Honestly, I couldn't give tuppenny fuck about background play, or any of the other shit they bundle in. I literally just want to be able to watch YT on my Apple TV without having to suffer through unending adverts, but I'm not prepared to pay those ratfucking shit heads £20+ for the family plan just to be able to do that.
I was happy as shit using my Ukrainian YT Premium account, paying £4 a month to watch videos. It was great. Never used YT Music because I didn't fucking want to, never had videos playing in the background because I didn't fucking need to. Then they were all like "Errr, we don't think you're in Ukraine so you have to pay us more". And fuck that noise.
So now I watch the odd video on my laptop on Freetube and have been researching how to run the thing that automatically downloads my subs and adds them to Plex. I'm a dumb shit though, so can't figure it out.
Well I've seen how people have shared the way YouTube have changed their tactics over time and I don't feel like I can blame you for feeling that way.
I got my subscription back when it was named YouTube Red. Like, as soon as it became available in my country. I just always saw it as a good deal, and I haven't really had to see any of that shit personally. I do think the way they're marketing it these days seems to be very annoying though.
What are the features that brought you over? I had it before, but YouTube music was too lackluster for me (polish, sound quality, ease of searching) and for the YouTube part I use van Ed on mobile and ublock
Quite a bit. For your subscription YouTube will take 45%. The other 55% are split among other creators by watch time of the subscriber. For what it’s worth, the creators I watch love that system and benefit from it quite a bit. It’s more consistent and safer than ad revenue.
I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I remember recently listening to a podcast or something where they mentioned that premium users' views are worth a little bit more than ad watchers on average. I'm assuming that's because there's no third party advertiser that needs a cut.