For me personally it’s the way they’re bullying me to pay it. For years I wanted YouTube and Twitter to introduce a paid plan with less ads. And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds. It’s just rude and I don’t like being bullied into doing something.
What's the alternative here? Just offer the service with minimal ads and just hope people decide to sign up for the ad-free version - a value proposition that makes little sense since the ads are minimal?
They aren't bullying anyone. They are trying to make a business model work as efficiently as possible. Anything that relies on ad revenue is going to be predatory like this.
You could've started paying almost a decade ago. I've had Premium for as long as it's existed, even when ads were "tolerable." (It was never tolerable enough for me to be able to keep a few bucks.)
I think it's ridiculous that people are only now coming out of the woodwork saying things like "I would pay if they weren't forcing me into it" or "I would pay if it wasn't so expensive now" or "I just want to pay for ad-free and not YT Music".
It's been out for years, and it was cheap before; they even had Premium Lite for a while.
> And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds
Youtube premium has been a thing for 8 years now, you have had a really long time to start paying for ad-free youtube. You just didn't bother to even check if it existed until they started to push for it harder recently.
So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now, its because it didn't work to just do it the way you think is "fair".
> Youtube premium has been a thing for 8 years now
Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US.
> So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now
They started rolling out aggressive ads before YouTube Red was available in my country to purchase. And by the way, I gave in and do pay for YouTube Premium currently.
But I still stand by my statement, because I see how bad it is on my second account. For decades, YouTube managed to show me a few ads before and after the video just fine. And suddenly it's literally every minute? I'm sure Google is struggling to make ends meet.
