Yes, they do. YouTube distributes your premium funds to creators by watch time. If they can’t associate your views with your subscription, they can’t compensate creators fairly.

Not to mention, it’s imminently not possible. Not without poking holes in what is and is not shared between regular and incognito mode (across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less). And breaking this barrier would earn Google a ton of backlash, and rightfully so.

> across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less

I don’t care about that. I agree this would be impossible in the browser.

I’m talking about the official app specifically, they should be able to do it there.

Premium funds is a good point I hadn’t thought of. I’d be fine if that didn’t happen while in incognito. Treat me like incognito mode for any other random user, just without ads.

I don’t run it all the time. And I wouldn’t if they did this. It’s extremely rare I want to do this.

But if I look up a recipe I’m likely to be bombarded with cooking channels. Home DIY fix? Similar. God forbid I look up a news video on a current event.

Huh? How will they know whether to set that bit if they don't know who you are?

They knew before I turned on incognito in the YT app. I just don’t want that one bit erased.

I dislike YouTube as much as the next person, but do you understand how unreasonable of an ask this is when you are explicitly going into incognito mode? I echo everyone else's sentiment here.

I don't know why everyone is fixated on the term incognito. I believe what GP wants (and me too) is to pause watching history or to at least exclude a viewing session from the recommendation algorithm.

Let's discuss this feature some more?

The reason users such as yourself want this feature is because you don't have faith in the recommendation algorithm, right? If you watched a video and Google started pushing related videos that you don't want to constantly see, and you clicked on the "do not recommend this kind of video" option, and it /actually/ worked, would you be satifised without this "exclude from recommendation algorithm" mode?

If so, the better solution here would be to have a recommendation system that isn't garbage. I admit I kind of fancy this described mode, but the only reason is because I don't currently trust Google to actually respect my expressed discontent. And if we don't trust Google to have a faithful recommendation system, why would we be willing to trust YouTube Premium?

If that bit is a literal bit, there will be an extension that just sets that bit, thereby bypassing ads when you didn't actually pay a subscription.

If that bit is some sort of encoded identifier that an extension couldn't generate, then they will know who you are.