In the comments to your coffee shop story someone points out that coffee shops deserve to be paid for the coffee and the working space you occupy. The comment gets heavily downvoted with other commenters providing great counter-arguments, like "the coffee is ridiculously overpriced, like a 100% margin, it's an evil for-profit business and we shouldn't pay those" and "they just had a coffee, it costs them almost nothing, the rest of the time they werr just working, which didn't incur any costs on the coffee shop. The coffee shop are assholes, if they let the OP work till the evening, they would've paid for their coffee". Someone even suggested a new commercial model for the coffee shop: everyone makes their own coffee, it's free, and so is seating, funding is donation-based. They have certainly seen such a place before, although, they themselves would never be up for running one cuz they have a day job to pay the bills.

I can think only for one legitimate reason:

• Google bought out YouTube and operated it at loss for most of its life, effectively making it a monopoly in the process, and only started to earn money on it when there was no way any other alternative would come up and endanger it.

If you ignore this, YouTube Premium is a pretty good offer. And I personally like the fact that I support content creators, without the need of watching ads that are nothing more than cancer for society.

That said, I would still prefer YouTube to return to its roots and separate from Google, since it's pretty much possible for it to stand on its own right now, I guess.

Because it’s £15 in the uk ?

Because it’s $15 in the us? lol

In Germany, the family plan costs €23.99, but the worst part is that even when you pay for it, there are still ads from the creators within the videos. Essentially, you’re paying for nothing, not to mention that they are much more expensive than all other video platforms.