Used VPN for cheaper YouTube Premium? Congrats, your subscription has been canceled
YouTube is canceling Premium subscriptions of members who used a VPN workaround to get Premium at cheaper rates than applicable. Read on!
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
They realize it's a service issue, they're trying to corner the market so that they don't have to care that it's a service issue.
YouTube pretty much has that market cornered. It would take a lot of capital to start up a viable competitor, especially one that didn't resort to ads and had some other kind of monetization scheme to support the sites existence and pay for all the storage servers.
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.
You're getting down voted, but you are mostly correct.
I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.
The thing is, Google isn't dumb. They've user tested this strategy and they know it results in higher revenue.
And the enshitification continues...for those that don't pay
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.
My main concern is that they sometimes serve ads that redirect to porn, even if you aren’t signed in, and that’s not the type of ad I want to see, especially if I’m watching a video about cooking. By this alone I wouldn’t want to use YouTube, but as they practically have a monopoly on video streaming it’s not really viable to boycott them without giving up on user generated videos
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'd rather not use youtube than give them money for it or even sit through their intrusive ads. There are infinite ways to entertain myself.
I mean... that is the point.
Pay for premium, watch ads, or don't watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree that YouTube wants their platform to shrink. Even if you don’t watch ads you are still giving them your data which they can monetize.
Personally I would be willing to pay for YouTube premium but not under the current terms. 1. If I’m paying for the service they should no longer collect and sell my data. 2. Allow me to have a YouTube-only account not connected to other Google services and 3. The current pricing is a bit high.
They can offer these terms or I’ll continue to use them logged out with Adblock. Or they can continue to enshitify and eventually their platform will start to shrink which will make the data they sell to advertisers less valuable.
Google should have thought of that before trying to paywall the zeitgeist.
If there's a bouncer holding culture hostage, I'm going to sneak in the backdoor.
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.
You can use NewPipe or Tubular for Android
Also there is https://piped.video/trending for watching in browser and Revanced on Android
And for anyone using YouTube Music there is Desktop app for Linux,MacOS and Windows https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music
LibreTube is also a good one. Basically an app for piped
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 ad blocking permanently. That's what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.
Enshittification
I have a very sinking feeling that websites will be streamed in the future (SHTTPS) and it will be pioneered by Google :'(
Is there an automated bot to archive channels from YouTube and upload them to Peertube?
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.
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.
Not that I know of but I could create something. I would feel icky if I didn't get the creators approval first however.
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.
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
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.
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.
Some media companies called it piracy even if you're doing it to get paid access content they aren't offering in your country 🤷
Thanks. That’s something I hadn’t thought of.
I’m sort of more moderate when it comes to paying Google to access YouTube. I’m happy to pay for products that I use. I want Google and creators to be rewarded for services rendered, but the prices are double what they should be.
I’m one of the people who used the VPN to get Premium at an affordable rate even though I have Ublock and know about other options.
My Premium account did get canceled. I was able to sign back up via another location, but if they push me out again, I would just revert to adblockers.
I suspect other users who signed up with a VPN are like me. We are the few who know how to get around the ads but want to pay, if we can. Just a guess though.
In theory the service operating costs could be spread across region differences such that in other areas it was at a loss to build and preserve market share and in richer areas it was making up for that.
But yes, in reality it's just exploitative "what we think we can get away with" pricing to "maximize shareholder value" (which is largely BS as the vast holders of shares are very small clusters of the population but people with a handful of shares in their 401k think that statement is talking about them).
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'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.)
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.
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.
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.
Okay? Just shoot yourself in the foot then.
Less reason to subscribe then!
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.
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 Peertube channels 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.
They did not get me yet 🥳 (I don‘t Know why)
