I’ve used most available services, but discontinued one after another along with promises that a better user experience will be provided with reduced content and removed functionality with the slight price hike. YouTube was my first and last video service I paid for, only Spotify remains on the borderline.
As someone who has worked on free Internet services, it used to be easier to make money from ads. A video ad view was worth nearly a dollar US. Audio ads were maybe 7 or 8 cents a listen. Now, a video ad view makes a few cents and audio ads are worthless. They likely did the math about how many audio ads they’d have to play on the phone in your pocket to break even and decided you’d hate it more than they would. Since content owners get just over half of what YouTube makes, they’d probably be pissed about seeing the drop in income too.
Feel free to hate YT. This was an economic decision at around the time when ad revenue had just fallen off of a cliff.
I think you are correct. I didn’t know the exact numbers but I was aware of general reasoning. The economic forces that push unethical design decisions range from mildly annoying to horrifying depending on which decision you’re talking about. Facebook using A/B testing with neural imaging tech to minimize users’ opportunities to disengage from the platform is probably on the more extreme end. Regardless, I don’t think the decisions being objectively correct when optimizing for the continuation of capitalist firms makes them any less morally onerous.