Its funny how we cant use VPNs but companies will go to the country with the lowest wages to get workers.
Companies are free to use labor from anywhere, but make sure we can’t get their products from anywhere.
I mean no one is stopping you from moving to another country.
Oooo, lies
I’ve never seen a company SO devoted to get me to not use their service. $2-$3 a month is worth not seeing ads in my mind. They’ve made their website SO user hostile and their prices are just too damned high to justify paying them - I can just go without.
If I could get Youtube Premium for $2-3, I’d probably pay. I don’t use it enough to justify spending $10 or whatever it is these days, so I block ads. If that stops working, I’ll stop watching Youtube.
I would even pay the 11,99€, in fact I did in the past. Youtube’s algorithms made me stop.
Spotify for example caters to my preferences. It took a bit to train it, but the weekly selection is spot on with lots of a variety, and they don’t try to shove pop music or other mainstream stuff into my face.
YouTube tries to suckme into a shit hole of craziness at every turn. It tries to make people dumber.
Makes sense and probably all companies that do regional pricing have a rule for this, Steam explicitly states to not do this as well
You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.
Thinking how this affects the people living in those countries is the best solution
Blows my mind that to this day, companies don’t realize it’s a service issue. Like it’s straight up regressed. Adobe and Microsoft used to encourage piracy to help their bottom line. Now you have stupid PMs who realize they can get a good performance review by talking about how much money they’ll make/save from doing stuff like this
This really is not a service issue. This is not a privacy issue.
YouTube as a service is … actually a great service, it pays creators well, it’s fast, it has decades of content, and it has tons of features.
It’s monetized with ads, you either watch those ads or you pay them. Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.
Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.
The internet’s most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs. So as much as I hate Google, i find nothing wrong with this.
that’s abuse of regional pricing
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.
Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.
So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.
Why wouldn’t high income areas be more expensive to serve?
Don’t they have to have local servers all around the world to even allow this instant-like transfer of videos for anyone to watch at anytime?
I actually don’t know the back end stuff so you might be able to explain this part.
Yes, but for companies like Google, the vast majority of systems administration and SRE work is done over the Internet from wherever staff are, not by someone locally (excluding things like physical rack installation or pulling fibre, which is a minority of total effort). And generally the costs of bandwidth and installing hardware is higher in places with a smaller tech industry. For example, when Google on-sells their compute services through GCP (which are likely proportional to costs) they charge about 20% more for an n1-highcpu-2 instance in Mumbai than in Oregon, US.
Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base? I haven’t seen much discussion around how to fairly set prices for any kind of service/good. Seems most people agree they should make a profit of some kind, and I’ve heard some rough rules suggested but it almost seems like the logical conclusion is that prioritizing profit is always bad for society.
Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base?
A business being in a position to be able to implement differential pricing (at least beyond how they divide up their fixed costs) is a sign that something is unfair. The unfairness is not how they implement differential pricing, but that they can do it at all and still have customers.
YouTube can implement differential pricing because there is a power imbalance between them and consumers - if the consumers want access to a lot of content provided by people other than YouTube through YouTube, YouTube is in a position to say ‘take it or leave it’ about their prices, and consumers do not have another reasonable choice.
The reason they have this imbalance of market power and can implement differential pricing is because there are significant barriers to entry to compete with YouTube, preventing the emergence of a field of competitors. If anyone on the Internet could easily spin up a clone of YouTube, and charge lower prices for the equivalent service, competitors would pop up and undercut YouTube on pricing.
The biggest barrier is network effects - YouTube has the most users because they have the most content. They have the most content because people only upload it to them because they have the most users. So this becomes a cycle that helps YouTube and hinders competitors.
This is a classic case where regulators should step in. Imagine if large video providers were required to federated uploaded content on ActivityPub, and anyone could set up their own YouTube competitor with all the content. The price of the cheapest YouTube clones (which would have all the same content as YouTube) would quickly drop, and no one would have a reason to use YouTube.
The only thing VPN’s are good for anymore is hiding torrents. That’s it.
Somebody should invent a way to use them for serious things, like connecting to your company’s intranet or something
Nah, my company doesn’t allow torrenting movies so a corporate VPN is useless
Also good for getting to pornhub.com if you live in one of the states they’ve blocked.
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I realize they charge what people are willing to pay, but can someone explain to me why YouTube costs just a couple USD a month in some countries and almost $20 a month in the US?
Are operating costs cheaper in those countries? Are they taking a loss in those counties? Or are they just price gouging in the US?
If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.
If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.
That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.
Well they are charging a premium for the service everywhere and more so in certain countries which can afford it but a big part is that in some countries people may only earn a few USD a day so they would not be able to afford it otherwise. I can’t speak on whether or not they are taking a loss in those countries, but i can’t imagine that they have a problem due to existing infrastructure from google all across the world.
If you pay for YouTube premium, you’re a clown and you’re only fueling the enshittification.
Ads are bad (I agree).
Paying for things is bad.
Then what’s left? YouTube should somehow be ad free and free of cost for the user forever and ever? Who’s gonna pay for the enormous costs of operating the service?
People are going to start yelling at me about capitalism and enshitiffication. Both of which cause problems, but what do you propose here? Magic?
I propose YouTube make a MUCH better premium product and price it correctly. Paying for things is fine. Paying for things to get crappier? Na
How is YouTube getting crappier for me as a paying customer? I feel like it hasn’t really changed in years.
Glad you enjoy it. Keep doing your thing. But are you seriously deaf to the rising chorus of complaints about YouTube? This thread contains many examples of youtube’s enshitification over the few couple years. Your question feels disingenuous at best to me
Name one complaint, other than blocking people with ad blockers. How has the actual product changed?
The worsening of recommendations/algorithm pointing to more crap content
Price increases
Inability to purchase only YouTube music
The death of Google music
4k premium only (decision reversed due to consumer outcry)
Inability to remove shorts from homescreen (decision reversed due to consumer outcry)
Increased family plan sharing restrictions
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I’ll still call someone a clown for paying even if I’m able to acknowledge that someone has to hold the bag. Just ain’t gonna me or hopefully anyone I care about.
I’m not opposed to paying for online services in general, I’m just not going to pay them to make the site worse with every update. (Plus I kinda categorically refuse to give Google money at this point.)
Youtube might be the literal most valuable site in my life, up there with Wikipedia and search engines.
A large part of my payment also goes to the channels I view.
Really? I watch very little Youtube, so I’d rather not use it than pay $10+ for it. I’m currently able to block ads, so I’ll watch as long as that’s an option.
Yeah, it has news, educational, and entertaining content. It’s a lot of value for me.
Unpopular opinion, but I also use YouTube almost exclusively.
It has my podcasts, my political livestreamers, late night shows, and multiple channels that I follow.
I also enjoy YouTube music as well.
I bought a full year, which lowers the price a little.
If you watch ads instead of paying a modest fee to remove them then you’re a clown. Companies do need to make money for the services they provide, I just disagree with the amount.
“Modest?” $14 a month? $5 would be modest. I literally pay less for whole as streaming services.
I pay less than 5usd for a family plan, I just subscribed through a developing nation with a VPN.
Which, as the article states, they are starting to end that practice.
That was my comment about the amount that should be charged. I’ll happily pay $5/mo, but not $15. I’m happy to pay for services, just not the amount that many want to charge.
