Most other companies can be selective in what they host / stream. YouTube will host/stream anything users upload and that's actually quite insane. Current statistics say that YouTubers upload 30.000 hours of video.. per hour.

Aside from the streaming/processing, only the disk space that would need is already frightening. Most of those videos will never be seen, and no ads will be played on them. The setup needed for this is massively more impressive to me than services like Netflix.

Do you perhaps have a source for those profit margins? I really wonder if they're already running break even.

That is because you are paying for the premium of signing up through ios; apple takes a cut so to make money they raise the rates. It's extremely common signing up to any service through ios, that you will be charged higher than if you went to the website on your browser and sign up for it there. First link has link to Hank Green who does a great break down and investigation but provided many more examples.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166546/subscribing-to-stuff-from-your-iphone-is-a-waste-of-money

https://www.devicemag.com/youtube-premium-cost-iphone/

https://lifehacker.com/dont-sign-up-for-subscriptions-in-the-app-1850298355

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2020/07/08/heres-why-your-apple-app-store-purchases-may-be-a-ripoff/

https://umatechnology.org/psa-subscriptions-cost-more-when-bought-on-an-iphone/

It's okay to pay for a service that you use daily.

I don't, but I disagree it's "to throw money away".

We csncelled all streaming and use plex but we watch too much YouTube and am tired of having to keep up with versions of pirate apps every time they break. I already deal with having to keep patching the newest youtube apk with vanced on my phone. Not gonna bother for all the other devices.

Exact same story. It's frustrating.

Look into getting SmartTube for the TV. Works pretty great for me

Is that how bad it is? Fuck...

My girlfriend said the same thing about Korea. Google keeps getting in their own way of selling a good service

And even if you select high resolution preferred in settings, they will absolutely serve that shit at a low resolution forcing you to manually select the resolution every damn time.

Yes YouTube my connection is absolutely fast enough to watch at the max resolution you can serve, don't pretend it's my connection to cover for your intentional bumping down in resolution.

It wouldn't be so bad if the ads were reasonably placed.

Don't target people who come in from another domain or on the first viewed video. Pre- roll ads after that. Most importantly, ad breaks at creator-defined times only. Sick of ads coming in at arbitrary times in the middle of a sentence. That's the worst part of it, IMO.

Oh and a time limit on ads. That has to happen too.

Also could somebody tell all the streaming companies that they know what language I watch all my videos in and to stop giving me Spanish language ads? Like, I got no problem with other languages, I just really feel like you're wasting your advertisers money showing them to people who don't know a quesadilla from a carton of pickles.

I was fine with it back when it was just one ad that you could skip.

I was fine with it back when it was just two ads that you could skip.

I was fine with it back when it was just two ads, and you could skip one, and the other was 5 seconds long. 10 was a stretch, but I'm patient.

Without an adblocker, now it's playing an unskippable, 10+ seconds long ad at the start AND at the end. Some ads are as long as 20 seconds. If the video is long enough, it dares to abruptly play an ad right in the middle. You can't skip that one, either. We're back to television content-to-ad ratios - the exact thing I was happy to dump once there was enough content on YouTube. I was patient. That wasn't enough for them. They can suck a beehive.

Free-at-point-of-service is a common feature of amenities provided by countries with socialist economies.

But they only work when the economy is actively managed. If you're just pumping cash into a big banking machine and telling people to grab for it, you're not incentivizing any particular economic activity. You're just encouraging entrepreneurs to get particularly good at snatching money out of the air and elbowing one another in the face.