>People were offended when Google launched YouTube Premium because it encroached on their right to "free" everything from Google.

Nope. At least I was offended, because YT Premium wanted $15 from me for hosting other people's videos. That's more than streaming services that pay for production of TV shows and movies.

Don't think they really need THAT much to cover hosting costs. Not when they operate on that scale and in addition can hover up and profit on all the usage data.

If YT Premium costed $3 or $5, I'd pay and I'd bully any friends and family that watch YT and don't pay into supporting the service. As it is now, my appraisal skill says "SCAM" and I pirate YT with clean conscience.

▲

Workaccount2 a day ago | parent [-]

Youtube has a 60/40 revenue share with creators for long form video (inverse for shorts). 60% to creators 40% to youtube. It's also dependent on watch time and split evenly among channels (unlike spotify where big names get all the money and small guys get nothing). Youtube premium viewers are the juiciest viewers for creators, by a large margin.

Also blocking-ads/pirating on youtube provides the creators with nothing. I'm not sure how people justify this besides the established internal conditioning that anything on the internet must be free. Also conversion rates for "watches all their content" to "pays for their patreon" are <1%. meanwhile ad-blocking/pirating rates are around 40-60% depending on your audience.

At some point the internet has got to have a reckoning with reality if they want things to improve.

▲

kyboren a day ago | parent | next [-]

In a free and competitive market, the price of any good trends towards the marginal cost of production.

Producing de novo some valuable information--a YouTube video, blog post, software program, news article, song, etc.--has a real cost that must be paid for each new information good created.

But making copies of information in our digital world with gigabit networks and terabyte disks is now very nearly free, so the marginal cost of production of copies of any piece of information is very nearly zero.

This is why centralization and scale are such powerful strategies for IP-based industries: They offer enormous leverage. And it's also why they are so dependent on government intervention to ensure unfree markets.

These creators can only make a profit if they are able to monopolize their information goods. If a new "factory" opens up down on BitTorrent Boulevard literally giving your product away for free, how can you compete with that? Moreover, what incentive do you have to produce new goods in the first place, if anyone can just offer infinite copies of your product to the market for free?

Thus, these creators rely on government intervention to make it illegal to offer copies of their information goods. But there's a fundamental tension between the twin economic realities that the marginal cost of production is ~zero yet the marginal price of consumption is nonzero. Thus, piracy.

In my opinion the copyright system is broken in the digital age. Instead of granting monopolies on information goods produced, we ought to figure out an alternative economic structure that incentivizes the production of these information goods in proportion to their consumption while accepting that their marginal cost of production is zero and abandoning any attempt to control the copying, transmission, creation of derivative works, etc.

▲

afiori a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It depends if Google ranks all users' watch time the same or less profitable users are weighted less in the "algorithm"

If all users' are ranked the same then loyal adblocking users can still help a lot

	▲	Workaccount2 a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's weighted on the individuals watch time, not all of YouTube's watch time. That's why it's so good for small channels. The most amount of your money goes to whatever channels you watch the most, regardless of their size.