The price of an individual YouTube Premium subscription is increasing by $2 to $13.99 per month in the US for new and current customers.
This price increase is live for new subscribers as seen on youtube.com/premium. Instead of $11.99, YouTube Premium now costs $13.99/month. Meanwhile, it’s $18.99 if you’re subscribing from the iOS YouTube app.
“Not enough people are paying at $11.99. We need to charge more.”
Just because landlords think they can push through 16% price hikes doesn’t mean everyone got a 16% raise. So they’re trying to steer people from uBO by … enticing them with higher prices?
I think they know people who aren’t paying already won’t buy it, so they are raising prices on those that found enough value in it to use it. There is YouTube music bundled with it that some like, so seems like smart strategy to me.
In reality they are going to find the limit where paying customers are no longer willing to be.
I have revanced and newpipe, and was still willing to pay as I get a TON of value out of YouTube. Im totally willing to not pay if they insist, however 🙂
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I just checked my subscriptions and my YouTube Premium is still grandfathered in at $9.99/mo from my Google Play Music subscription that included Google Red.
Myself and family listen to music all the time, and YouTube without ads has paid for itself with dev tutorials, DIY videos and other educational stuff; I can’t run aBO on my TV. As soon as they find a way to kick me off my current rate, I’ll bail, but until then I can’t find a cheaper fit for my needs.
Same, that’s pretty much my break point for something like this. I use youtube a lot so I don’t mind paying a small amount to remove ads and still have creators get a cut, though I understand why others hate the system.
Hate to break it to you, but grandfathered accounts are all getting hit with the price increase emails now as well. I just got mine an hour ago. Thought I was safe since they promised back in the day to honor the 9.99 price… nope, they expect 13.99 soon, but are giving grandfathered accounts a 3 month extension as a “thank you” for their loyalty.
“Thank you for believing in us. We’re now going to betray you.”
Whelp, here’s a toast to the future where the creators we enjoy can be supported through a more federated system.
I don’t think there’s any way to beat YouTube’s infrastructure right now, and you can’t even replicate it without a steady supply of blank checks.
Any geniuses out there know how to think of a system design that’s FOSS, competes with YT’s pay structure, and who knows what’s the best supply for that pay? I hate advertisements.
How do we take the money that we already spend for subscription services and funnel that into some kind of pool to be equitably distributed to content creators?
People tell me oh youtube prem is reasonable but I know that yt is just going to raise the price bit by bit and everyone will accept it because they have no other option.
As with all monopolies/cartels/prohibitions unsatisfied demand always finds alternatives. If the rules get in the way people circumvent them. Youtube premium price increases will create a bigger demand for ad blocking. Just as the balkanisation of streaming services and reduced value will return many people to piracy. The people who run these organisations are idiots who destroy brands and shareholder value to get short term attention and bonuses.
Youtubes changes are successful. Less people use ad blocker and more people are using yt premium.
There’s so many people who dont want to constantly keep looking for work around and having their sites break etc. Once one person in their family buys yt premium then it makes sense for them to get a family plan.
My issue isn’t with youtube running ads or charging for their service. My gripe is that they built their website as a free ad based service and out competed everything else based on that. Then they slowly ramped up ads and monetization once they had a monopoly and they won’t stop squeezing.
In my eyes the only ethical solution is a distributed competitor where users can pay for the service of streaming videos but can’t be forced into a single vendor. For example if one peertube instance started charging to much then you could move to another.
I pay for Nebula but watch nebula creators on Youtube. Watching on Youtube boosts them in the algorithm and gives them a small share of premium and it is more discoverable. The problem with distributed alternatives is that using them would disadvantage creators on youtube which is their primary outlet. We may need to concede that unlike Reddit or Twitter that clearly can and should be replaced by distributed alternatives, Youtube has proven to be a natural monopoly and as such needs to be regulated to protect consumers and creators from monopolistic abuses.
I dont know how people would switch off youtube. Youtube would need to shoot itself in the head or even a chance of people leaving the platform. Maybe creators could unionize or a new form of media could dethrone it.
When I tried Odysee I also did the same. I subscribed and viewed the videos on odysee but would pause and watch on youtube to save odysee bandwith and ensure that the creators I like that are pretty small wouldnt be hurt.
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Front ends aren’t really an alternative option. You are still using youtube. Youtube will continue to try and stop ad blockers and shutdown these Frontends. Eventually they will be successful. The more inconvenient they make it to use these technologies the more people will pay for yt prem. The only option is to start making the very painful switch to alternative platforms.
Even twitch has work around so they are welcomed to keep trying until they are successful.
What is the workaround for twitch?
Here’s one https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/apk-mod-5-0-twitchmod-twitch-app-modification.4129481/page-8
I don’t watch twitch so I can’t attest to its effectiveness.
When unlock stopped working on Twitch I watched everything in multistream. No ads lol
thank you for sharing, also that seems like a helpful site in general!
Don’t forget NewPipe for Android, Yattee for Apple devices, SmartTube for most Android TV boxes, Playlet for Roku, and Invidious for PC (if you don’t like Piped).
The only (usable) platform I can think of without a ad-free YouTube client is maybe webOS for LG TVs.
(some of these clients are also missing some features because they are new, but they should all be better for watching than the official app)
Also don’t forget https://github.com/revanced it even has a manager for updates.
