• chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?

    • I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
    • I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
    • A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
    • The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
      • Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free

    So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.

    • Slashzero@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’m also a YouTube premium user. I realize there are other ways to get around the ads, but I prefer supporting the services I enjoy using.

    • Danny M@lemmy.escapebigtech.info
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      1 year ago

      rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It’s a win win

      • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Alright, let’s say I do that. I’ll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I’ve watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows… about 100 different channels.

        Let’s ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I’d have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let’s do math together:

        • Subscription: $12.48 (the extra $0.48 is applied at checkout for the 4% VAT)
        • 4% VAT (rounds up): -$0.48 ($12.00)
        • 1.9% + $0.30 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.53 ($11.47)
        • 45% Platform Split (not rounded!): -$5.1615 ($6.3085)
        • 100x split: $0.063085 p/channel

        Ok. That’s ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. Now, I don’t know about you… but I’m kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let’s go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:

        • Not-Subscription: $12.48
        • Rounded up: $13.00 (the donation has to be evenly divisible by 100)
        • Per-creator donation: $00.13
        • 4% Local Digital VAT (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.12)
        • 5% Platform Fee (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.11)
        • 5% + $0.10 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.11 ($0.00)

        In other words: I’d be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the “no money” problem, there’s also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. We also conveniently ignored the challenge of individually navigating numerous currency conversions…


        Let’s be honest and come clean with each other now: you weren’t being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I’m certain that you don’t actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.