this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.
They reduced the price!
And forcibly added a YouTube music sub to the price...
The music subscription service is older than YouTube Premium. It started as Google Play Music, then YouTube Premium was rolled in, then they replaced Google Play Music with YouTube Music.
The ol' switcheroo-to-boost-youtube-premium-subscribers-to-make-it-look-good-to-shareholders trick.
I had a google play music subscription. They bundled it into YouTube, dumped the play music app, and it's equivalent on the YouTube platform is garbage, never understanding that hey, sometimes people don't have a data connection and failing to load even the songs in my phone.
I considered dropping it then and going over to Spotify then, this price hike might be what finally does it.
I don't think they did a proper cost-benefit analysis for this one. Feels like the new CEO learned of ad blockers and put down a diktat.
No, I think the advertisers learned of ad blockers and started putting pressure on the new CEO. "Why am I paying you $X,000,000 for an ad buy that people can just block? And you're not doing anything about it?!"
So they put some development resources behind it, make some noise, get the internet in a tizzy, so the advertisers feel like they're being heard and listened to and some progress is being made. Then later they can say, "hey look, less than 1% of ads are being blocked on our platform but views have gone up by 6%, so we'll only increase the ad cost by 5% this year and call it even."
Boom, everyone wins and they can drop it, at the cost of just a little bit of their dignity and self-respect.
The advertisers are only paying for seen ads, not ads that are blocked.
And people that block ads weren't likely to click on any to begin with, which benefits advertisers because they get a higher clickthrough rate.
Google doesn't want to be providing a good service to anyone though, they want money. Low clickthrough with high views makes Google more money (and costs the advertisers more money and the viewers more time).
It doesn't matter whether they do or not, it's about what they think.
I'm pretty sure advertisers aren't paying for ads that get blocked.
It doesn't matter whether they do or not, it's about whether they think they do or not.