Comment by hansvm
3 months ago
It's >12x the ad revenue they bring in per monthly-active YouTube user (suggesting they'd still be happy with a much lower price), and the price has increased 75% in the last decade (compared to the 40% real inflation over that period, suggesting they intend to continue increasing the price till public backlash or other effects reduce their total revenue). Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users, and we'll see how far that initiative goes.
> Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users
Do you have a source for this?
I do value watching unlimited youtube videos without ads, but if they're gonna add the ads back in, I'd easily stop paying for the one google product I currently pay for (and honestly the only reason I haven't already done this is laziness and convenience)
> the price has increased 75% in the last decade
It launched at $9.99[1] and is now $13.99[2] which I believe to be a 40% increase, i.e. flat in real dollars. If like most people you subscribe for a year, it's only $11.67/mo.
1: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/youtube-free...
2: https://www.youtube.com/premium
I was going off the 7.99/mo price I first paid (which they've recently stopped grandfathering in). Was that not a common amount people paid?
This suggests that you initially subscribed to Google Play Music at their launch special price, and were later grandfathered into getting YouTube Premium at the same price, or that you used YouTube Music Key (yes, more product roadmap confusion!) with the same outcome, or that you signed up with a student account (this is still $7.99 today).