That too! I just don’t use it myself because I find NewPipe works well enough for me. However, I should still try it out eventually to see if I’m missing anything big.
I just tried installing SmartTube on my Chromecast Ultra today and found out it can pair with YouTube revanced. This fixed my number one issue with revanced where the cast button is not working.
Omg really? Does that mean I can finally watch YouTube videos on my Nvidia shield again? I have to try this out now!
You can enable it from settings -> remote control in SmartTube app. Also, if you’re using YouTube revanced, the cast button might be hidden because it was not functional. You can re-enable the cast button on YouTube revanced from revanced settings.
When casting a video, you’ll have to open the SmartTube app in your Android TV first because it’s not automatically launched when you hit the cast button in YouTube revanced. If it’s in the background or not yet running, the video won’t play.
Got it installed and running. So nice to finally be able to watch YouTube on the TV again.
Or…you can use a VPN and change your location to Turkey and see the price that you get after.
youll have to pay with a cc based in, say the UK, so they’ll automatically change your location back to the UK. doesn’t work anymore.
I actually recently just changed my cc info to another local cc and I’m still just paying like $2/month and I have a coworker that is still paying the same price to when she signed up in Asia.
Damn, even $11.99 sounds like a lot - I only pay 12.99€ for a family plan in Europe.
in the uk it used to be £18 now £20 … that’s about €23 or $25
why is it so expensive here specifically?? christ, i’m so mad about inflation
NewPipe still works like a dream. No accounts though.
Oh yeah I use revanced so no worries for me. I tried NewPipe but the lack of accounts did annoy me
It’s been forever since I’ve used a paid YouTube subscription. I didn’t realize how much it has increased.
YouTube Red – Family membership
Billed Monthly starting Oct 21, 2017 $14.99ReVanced, ReVanced Extended and uBlock Origin will always be free :)
I’m unfamiliar but just read a bit. Are updates to the apk manual? Does the android app sync to a browser or desktop version?
Yeah the updates are provided manually by people who build them, or if you do it yourself. What do you mean by sync?
I’ll continue to pay for it… it’s the only streaming service that I consider essential to pay for. I’ll dump everything else before I dump this.
I am very selective with what I watch but even so the amount of good content on youtube exceeds my available time while other services have a couple of shows a year to binge and then they can be dropped. With writers and actors striking conventional content is only going to get thinner for the other streaming services. There is a limit to what I will pay for a painless ad free experience for the whole family on all their devices and Youtube is rapidly approaching it.
Every new YouTube headline makes me feel better about hopping on the early bird pricing of Google Play Music.
The funny thing is that I used to have YouTube premium bundled with Google play music, but I had to cancel after they killed it. YouTube music was just a terrible experience coming after GPM (lost a lot of songs in transfer, unable to play only liked songs by certain artists, uploaded music locked in jail and unable to be mixed into playlists, etc…). I felt like I had to voice my complaint by canceling YouTube music, which I could only do by getting rid of YouTube premium as well. How else do you protest a product that got bundled onto something else you already used? Anyway, I would buy a cheaper premium tier if it didn’t include useless YouTube music.
Same. I used GPM, then when they added YouTube Premium, I used that too. When they killed GPM in favor of YTM, I dropped the entire service.
Between GPM shutdown, Crunchyroll’s terrible forced UIX change, and Netflix doing a complete 180 on all of their pro-consumer stances, I decided to say fuck it to all of them and spin up my own home media server.
Same here.
Um, I’ve been paying $15.99. When was it $11?
Did you buy it through the iOS app? Because they are 30% more.
You’ve been paying the Apple Tax!
I was paying for it at a legacy price still but that gets wiped out with this I guess. Canceled.
Of course they are. Because literally everyone and everything is screwing all of us who aren’t super rich.
“We need to be inflation winners”
Actual line from the C-level strategy meeting at my company.
I’m fairly certain we’re not alone.
Next; let’s talk about how recessions are made….
It’s just like the old adage that history repeats itself. All the streaming companies are starting to do the exact same damn thing cable did. They’re starting to bloat their own products and expense them completely out of normal working schmoes price bracket.
The early 2000s was Paradise for cord cutters. The whole purpose of moving away from cable was the smaller individualized payments. Now if I want to watch all my shows legally I’m approaching cable tv package prices again. I’ll be damned if I ever get trapped into that cycle again. Now the streaming networks are bombarding us with advertisements that compare the cable was when I cut cord 20 years ago. And they’re slowly getting worse.
Still better than cable ever was. No long term contracts, extra fees on bills, tons of useless channels and tons of ads.
I think people forget how bad cable TV actually is if they haven’t used it for a while.
The month to month contracts for streaming content will go away soon.
I don’t see the value in complaining about things that haven’t happened yet.
The general direction that streaming services have been taking in recent times is clear, though: Raising prices, locking down account sharing, splitting up the content across too many different providers and introducing advertisement in cheaper plans. Sounds pretty cable-y to me.
They’ll probably go the way other big subscription services like MS and Adobe are. Annual commitment with monthly payments of x.99 or no commitment with monthly pricing of y + x.99
I dislike that even more.
The early 2000s was before streaming was ever a thing. Netflix was still sending DVDs in the mail en masse.
I just canceled the Netflix account I have had since 2002.
They were great once…
