Slashdot Mirror
Google To Offer Ad-Free YouTube - At a Price
First time accepted submitter totalcaos writes YouTube announced today its plans for an ad-free, subscription-based service by way of an email sent out to YouTube Partners. The email details the forthcoming option, which will offer consumers the choice to pay for an "ads-free" version of YouTube for a monthly fee. The additional monetization option requires partners to agree to updated terms on YouTube's Creator Studio Dashboard, which notes that the changes will go into effect on June 15, 2015. We talked about the possibility of an ad-free model back in October.
I like the concept of paying for content to support my usage instead of going through annoying ads, but I don't use Youtube all that often, usually only because someone else has given me a link to something in particular. Those 30 second ads which sometimes lets you skip after 5 seconds and sometimes don't let you skip at all are really annoying. I hope that they give a low-tier option. For example $1 per year which is good for ad-free (or no forced ads) up to 500 videos.
The most important thing is that I hope that the subscription options are compelling enough that someone would WANT to use it over the use of an Adblocker without any Adblocking counter-measures put in place.
If it is successful (for consumers) it would be great if an ad-free pass could be extended across any other websites too that participate, not just Youtube.
I use Adblock because the quality of advertising is too invasive, not because I don't to deprive websites of revenue.
There is another catch to it: I will not pay a fee to all websites I visit in order to avoid ads. Not even talking about the money spent, there is just no practical way for me to micro-pay for every site I go to... Even though I think it would be a nice way to avoid ads while still giving something to the sites I visit. After all, they provide value..
In other words: it doesn't scale until there is a way to expand the model to the internet. As such, I will still have AdBlock installed for all the other sites I visit. So even if I don't pay for YouTube, I won't see any ads anyways, making the YouTube subscription of little value.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
They have heard of adblock. In fact, when I specifically requested to pay them so they could pay the content creators without showing me ads, they refused and even mentioned ad blocking. Note my motivation in that sentence; this is actually a feature requested by some of us. This announcement got my hopes up just a bit, but it remains to be seen if it's like the offline watching, which was riddled with strange restrictions, never worked properly, and was quietly removed. I see they're still talking about that in the future tense.
I teach language classes, and this would be useful since I often use Youtube to show songs, listening exercises, etc. Sometimes I'm forced to use the in-class room computer, and nothing throws off a listening exercise like warming everyone up, getting their mental schemata activated, and then some ridiculous ad immediately preceding a listening. I hope that perhaps my university could get some sort of educational rate, since this is really for my work rather than my personal use.
I'd also love to make the scourge of autoplay go away somehow - suddenly it's everywhere that shows videos.
No legal obligation.
No other obligation either.
But suppose I watch the ads, do I then have an obligation to change my buying patterns, or is it okay to freeload on the creative effort it took to make the ad, and the bandwidth required to serve it ?