem, adblock it is.
For those cancelling premium. Don’t click on any YouTube ads. Lots of them are scams. Nobody at google vets them.
Better yet, install an ad blocker. If you're on Android, Firefox will allow you to install UBlock Origin to block ads and allows background play out if the box. If you're on iOS, lol.
Wtf is EVERY service increasing.... All because of the strike? If so that's insane
Nothing to do with the strike. For a long time a lot of things on the internet were able to persist running at a loss or barely breaking even in the pursuit of increasing their user base because interest rates were low and debt was cheap. We got used to everything being free, relatively Ad-light, or being a really great value. Interest is now higher and debt is no longer cheap, advertisers have pulled back considerably on their web ad spending, and platforms and streaming services are forced to change to a business model that is profitable, raising prices, adding new ways to nickel and dime users, cutting nonprofitable services, etc, even if it means losing users. Same reason driving Reddit’s aggressive move against third party apps.
This is the right answer and I would add that many of these services have essentially topped out their available user bases. Netflix and YouTube aren’t gaining subscribers they way they were years ago and shareholders are wondering where the revenues and profits are going to come from.
There are no more sheep to shear so now they must skin them
They’ll make up a reason, but it’s price gouging. Everyone will keep raising rates until we stop paying.
Yep, this is when you as the consumer are expected to display price elasticity. Either it's fine and you're willing to pay that, or you put your foot down and tell them to fuck off.
because "Due to inflation".
No longer worth it, eat a bag of dicks YouTube, you just lost a subscription
Well. I canceled. I'll deal with the commercials.
*unsubscribes*
I’ve been grandfathered into the old price since the Google Play Music days, and they’re no longer honoring it after December.
I am getting so sick and worn out on continuously rising subscriptions I’m about to cancel all of them. They are all overpriced now.
I just received an email from them. My plan is going up $4 (was grandfathered in to the $9.99 plan from years ago).
YouTube makes more than enough money from ads, seeing as how they made [$29 billion from ads in 2021](https://www.tubics.com/blog/youtube-revenue). Raising the prices is bullshit.