Youtube premium is a very short sighted band-aid solution. Because the more people sign up for it early, the more expensive and/or less convenient it will become later when the 'market is saturated' (meaning there's no one left who wants to sign up for it). When they can't grow their income through more users, they'll ramp up prices and shave off services. It's happening everywhere already and in the end you'll wish everyone advocated for adblockers a little more because by the time you're fed up with their pricing, it might already be too late to go back.
This is the real insidious thing about internet enshittification. It's run by publicly traded corporations so it's not enough just to squeeze every possible dollar out of your customers, you have to keep ramping up the squeeze. Even once you're bringing in billions and billions of pure profit with a product that everyone loves, you have an actual legal duty to your shareholders to make it worse in an effort to try to grow the profit even more
Premium has already been enshittified. You used to get Youtube Music alongside it, now you have to buy it separate. The worst part is that a lot of people only bought premium for one or the other, so even among those who bothered to switch over, they cut their userbase in half.
Youtube premium is a very short sighted band-aid solution. Because the more people sign up for it early, the more expensive and/or less convenient it will become later when the 'market is saturated' (meaning there's no one left who wants to sign up for it). When they can't grow their income through more users, they'll ramp up prices and shave off services. It's happening everywhere already and in the end you'll wish everyone advocated for adblockers a little more because by the time you're fed up with their pricing, it might already be too late to go back.
This is the real insidious thing about internet enshittification. It's run by publicly traded corporations so it's not enough just to squeeze every possible dollar out of your customers, you have to keep ramping up the squeeze. Even once you're bringing in billions and billions of pure profit with a product that everyone loves, you have an actual legal duty to your shareholders to make it worse in an effort to try to grow the profit even more
Premium has already been enshittified. You used to get Youtube Music alongside it, now you have to buy it separate. The worst part is that a lot of people only bought premium for one or the other, so even among those who bothered to switch over, they cut their userbase in half.