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Okay, fine, I am ready to come out of the closet: I’ve been a YouTube Premium subscriber for two years. Lynch me if you like. I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription, and I found the cost acceptable.
Three price increases and a worsening of service later, I cancelled my subscription as soon as I received the email about a price increase.
Incidentally, I think that’s the thing to do: you get a price increase, there is no tangible benefit to the increase, you immediately drop the service. None of that “Whatchagonnado?” stuff. The only thing these services react to is an instant drop of revenue. You can live for a month without Spotify (or YouTube Premium), they can’t live for a quarter without subscribers.
We always have to remember that the short-term focus of modern capitalism is their weakness: a stupid mistake, a sudden drop in revenue, and the CEOs are flying out the window faster than Putin’s generals.
People don’t know how to vote with wallet anymore.
It’s the reason these services get away with nickel and diming. Look at food delivery. For whatever reason people keep using it even though the fees add up to more than the meal itself. Let alone the markup the restaurant does to cover the costs.
Uber Eats motto should be “For when you want to pay $80 for a $5 meal”
Same thing with like Starbucks. People paying $17 for burnt coffee that needs 45 cups of milk and sugar to salvage.
The services will never change because consumers are lazy. It’s easy to just give their money away. People mock the “stop buying avocado toast” saying. But I think they just misunderstood it. I think the deeper meaning of it was meant to convey to vote with your wallet. You can buy avocados and bread at the grocery store and make an avocado toast yourself for under $1. But instead people go and buy it at a fancy pop-up and pay $18 plus tip for some mustachioed hipster with an artisan apron to make it for them.
/rant
The problem is, YouTube has no real competition. No one has the same thing they do. And the same applies to a lot of things today.
Another issue is, subscription services can just raise the price and then start charging people more without those people doing anything, or possibly even noticing, which differs from individual purchases where you had to make a judgement about the price each time. Now, people have to make an actively cancel in order to not agree to new prices (or EULA changes for that matter). It should really be the other way around, so that if a service raises their price, people have to actively agree to the new price in order for the service to keep charging them.
Can’t speak for Uber Eats or Starbucks though.
My proposal: cancel YouTube premium, donate $1 to Smart Tube developer, donate $1 to Firefox. ublock origin doesn’t accept donations as far as I know.
