YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads.::Google is increasing the prices of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscriptions in some regions, right after blocking ad-blockers.
YouTube has been in the red since day 1. Now Google wants their payback. OK. Seems fair. But I don’t have to participate.
Everybody acting like Google is taking away a basic human right, or somehow “taxing” them is getting exhausting.
Facebook is up to even more shenanigans, proposing to charge users to keep ads off the screen. Again, fine. I don’t have to use FB.
“But muh free content!”
It was very damned long ago that “content” was what you could see at the movie theater, see on your 4-channel TV selection or grab at the library.
/old_man_rant
Payback is fair? Even though these very digital megacorporations are just now facing antitrust lawsuits for very good reasons? The only argument for having to use these platforms as a content creator is reach. But if Google, Amazon, Meta, etc. only got their market-dominating positions by illegal means, nothing is fair about wanting payback.
I am paying money to people creating content for me directly, even for some YouTube channels. If I were to abide by Google’s rules, I’d have to pay double. For the infrastructure & the people actually producing the content. Sorry… Why would I? I will not pity a monopolist because of their lost profits as long as I can circumvent it somehow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
Google offered content for free and so played a part in making generation(s?) of users expect content for free.
I used to watch films in cinema before they started playing them on TV but now I 99.8% don’t care about them, or shows. I use Crunchyroll for a couple of anime but most of my content is only on YouTube.