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.
If you have an iPhone or iPad you don’t even need to use a VPN to get cheap Premium. Just make an new Apple ID with an Indian address, top it up by buying a digital Apple Card on Amazon.in and redeeming it to your Indian account in iTunes on a computer. Then on your iPad or iPhone go to your Apple ID in the settings, log out of Media and Purchases and login with the Indian account. Then you can buy Premium in the YouTube app with your Rupees, you don’t even need to change your YouTube account.
I can do even better. I can hook you up with a free lifetime account, but I’m having a problem with my bank account this week. But I’ll send you $6000 dollars if you just send me $5000 back. Yeah I know it sounds weird but I’m really not hard up for cash I just can’t get my cash out of the bank at this moment so I need your help. Hit me up and we’ll figure something out, and I’ll get you that free lifetime subscription.
/s missing
The only thing VPN’s are good for anymore is hiding torrents. That’s it.
Also good for getting to pornhub.com if you live in one of the states they’ve blocked.
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
Couldn’t you secretly hook up with the boss’s wife and give her the most intense orgasm of her life, so she’ll do anything for you, and you use her to ask her husband he should allow torrenting or else she will get a divorce, so he’ll allow torrenting and then the VPN would become useful?
Solid 1980s movie strategy
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.
How did you manage to make Spotify not a steaming pile of garbage?
It was hard work, but a general rule is to like only songs that you could listen every day to, make playlists for everything else.
That’s definitely what I’ve done, but it recommends country daily despite my immense hatred for it.
I use to care, but then I just use Peertube. Oh but there’s not as much content on Peertube. Put the type of content you like on Peertube make a channel it is free. Another tip is, look for specific types of content, and not specific content creators. and if you happened to find a creator you know or knew, follow them on Peertube!
I have plenty of tech that keep me up to date on Peertube, and it’s a type of platform that will never have ads or go a direction I don’'t want it to as a whole in terms of federation of servers and being an opensource video platform.
Server can surely make some unwelcomed decisions, and I can just change servers easily. Better then Youtube no ads, and your experience does not get throttled.
Peertube is a crazy impressive piece of tech. Just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it needs something to happen to push users over to it (or something like it). YouTube keeps doing stupid things like this, so one day users will be pushed away from it and the creators will have to follow or die.
Is there an automated bot to archive channels from YouTube and upload them to Peertube?
Not that I know of but I could create something. I would feel icky if I didn’t get the creators approval first however.
There are repos on GitHub that pull the videos and metadata, not sure about posting to Peerhub, though if that’s possible to post via an api you could probably script it easily enough. Likely a risk of other “issues” doing so, but I’m sure some datahoarders could chime in.
I’d run this on a VPS if I could do it over the TOR network (don’t want to get caught with my CC on the line), but there’s the problem of needless duplication if this happens, so it’s likely the best if relevant authors do it themselves
What about renting a VPS itself over Tor using Monero, and then letting the VPS do its work normally in the clear?
I always thought Invidious was downloading the source video from YouTube in the background when given a YouTube video ID and it’s not already downloaded, but I might be wrong.
BitLaunch let’s you rent a VPS with crypto currency
I’d prefer XMR
Same, but you can always use Trocador to convert your XMR to other coins. Alternatively there are some ways to anonymously acquire BTC.
Had never heard of it, thanks. I prefer DEXes for crypto (XMR only now)
It’s not perfect, there are some conversion fees, but it should be ok. I use it from time to time to pay for my seedbox.
kycnot.me lists a bunch of providers that accept XMR directly.
If one does that, be prepared to defend yourself against the copyright infringement lawsuit that’s coming your way eventually.
Read my comment on doing it over TOR. If you have a trusty VPS, encrypt your LVM with LUKS and use that for scratch storage.
If you pay for YouTube premium, you’re a clown and you’re only fueling the enshittification.
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.
They make enough off of all my data they collect. I’m not paying them a cent for anything and I’m not watching a single ad. If you want to watch ads for shareholders, you are most definitely a clown.
“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.
I’d probably pay $5, and I’d certainly pay $2-3. But I don’t watch enough to justify $10+/month.
If you watch enough youtube per month to see an hour of ads and you can’t block ads for some reason, you may actually be losing time/money by not paying the subscription. That said, there are ad blockers for almost every platform so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find one that works.
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.
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 are 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 def 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?
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.)
So a person is not allowed to be part of their home country and get service and then move? What if their job stays the same and they don’t make any extra? Evil google.
They are perfectly free to do that. They just have to resubscribe from their new home country at the new rate. Just like with telephone service or cable tv. It’s not like they will get in trouble or would be prevented from moving.
Operation costs differently in different regions. Advertising spend differs in different regions. You’ve moved from a region with cheap operating expenses and no ad spend to another region with more expensive operating expenses and higher ad spend. Congratulations on your move, now the cost to provide you service is different, and you’d need to pay more to cover the operating expenses + expected margin.
