Makes sense and probably all companies that do regional pricing have a rule for this, Steam explicitly states to not do this as well
You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.
Couldn’t you secretly hook up with the boss’s wife and give her the most intense orgasm of her life, so she’ll do anything for you, and you use her to ask her husband he should allow torrenting or else she will get a divorce, so he’ll allow torrenting and then the VPN would become useful?
I've never seen a company SO devoted to get me to not use their service. $2-$3 a month is worth not seeing ads in my mind. They've made their website SO user hostile and their prices are just too damned high to justify paying them - I can just go without.
If I could get Youtube Premium for $2-3, I'd probably pay. I don't use it enough to justify spending $10 or whatever it is these days, so I block ads. If that stops working, I'll stop watching Youtube.
I would even pay the 11,99€, in fact I did in the past. Youtube's algorithms made me stop.
Spotify for example caters to my preferences. It took a bit to train it, but the weekly selection is spot on with lots of a variety, and they don't try to shove pop music or other mainstream stuff into my face.
YouTube tries to suckme into a shit hole of craziness at every turn. It tries to make people dumber.
I realize they charge what people are willing to pay, but can someone explain to me why YouTube costs just a couple USD a month in some countries and almost $20 a month in the US?
Are operating costs cheaper in those countries? Are they taking a loss in those counties? Or are they just price gouging in the US?
Well they are charging a premium for the service everywhere and more so in certain countries which can afford it but a big part is that in some countries people may only earn a few USD a day so they would not be able to afford it otherwise. I can’t speak on whether or not they are taking a loss in those countries, but i can’t imagine that they have a problem due to existing infrastructure from google all across the world.
If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.
If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.
That's it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it's just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.
In theory the service operating costs could be spread across region differences such that in other areas it was at a loss to build and preserve market share and in richer areas it was making up for that.
But yes, in reality it's just exploitative "what we think we can get away with" pricing to "maximize shareholder value" (which is largely BS as the vast holders of shares are very small clusters of the population but people with a handful of shares in their 401k think that statement is talking about them).
I’m sort of more moderate when it comes to paying Google to access YouTube. I’m happy to pay for products that I use. I want Google and creators to be rewarded for services rendered, but the prices are double what they should be.
I’m one of the people who used the VPN to get Premium at an affordable rate even though I have Ublock and know about other options.
My Premium account did get canceled. I was able to sign back up via another location, but if they push me out again, I would just revert to adblockers.
I suspect other users who signed up with a VPN are like me. We are the few who know how to get around the ads but want to pay, if we can. Just a guess though.
If you have an iPhone or iPad you don’t even need to use a VPN to get cheap Premium. Just make an new Apple ID with an Indian address, top it up by buying a digital Apple Card on Amazon.in and redeeming it to your Indian account in iTunes on a computer. Then on your iPad or iPhone go to your Apple ID in the settings, log out of Media and Purchases and login with the Indian account. Then you can buy Premium in the YouTube app with your Rupees, you don’t even need to change your YouTube account.
I can do even better. I can hook you up with a free lifetime account, but I'm having a problem with my bank account this week. But I'll send you $6000 dollars if you just send me $5000 back. Yeah I know it sounds weird but I'm really not hard up for cash I just can't get my cash out of the bank at this moment so I need your help. Hit me up and we'll figure something out, and I'll get you that free lifetime subscription.
If you watch ads instead of paying a modest fee to remove them then you're a clown. Companies do need to make money for the services they provide, I just disagree with the amount.
They make enough off of all my data they collect. I'm not paying them a cent for anything and I'm not watching a single ad. If you want to watch ads for shareholders, you are most definitely a clown.
If you watch enough youtube per month to see an hour of ads and you can't block ads for some reason, you may actually be losing time/money by not paying the subscription. That said, there are ad blockers for almost every platform so it shouldn't be too difficult to find one that works.
That was my comment about the amount that should be charged. I'll happily pay $5/mo, but not $15. I'm happy to pay for services, just not the amount that many want to charge.
Really? I watch very little Youtube, so I'd rather not use it than pay $10+ for it. I'm currently able to block ads, so I'll watch as long as that's an option.
Then what's left? YouTube should somehow be ad free and free of cost for the user forever and ever? Who's gonna pay for the enormous costs of operating the service?
People are going to start yelling at me about capitalism and enshitiffication. Both of which cause problems, but what do you propose here? Magic?
I'll still call someone a clown for paying even if I'm able to acknowledge that someone has to hold the bag. Just ain't gonna me or hopefully anyone I care about.
Glad you enjoy it. Keep doing your thing. But are you seriously deaf to the rising chorus of complaints about YouTube? This thread contains many examples of youtube's enshitification over the few couple years. Your question feels disingenuous at best to me
I'm not opposed to paying for online services in general, I'm just not going to pay them to make the site worse with every update. (Plus I kinda categorically refuse to give Google money at this point.)
There are repos on GitHub that pull the videos and metadata, not sure about posting to Peerhub, though if that's possible to post via an api you could probably script it easily enough. Likely a risk of other "issues" doing so, but I'm sure some datahoarders could chime in.
I'd run this on a VPS if I could do it over the TOR network (don't want to get caught with my CC on the line), but there's the problem of needless duplication if this happens, so it's likely the best if relevant authors do it themselves
I use to care, but then I just use Peertube.
Oh but there's not as much content on Peertube. Put the type of content you like on Peertube make a channel it is free. Another tip is, look for specific types of content, and not specific content creators. and if you happened to find a creator you know or knew, follow them on Peertube!
I have plenty of tech Peertube channels that keep me up to date on Peertube, and it's a type of platform that will never have ads or go a direction I don''t want it to as a whole in terms of federation of servers and being an opensource video platform.
Server can surely make some unwelcomed decisions, and I can just change servers easily. Better then Youtube no ads, and your experience does not get throttled.
Peertube is a crazy impressive piece of tech. Just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it needs something to happen to push users over to it (or something like it). YouTube keeps doing stupid things like this, so one day users will be pushed away from it and the creators will have to follow or die.