Nope. YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
Google is acting as a mobster and you should never pay the protection money. Use your trusty adblocker of choice, NewPipe or yt-dlp.
I just wish there's viable alternatives to YouTube out there but sadly there isn't any.
Ether pay, or don’t use.
Fuck You, Pay Me: https://youtu.be/jVkLVRt6c1U
I am sure ads will come to paid option too soon so enjoy while it lasts with truly ad free paid option.
People of course do stupid things, but the information I saw made it sound like there’s no question, premium is better for Youtube
Now ads are coming to Netflix, which you will still pay for.
What do you think Google will do, when they do freely abandon services, jack up GCP prices, and set 10 ads on the unpaid tier?
In the meantime, if you can stand to identify yourself to Google, the $11.99 / mo I pay for YouTube Premium is some of the best bank for buck I ever spend.
Slippery slope might be that as soon as enough people by the lower tier, the prices increase to the upper tier
I disagree with the statement that this is " a medium where you don't have full control" — after all those are my devices and I like them to be my (user) agents, not some thurd (sic) party.
Then we get upset when terms change/ we’re the product.
I wish there was a better way.
The success of Netflix and its ilk proves that people are more than willing to pay for a product.
The issue is that Netflix and its ilk decided that the format and payment we all agreed on for the content provided was insufficient, and split content and jacked up prices and fudged with the platform to extract more money from people who were already paying.
I would be ok with Netflix raising their prices as they produce more content and offer more services. I would be okay with a competitor or two having different content behind their own paywalls.
I am not okay with having prices increase while losing content and having negative experiences like advertising added to the experience across the board and needing to keep paying more and more to what is it, 10, 12 streaming services each with their own tiers of quality and constant price changes and content disappearing and being shifted over to other streaming providers.
They've taken what should have been a simple platform that is accessible to everyone for a reasonable price and turned it into a hellish pay-as-you-go labyrinth of frustration.
That's why people would rather pirate than pay.
What I would like is a pirating amnesty pay site. Go to one spot, tell it what you've watched (but not where or how) and pay whatever fraction of a dollar per show that the show creators expected to receive after all of the middlemen took their cut and go on with a clean conscience.
I would even pre-buy credits to spend on shows, when I'm out of credits for the month I don't get to watch any more tv. I'm cool with that, but that option doesn't exist and won't exist as long as soulless middlemen insist on pissing on the walls of every good thing until they get their money.
There are over 20 streaming services in the US alone, and while some of them are tied to your cable providers, the grand majority have some content that is exclusively available to them, each with their own fee schedule and varying amount of advertisements or combo deals required to view the shows you would like to see.
I wonder how long that will last.
Likewise, If too many people buy Premium, they won't be able to sell as many ad spots. Plus, the people who actually pay for Premium probably make heavy use of YouTube. My guess is that they'll instead start increasing the price of Premium to get more people to give it up.
Back in the day before Amazon brought out Twitch turbo would give ad free viewing plus a few extra perks (different emotes, full RBG setting for colouring your username).
When they launch Twitch Prime (now rebranded as Prime Gaming) as a benefit for Amazon Prime they copied the feature set from Turbo and added a free subscription to a streamer of your choice. So most people swapped from Turbo to Prime.
They stopped pushing Turbo and hit its purchase page but if you looked closely enough you could find it.
But prime wasn’t really a money maker, sure it was a benefit to the viewer but it was an extremely generous offer (helped soften the blow that Amazon just brought everyone’s fav gamer streaming platform)
But yeah it was tanking ad impressions (which they have were trying to expand the ad business during this time) cause you know you know a sub token worth 5 bucks, ad free viewing and all the other benefits of Amazon prime for what 8 bucks a month. You were a fool not to swap from the existing Turbo offering to Prime, and if you didn’t have Amazon Prime but you already sub’ed to atleast one streamer a month it was only a few extra bucks a month compared to what you were already paying.
So they removed the ad free viewing from Prime gaming and started pushing Turbo again for another 9 bucks a month.
But even that can get acquired.
Most also hamper investors, of course.
And then you're seeing it in their earnings call. (Though it's still a small percentage of revenue)
Hint: it's possible to watch YouTube in the browser on mobile. It's possible to do it with the screen off as well, using some browsers. Do with this information what you will.
YouTube may want to fix things so content creators can just put out good content and get paid properly through the platform.
Look, I hate ads. I really do. You can pry uBlock Origin from my cold, dead fingers. But the thing is, sites and creators and whatnot still often choose ads as a way to fund the things they create. If they're pushing ads at you over a medium where you have control (there's a reason why a web browser is a "user agent"), then I think you totally have the right to choose what your user agent does and does not fetch from the remote server. (And I believe uBO does work for YouTube ads?)
But if you're consuming something through a medium where you don't have full control -- such as the YouTube mobile app -- then you get what you get. If the ads are onerously bad enough, and people don't want to pay to remove ads, then fewer people will use YT and Google will dial it back. But there's always the paid option.
I get that many of us don't like ads -- again, I don't either -- and don't like a choice being made for us as to how we're going to "pay" for content online. But this isn't the case here: Google offers an ad-free paid experience. If you get enough value out of YouTube, maybe you should just pay for it. If you don't want to (or can't), then ads (or blocking) it is. Or just don't use it... vote with your feet.