
The YouTube Premium Concept Is All but Done - elemeno
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/critics-notebook-youtube-premium-concept-is-all-but-done-1164556
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agnokapathetic
I’m a YouTube premium subscriber and I never watch any “original content”. I
simply enjoy zero advertisements.

Paradoxically the target demographic willing to pay to be ad free is probably
worth far more to advertisers than those who don’t— making it difficult to
justify the product offering.

Though I’d certainly use YouTube significantly less if I had to sit through
the ads.

~~~
denormalfloat
The paradox is resolved if you consider yourself an advertiser. When you pay
for "ad free", it's equivalent to bidding on yourself and then showing
yourself nothing. A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self.

~~~
nothrabannosir
I like this idea, although I do want to note:

 _> A serious bidder could bid higher than you on your own self._

At least I'd get my money back :(

But it's a great mental model.

~~~
londons_explore
The mental model gets better when you realise online ad auctions have bids
multiplied by the predicted click-through-rate (pCTR).

That means someone can outbid you easily if it is predicted the ad will be
clicked, and they have to pay a _load_ of money if it's predicted the ad is
very unlikely to be clicked.

Which in turn means, you'll effectively only be shown ads you're interested
in, since the predictor thinks it's very likley you'll click (or watch the
whole thing for a preroll ad).

Turns out, that predictor is mostly right - it did a good job of showing me
ads that were funny enough to watch to the end, and correctly realised I would
never watch an ad twice, so never showed me the same ad twice.

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ohazi
I love YouTube and watch a ton of creative and technical content. I'm arguably
the ideal customer for a product like YouTube premium. But I use an ad-blocker
and pay creators directly via Patreon (whenever possible) instead.

So why didn't I bother signing up for YouTube premium, even though I was
excited to the level of shouting, "This! This is what I wanted!" when it was
first announced?

I have zero confidence that Google is willing to keep their experiments like
this one alive for more than a year or two. This result seemed obvious and
inevitable. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety, but I'm now far more
likely to try out a random probably-not-going-to-be-around-next-year startup
with a neat idea than an interesting looking Google experiment.

Google used to have a reputation for being clever and innovative. It was fun
to try out their new products. They had features that were original and
helpful rather than gimmicky and "me too." Product updates added features
without throwing away old functionality that was obviously still important.
Products lasted longer than one or two promotion cycles.

These days it's just frustrating.

~~~
creato
> So why didn't I bother signing up for YouTube premium, even though I was
> excited to the level of shouting, "This! This is what I wanted!" when it was
> first announced?

> I have zero confidence that Google is willing to keep their experiments like
> this one alive for more than a year or two....

This seems like really silly logic. It's not like youtube premium is a big
commitment, and there's zero chance that google is going to actually just rob
your money and not give you the product you paid for. So what if you get ad-
free YouTube for just a few years and then it goes away? You're back where you
started with no real loss. It's not like they cancelled a service that has
stickiness (e.g. e-mail history, chat network effects).

On the other hand, I think it's good to buy things that are actually good.
Anyone that allows me to pay for content at a reasonable price instead of
seeing ads is a good thing and I'll buy it (if I use it of course, which I do
use youtube).

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _This seems like really silly logic. It 's not like youtube premium is a big
> commitment_

There's an emotional component. People are upset that Inbox is going away,
that Hangouts is going away. Google Reader _was_ a bigger commitment, since it
required you to curate a list of feeds, so that doesn't really count.

But honestly at this point using Google services is like letting your third-
time-rehab cousin live above your garage. He's not hurting anyone, but you're
just waiting for that moment when your uncle calls to tell you he's going to
be gone for another 30 days...

> _there 's zero chance that google is going to actually just rob your money
> and not give you the product you paid for._

I don't know, remember when Hulu didn't show ads?

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discreditable
I had YouTube Premium to avoid ads. Since the adpocalypse, more creators are
adding sponsored content to their videos. So now I've got ads even though I'm
paying.

~~~
newnewpdro
The vast majority of youtube content I encounter is thinly veiled commercials
of one form or another.

It's so bad that occasionally I'll ask myself if the overt and relatively
easily defeated ads exist in part to obfuscate the more subtle advertising
most content has become rife with.

~~~
on_and_off
Do youtubers have to disclose how much each company is paying them ?

I stumbled on a video yesterday about how Tesla was so far ahead of its
competition .. and I could not help to wonder how much this youtuber has been
paid to say that.

