2042
YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
(www.androidauthority.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Controversial take but:
As for myself personally, I watched YouTube with ads for the last 2 or 3 years, and more recently I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium.
YouTube Premium made sense for me because:
Before all of that, I used to use YouTube Vanced (RIP) and NewPipe, both great though not entirely legit ways of bypassing ads and downloading videos. I still use the latter to archive the really good content I come across.
If you're ok to pay for YouTube, but it's too expensive for the value you get out of it, there are alternative approaches. You can spoof your location and buy YouTube Premium in another country, like Turkey or India, and get it for as low as $2 a month. Google doesn't crack down on this much at the time of writing.
Not quite, unfortunately. You can pay by watching ads in addition to being surveiled, or by paying for premium and being surveiled potentially even harder (because you have to have an account with personal and payment information). Google does not stop tracking you and selling your profile just because you pay for Premium, so it's not an option for me.
I hadn't thought of it from a privacy perspective.
I couldn't imagine using YouTube not signed in because of the dogs**t recommendations you get then. I imagine if you're signed in the privacy loss is not significantly less than if you paid for Premium too.
I also use GMail so I'm already f***ed from that. I've basically given up on privacy at any other time than when I want to do private things, and I use a VPN and private browser.
I honestly have more than enough content on Youtube to watch without having to rely on recommendations, and I intentionally do not use Google accounts in any other capacity either. So yeah, for me Youtube Premium is just not an option even though I would be open to pay for the content. Hell, I even do donate to some individual creators through other platforms already. If Google wants my money they shouldn't have killed the separate Youtube account and shouldn't have forced everything into their surveillance-ad business.
I can understand your point of view. I was grandfathered in at $16 a month for the family plan for years since I was around from the beginning. Then I got an email telling me it's going up to $22 a month. I used premium for music and ad free only. I don't care about movies or anything else. I would still happily be paying for premium today at the understandable $16 dollars but they got greedy so now I use Revanced and pay nothing. I am also trying out Grayjay since it combines a lot of platforms.
Oh wow that really is expensive. Americans do make more money on average than Europeans, but goddamn does your stuff cost a lot of money sometimes.
I think it's €15 here?
EDIT:
Ah, for the family plan. Just reread. Not sure what that is here.
They're absolutely within their rights to try and block ad-blockers. And users are fully within their rights to circumvent the blocks in order to protect their privacy and the security of their machines and the data on them, as Google has proven repeatedly to be either uncaring or incompetent when it comes to ensuring the ads they serve aren't spreading malware.
This is factually false (depending on your country).
From a quick Google search (ironic) the following seems to be true:
Blocking is not, in itself, illegal. However, circumventing restrictions on content, like what YouTube has added recently, is.
See this article: https://blockadblock.com/adblocking/adblockers-dont-break-the-law-except-when-they-do/