alt Hacker News> Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive
Disney, Netflix, and HBO all fund the creation of and own the content they provide to users. Youtube does not. Youtube inserts itself as a middle-man taxing regular people sharing videos with other regular people. There is obviously a non-zero cost to infrastructure but their attempts to extract revenue go far, far beyond that, hence people feeling their prices are too high, whether the price is paid in ads or subscription fees.
OK, again a good point. There is YouTube Originals (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqVDpXKLmKeBU_yyt_QkItQ) not sure the model vs the others (also want to ad I enjoy the classic films that YT provides for free [tho I think I need to be on a US VPN to get that if traveling], plus of which you need to buy/rent), but I'm also not sure any of us has the inside track on YT's costs/revenue, so I guess we're all speculating.
When you say "their attempts to extract revenue go far beyond that"(A) I feel I can't accept that on good faith, I'd need to see numbers. Also I doubt this kind of data is the thing most people reacting with "prices are unfair" or "payment is bad", are drawing on, instinctively or not. So it's hard for me to accept this thesis as the source of ills. Tho, maybe it is. Maybe people's innate sense of fairness really does cover this, somehow.
I'm not aware of those numbers, so it doesn't seem that way to me, but maybe I'm just not across it. Can you give examples of your claim (A)?