I agree that the pricing doesn’t make sense unless you can split it, which is what I do.
Premium is $25 in Canada. You can add 5 people to your plan. That makes it $5 per month for each of us.
Personally I don’t buy cable or satellite TV, so I get most of my enjoyment from YouTube. So to me $5 per month is nothing, especially if you have something like Spotify which you can cancel and use YouTube Music, which is included in that $5.
If you have no friends and you’re the only one footing the bill, I agree that the pricing is a lot. At that point you just have to deal with the annoying ads.
I hate ads as much as anyone, but my question still remains for anyone who demands on blocking all ads and refusing to pay for premium, how do you expect servers and creators to be paid?
I know Google can technically afford it, but that’s not how businesses are run. You can’t take profits from one department to make up for the losses in another department, and as we know bandwidth is extremely expensive, and Google hosts an unbelievable amount of data, and free, too.
Like I’ve mentioned in the past, I have a bunch of videos uploaded to YouTube to share with family, and they are all private. Therefore Google is paying to store my videos, while making $0 from them, as they are not public and making any ad revenue.
I also know that Google is bad. Corporations suck. All that jazz. I just don’t understand why most of Lemmy users think everything should be free, but when asked about how these things are supposed to get funded, they go silent.
Lemmy itself won’t be around long if users refuse to donate to their instance, and refuse to view ads. Even if someone is hosting an instance in their basement, the cost of internet, replacement drives, maintenance, and electricity all add up.
Reddit is doing better than Lemmy. Have you seen Lemmy statistics lately? 📉
Edit: Lemmy users mad about facts.