Alternatively, procure a local credit card (I.e. the same one you used back home), billing address (i.e the last place back home), and always do everything through a VPN back home. Then you’re at least using services from where the operating expense reflects the pricing.
This is just business, and should be expected. Food is dirt cheap back in Asia, they’re more expensive here in North America. Like it or not, if I’m living here, I need to pay the prices here. If I don’t want to pay the prices here, I can move back to Asia.
Except food is a physical good that needs to be transported, while the service is still provided by low wage workers from across the globe.
If a corporation gets to provide the service from where it’s cheaper, they can’t be mad people buy it from where it’s cheaper.
Service provider must acquire hardwares for the data centre at local vendor pricing.
Service provider must hire someone local to work in your local data centre.
Service providers need to pay local electricity and bandwidth rates.
List goes on. Just because you don’t interface with the local aspects of business doesn’t mean they don’t exist and add extra costs.
If you want to pay lower rate, as I stated earlier, make your narrative work: use local payment methods, billing address and use the service locally to the locality you’re paying in. Then they’ve got nothing to argue against you as you’re using services in that lower cost region.
Except the hardware is purchased using a global framework contract that uses the volume as a reason for deep discounts.
It gets put in a rack by a local guy and then remotely provisioned by some person from a low cost country.
Electricity in datacenters is purchased at wholesale prices and muchuch cheaper than what consumers pay…
The list goes on and on.The higher prices in countries has only very marginally to do with the higher costs.
Money grabbing corporations will charge what the market will bare.
Without violating my NDA with media companies (YouTube being one of them, incidentally), all I can tell you is you’re wrong about these. I’ve been in this exact sector for over a decade and the operating expenses are much higher comparatively speaking, and the objectives are different depending on region.
If you’re so inclined to pay the discounted rate, make the narrative work so they have no way of flagging you. Otherwise don’t be surprised if you’re asked to pay local rates.
So, where does it differ? Cost of hosting the machine and the data?
On purchasing servers; I don’t know about Google specifically, but most media partners I’ve worked with doesn’t have global acquisition as an option for hardwares — not because they don’t have the purchase power/volume, but rather the vendors have region specific distributors with their own sales teams and pricing. Even if you have the personal contacts of VPs high up the chain, someone from IBM China cannot even sell to companies in Canada, and vice versa, for example.
On people side of things… With YouTube specifically, you’re also not only dealing with their own DC but getting their hardware into local ISPs centres. Logistics around that is not something cheap remote labor can arrange, need actual boots on the ground to facilitate.
Ad sales is also something that’s kind of localized. YouTube has American teams selling American creator inventories for example. Not something that’s outsourced out.
So yea… Although from the outset it’s all just “YouTube.com”, there’s actually a lot of localized touch points that creates different costs to provide service in different regions.
Internet isn’t free. It takes copper or fiber cable, switching and routing equipment, labor to operate and install them, and electricity to run it all. Those costs are also lower in other countries.
So if you subscribe in a low-cost country, does it make sense for them to let you use the high-cost infrastructure?
It is just some Telcos that price for data usage and put in usage caps. But this is only a way to price gauge customers. In the EU most ISPs operate without datacaps and are much cheaper month to month than in the US (my 1gb symmetric fiber connection without datacaps costs around 30 euro per month).
Sure a data connection in a datacenter is more expensive, but is either shared across datacenter customers or a customer gets their own. And again, global players have framework contracts with other global players… so maybe Orange Business Services provides the internet connection for their DC operation globally.
The cost for the things they have to source locally is highly overestimated. Usually budgets they spend locally on stuff like advertising are much higher.
YouTube doesn’t want your money.
and other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself
They want you to pay a higher price but since you have choice of paying nothing then the message seems clear to me. You can see comedians on there for free, they tell real jokes.
…whoosh
no u
I keep saying it. Privacy invasive, targeted advertising has got to be barely worth the cost of maintaining it. Why else is Google trying to put more ads in places, kill ad blockers on chrome, force expats out of subscriptions, and experiment with unskippable ads if not to try and invent some kind of additional value to advertisers out of nothing.
Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What’s happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.
YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube’s losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.
But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.
And this is what it looks like.
As for risking competition, at this point, I don’t think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.
I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There’s a long-term strategy here to nuke and blocking permanently. That’s what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back.
I have a very sinking feeling that websites will be streamed in the future (SHTTPS) and it will be pioneered by Google :'(
Enshittification
They did not get me yet 🥳 (I don‘t Know why)
Its funny how we cant use VPNs but companies will go to the country with the lowest wages to get workers.
I mean no one is stopping you from moving to another country.
Oooo, lies
Companies are free to use labor from anywhere, but make sure we can’t get their products from anywhere.
Man I knew something like this was going to happen. Just be glad Google doesn’t block your access to all their services or just outright delete your account. On the bright side, you’d be set free.
I’d have expected this to happen years ago.
Less reason to subscribe then!
