> Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads

The entire point is to find more ways to make money. They will try new ways as longs as there is too big drop in the users.

>Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads.

You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.

>If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers.

Doing this successfully on your smart TV is a barrier that most non-techy folk aren't going to climb over. In the case of Hulu, most people just... accepted it. Same with the Amazon Prime ads you mentioned.

> You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.

The main point of paying for Hulu was to be able to watch the shows. Youtube doesn't have that. (They tried to have premium-only shows but it was never much and as far as I can tell they stopped a long time ago.) So while youtube could obviously increase the price another $3, I don't see how they could split off a viable premium-with-ads plan. The premium features outside of ad removal are close to worthless.

This was true of Cable as well.

Price discrimination. They currently divide users into two groups: people not willing to pay anything to remove any ads, and people willing to pay the current price to remove all the ads.

As the number of users and the price go up, it may make sense to add a middle group: people who are willing to pay some smaller amount to remove (or otherwise reduce the impact) some of the ads.

At least the sponsored segments can almost automatically be skipped now. If you press forward on the remote it will jump ahead of the sponsored bit. A little annoying that I have to actively skip it but still better than watching them.

Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premium will be "reduced ads" and then there will be YouTube Premium+ that has no ads, for a nominal fee, of course.

I don't buy that there's a segment of customers willing to pay to get rid of some but not all ads.

The entire point of premium as it already stands is ad removal. None of the other features are relevant (I don't even know what they are)

Queuing is pretty handy a feature. Long click then "add to queue" while clicking around in the app while something else is playing. Smart downloading means there's something to watch while offline without having to explicitly pre-downloaded something. If you're a video quality aficionado, there's better picture quality available. An in-app sponsorblock equivalent was being beta tested but I think it went away. YouTube music except that not all the videos are licensed. There's a couple others. But yeah, ad-free viewing is the primary reason I pay for Premium. Supporting creators is another.

The question is how annoying the ads are. One 15 second ad before an hour long video, I'm annoyed but I'm not going to flip the table over. 5 minutes of ads every 30 mins? At some point I'm getting annoyed enough to cancel my subscription.

By the way, one of the Premium features is to be able to skip over in-video sponsored segments.

SponsorBlock already does this.