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craftyguy
Why would they have to disclose that? They are not elected politicians or have
any other status that requires them to publicly disclose their employers any
more than you or I have.

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pessimizer
You and I must publicly disclose our employers. Advertising is regulated.

~~~
craftyguy
Source?

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analyst74
The content creation space is extremely competitive and audiences are fickle.

On top of that, Hollywood is a very self-reinforcing system, where industry
connection is super valuable at getting funding, securing talents, rights and
other things needed to deliver a successful project. Outside funding will have
a hard time competing against existing investors, and will end up either
overpaying or settle with less promising projects with trouble securing
funding otherwise.

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wjoe
>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if
the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be
interested in scripted longform storytelling. Well, YouTube found out
definitively that the answer was a resounding no.

It's not so much that the audience isn't interested in paying for long form
storytelling (or at least myself), but maybe just not interested in paying
YouTube for it. YouTube is a place for short videos, I go there when I want to
watch tech reviews, recipes, or something silly. When I want longform
storytelling, I go to Netflix or something else that I pay for.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but YouTube hasn't done a good job of
advertising or raising awareness of Premium content at all. The most I see is
a few thumbnails of things that I need to pay to watch on the homescreen. I
would be happy to be proved wrong, but I have low expectations of drama or any
longform content on YouTube - I expect it to be low budget and badly acted, so
I may as well just go elsewhere.

Perhaps ad blockers are a double whammy against YouTube Premium. I don't see
ads on YouTube anyway, so I don't need to pay to get rid of them. And maybe
they're advertising Premium content on there, but I've not seen them anyway.
I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting
adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the
video streams and make them unblockable.

Still, it wouldn't take much for them to draw more attention to Premium
videos, whether it's from ads, creating more social media buzz around them, or
just putting a larger section on the home page that at least gives me a
description of the content that I'm missing. As always, YouTube relies too
much on their algorithm of placing _more of the same_ content in front of you.
When the experience is designed to just keep you clicking on though the
recommendations of videos like the ones you just watched, it's no wonder that
they're not getting eyes on original content. And yet it should be so easy for
them.

~~~
leppr
_> I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting
adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the
video streams and make them unblockable._

Not only would that force them to enter a game of cat-and-mouse with
developers, it would also give an opportunity for ad-free/ad-light
competition.

My intuition would be that they want to wait until " _paying for not having
ads_ " becomes sort of a norm, before prematurely forcing ads on desktop users
and potentially encouraging an exodus.

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nerdponx
I would have paid for YT Premium if I had some guarantee that I wouldn't be
surveilled aggressively even as a paid user.

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PhantomGremlin
The biggest winners here are Google shareholders. There was no way Google was
going to spend enough cash to successfully compete with the likes of Netflix
and Disney. It's better that they pulled the plug early.

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JumpCrisscross
> _YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively,
> if the immense online entity 's user base would A) pay for something and B)
> be interested in scripted longform storytelling_

I pay for YouTube content. YouTube just doesn’t get a cut of it. I pay for it
on Patreon. There is so much great short-form educational content waiting to
happen, but instead we get more long-firm scripted crap.

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vinceguidry
YouTube isn't taking any chances but still expecting to get big like Netflix
just cuz.

I have a friend who makes original, scripted, television-length episodic
content and he can't get noticed, despite having a whole season already up on
YouTube, link below. This sort of serious production isn't really viable for
the sponsorship model of most YouTube channels, which stick to 10-20 minute
videos that can use what a TV crew would consider a barebones production
staff.

YouTube should be reaching out to people like my friend like they reached out
to my mom shortly after all the crafting TV shows started disappearing in the
early 2000s. I think they just lost their nerve, but still don't have the
resources to truly do what Netflix is doing.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/videos)

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bad_user
I would pay for YouTube Premium, but it's not available in my country.

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aetherson
Impulse was considerably better than it has any right to be, though.

~~~
yegle
Yes Impulse is surprisonly good compare to those low quality originals and is
the only original series I watched so far since I start using YouTube
Red/Premium 3 years ago.

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payne92
I don’t understand why YouTube hasn’t implemented Patreon as a feature.

That’s one model that’s clearly working at some scale, and it could be easy
expanded to “subscriber only videos“

~~~
Ajedi32
They have.
[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294)

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akvadrako
Some of their originals were pretty good, for example Dallas & Robo.

