I am conflicted because to some extent, paying for some of these services feels like paying a blackmailer, spying on you, holding a whole ecosystem hostage and even jeopardising mental health and the public discourse.

I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to.

If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.

Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free.

If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.

There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.

YouTube announced in March that they have 125 million premium subscribers.

I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.

I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.

Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...

My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast majority are long term members that have been on the site for years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so, only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.

I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.

> met one person [...] who actually pays for YT Premium.

I dont like that while the ad revenue barely extracts a dollar from me, my subscription suddenly expects $10-30 per month regardless of my usage.

Thats not "we need to charge you to continue our services", thats "we need to charge you and then 20x times again just because we can".

I am not interested in paying Google for anything. It's a company too big and powerful through immoral business (ads)

I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.

YT Premium is pretty expensive. I think it costs as much for one user for a multi-device plan on Netflix?

They don’t create nor curate much content.

I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.

I'm about to start paying for YouTube for the first time ever. Of course, they make it complicated because I don't actually want their bundled music service. And the "lite" version says most videos are ad-free. But what's preventing them from changing that deal the day after I sign up? And of course, once I become a customer, now I'm hooked, and I'm subject to their arbitrary price increases.

Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.

Amazon prime had a lot of customers but they started to put ads to paying customers as well.

So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"

By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.

Surely it has to be somewhat ideological given that adblockers exist? Have you seen your high paid engineer friends actually watching the ads?

I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.

Probably not watch.

I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.

When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.

Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.

Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.

I don't use YT much, but if I did and paid for premium, I'd assume they'd still track me, monetize the data and utilize dark patterns and enshittified UX.

What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.

I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.

I pay for YT Premium and Protonmail. Very happy to do so.

> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk.

Depends on the price.

I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier.

WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook:

* https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/

Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).

> crowd is mostly all-talk.

I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties.

> who actually pays for YT Premium.

Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?"

Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.

I pay for YT Premium. Not because I care for stupid videos, but because you get YT Music for free with it... Spotify is the hottest of garbage in my opinion, constantly trying to push podcasts at me. Why more people don't cancel Spotify and just pay for YT Premium - you get ad-free videos and all the music of Spotify. Plus with YT Music you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account.

The problem with YT premium is that they simply do not have content worth paying for. Even the very best content (say, videos where people give music lessons) is not actually something I would pay for. I don't mind paying for a streaming service - I pay for Netflix and will for the foreseeable future. But that's because Netflix has stuff where I actively want to watch it and would miss it if it was gone; YT does not.

Solving this properly probably means solving how to pay for open source. I think it needs a somewhat complex scheme of pooling money together into an ad-hoc fund like entity and distributing it to service providers by someone elected for the task.

I don’t want to pay for YouTube because the official app, even without ads, has a much worse UX than Tubular.

$13.99 /month is hardly a small fee IMO. But more importantly it's an arbitrary price point set by Google. Pretending that people are not willing to pay just because they choose not to accept a particular set of conditions is dishonest.

Paying for YT Premium is a no brainer. Especially for someone like myself with ADHD.

I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.

> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk.

That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction:

- credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor.

- in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones)

- bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts

- crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions

- pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend

In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started.

Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.