Honestly, I couldn't give tuppenny fuck about background play, or any of the other shit they bundle in. I literally just want to be able to watch YT on my Apple TV without having to suffer through unending adverts, but I'm not prepared to pay those ratfucking shit heads £20+ for the family plan just to be able to do that.
I was happy as shit using my Ukrainian YT Premium account, paying £4 a month to watch videos. It was great. Never used YT Music because I didn't fucking want to, never had videos playing in the background because I didn't fucking need to. Then they were all like "Errr, we don't think you're in Ukraine so you have to pay us more". And fuck that noise.
So now I watch the odd video on my laptop on Freetube and have been researching how to run the thing that automatically downloads my subs and adds them to Plex. I'm a dumb shit though, so can't figure it out.
Well I've seen how people have shared the way YouTube have changed their tactics over time and I don't feel like I can blame you for feeling that way.
I got my subscription back when it was named YouTube Red. Like, as soon as it became available in my country. I just always saw it as a good deal, and I haven't really had to see any of that shit personally. I do think the way they're marketing it these days seems to be very annoying though.
What are the features that brought you over? I had it before, but YouTube music was too lackluster for me (polish, sound quality, ease of searching) and for the YouTube part I use van Ed on mobile and ublock
Quite a bit. For your subscription YouTube will take 45%. The other 55% are split among other creators by watch time of the subscriber. For what it’s worth, the creators I watch love that system and benefit from it quite a bit. It’s more consistent and safer than ad revenue.
I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I remember recently listening to a podcast or something where they mentioned that premium users' views are worth a little bit more than ad watchers on average. I'm assuming that's because there's no third party advertiser that needs a cut.
I consume a lot of YouTube. Like a lot a lot. All kinds of YouTube, on all kinds of devices. Long form essays, machinist channels, gaming tournaments, tech channels. I always have a video going at some point or another, if only to have some background noise while I'm working on something else. My side monitor at work has the YouTube logo burned in.
I used to pay for Spotify, and figured I could skip the hassle of dealing with Adblock on devices that don't really allow for much liberty and still get music by YouTube music for roughly the same price.