YouTube as a Paid Subscription only Service

I know I might get a lot of hate for this post, but I believe a YouTube Premium membership is so worth the value that you get in return, and I myself have been a paying member since its inception way back in October of 2015.

Here’s a list of what you get for being a YouTube Premium subscriber:

1. Watch videos on YouTube without ads. (I can’t do YouTube without this.)
2. Download videos and playlists on your mobile device to watch offline.
3. Continue playing videos on your mobile device while using other apps or when your screen is off. (This is yet another can’t live without feature for me, and no ad-blocker is going to allow you to do this, since it’s a feature of the YouTube application only, and I pretty much exclusively use YouTube, so when I’m driving or exercising I can listen to anything on YouTube, or YouTube Music without killing my battery in the process… I absolutely love this feature!)
4. Get a subscription to YouTube Music Premium at no monetary cost.
5. Enjoy your music and podcasts on your Google Home or Chromecast Audio.
6. My favorite creators get paid based off of the amount of watch time I commit to their content, which makes me feel good knowing that I am supporting them just by doing what I want to do, which is watch their videos. Plus, because of this feature, I no longer feel guilty not buying any of their merch, or whatever other usually irrelevant to me product they are hocking in their videos. (This is not in the source material link listed below, I just added this myself, because it’s a very important reason as to why I am, and will most likely always be a YouTube Red Premium member.)

Tap or click here to view the original source material listed above.

I absolutely hate ads, like with an extreme passion, which is why I don’t even use most of the platforms I used to once upon a time such as Facebook and Instagram, which is pretty much just a crappy stream of advertisements these days in my opinion.

Alright, now to get on to the point of my post, which is to highlight the latest war between YouTube and ad-blockers, and why I don’t understand most of the complaints about it.

If you’re a power user of YouTube like me, and you don’t want to fork up the $13.99 a month to become a YouTube Premium member, then watch the ads, that’s how the creators you love and support earn money to keep making those videos you want to watch.

To put some context into what I am talking about here, YouTube has recently started warning folks who watch videos with an active ad-blocker that they can watch I believe 2 more videos, and if they don’t disable their ad-blocker, they will not be able to watch anymore videos.

I think this is fair, but let me get into another point of mine.

I was under the impression that YouTube was always going to be a money-loser for Alphabet, and that they understood this. I always heard that they use YouTube as an information gathering machine, seeing as though it is the second largest search engine after Google itself, and I believe as of writing this, the second most visited website in the world, and I guess I just figured they used it as a tool to push users over to their actual profitable services, such as Google Search and Google Cloud.

With all that being said, YouTube is really the only game in town, and if folks keep messing around, I think Alphabet will pull a Netflix and go to a fully paid subscription style format. Either you pay the $13.99 a month… or you get nothing.

You know right off the start you’ll get all the creators forking over the money, because where else will they go. The crapification of the latest Chinese communist party ran darling TikTok is already in full effect, requiring creators to fill up 10 minutes of play time just to make a few bucks, so the migration over to that crap service is now a moot point for most creators.

Then you have power user watchers like me who will pay, because I love long-form content, and YouTube is a place where I can always find something that I want to watch. It’s extremely educational and entertaining, so I am definitely staying.

Although, to be fair, I do fear less content being created and uploaded to YouTube if this did ever happen. Maybe they could offer a tier where the best creators will just have the fees for their membership deducted out of their YouTube earnings each month, this way the creators could just write it off as an expense for tax purposes at the end of each year.

All I know, is that if Alphabet is serious about monetizing YouTube, which I don’t understand why they would have to, considering how well their other services perform, they are going to need to do something, because think about all the crap that is uploaded to YouTube each and every day at 4K, 8K, or even higher in some cases that get 1 or 2 views… hosting all that crap on their servers forever is definitely not a sustainable business model.

Heck, they can even take a page out of Twitch’s book, and if you’re not a paying member, all content uploaded is deleted after 7 days, but maybe alter it a little, and make it to where your videos have to have so much watch time in order to stay up indefinitely.

I don’t know what YouTube has to do, but I can assure you this. They are the only game in town because they have Google’s ad money making machine supporting them. No other company can sustain a business model the way YouTube is, and has for the last almost 20 years without those Google dollars.

They know this too, so maybe it’s only a matter of time now before all the ad-blocker users get a special message from YouTube… a mess around and find out message.