Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.

Isn’t that Apple News+?

You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?).

That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.

I pay for Apple One and yet the apple news app on my phone is still riddled with ads with weird AI generated people and horrible articles from crappy publishers pushing some other sensationalist garbage.

I think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company anything to include, but when somebody gets greedy and starts considering adding ads it would make the idea much less attractive and could force them to look at other ways to enshitify their product.

cable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.

There are enormous piles of money looming around every corner seeking a return on investment. If you have users that are enjoying a service, one of those piles of money can buy out the owner, double the price, implement ads, and sell all the private data. The bet they are making is it will take longer for the userbase to quit than it will take to make back their investment.

Every popular / beloved service is a target for these giant piles of cash. The fact that lots of people like it is de facto proof that it's underpriced, or over-resourced, or coddles its users with too much content. According to the finance industry, a stable business relationship should have the userbase reluctantly concluding that they have no other option, gritting their teeth and opening their wallet - and that's the sort of maximally profitable entity that a giant pile of cash will leave alone, letting it just exist, as a business.

I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top.

I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.

Then there's the TV streaming problem where the three shows (or sites) you're interested in viewing regularly belong to three different subscription services, and they're jealously set against uniting. I guess that's like the same problem as individual paywalled sites, but bigger.

My guess is that the $2/user/month thing is an average across all of the users, and the fact that you use YouTube enough to even consider to pay to go ad free puts you in the much higher range of dollars-per-month users such that $14/month may even lose them money.

Presumably because advertisers won't continue to pay $2/user/month for a pool of users that has been denuded of all the users with three bucks a month to rub together for ad-free YouTube.

FWIW, YouTube Premium Lite is $8/month. It removes ads from most content, just not music, and doesn’t include YouTube Music. For me it’s well worth it.

Unless you have some first hand information that I have, you are more than 10x off.

> I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...

There in lies the problem. Your eye balls (assuming well employed with $$$ disposable income) is another 10x worth to advertisers.

If I were to make a guess, Youtube for sure will lose money at $14/month on your specific browser.

You are literally subsidizing internet for, let us say for arguments sake, some zip code in rural america or <sub any rural part of the world> 's Youtube streaming needs.

There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.

Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).

The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.

----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.

By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.

I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.

...And you'll find that when you do so magically you seem to get logged out more frequently, and because of their UI, you likely won't notice until the sneaking suspicion the quality of your recommendations has dropped catches up with you

What if they dropped the average price of YouTube Premium to $2? And charged you $20 but people in Africa $1. Then it’d be more comparable to ad revenue. Would you be happier then?