I have YT premium and it is easily the best money I spend most months. I'll just play devil's advocate. Maybe people are imagining a pay per view type of experience?
(I recently made near exactly the same comment in a recent, related story thread - but it's worth repeating).
“Welcome to YouTube! Would you like to watch 40 videos on todays slaughter of innocent people?”
No. The answer is always no.
After a short while of doing this the supply of news channels starts drying up, though the algo occasionally attempts to push increasingly unlikely ones on you; just continue mopping them up.
The stupid thing is: they try to get more popular than TikTok. How the hell do they expect to become popular with users that don't want this stuff? I'm not on TikTok, I hate YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. Just allow me to turn that shit off and I'll be a lot happier and use the service more because it's not pushing me away.
How do they think forcing it on unwilling users is in any way beneficial??
My biggest beef with Shorts is that it's the equivalent of having the shelves full of lollies and junk food if you're trying to be healthy; it's far better not to have any available if you want to stay lean.
I love long form YouTube videos as much as I loathe the short form, whose promotional algorithms are skewed towards content that's rubbish for the brain - and society.
Edit: On Samsung Internet, could browse to the mobile app and indeed hide the shorts for 30 days (little X in top right of Shorts content panel, not a setting). Furthermore, if I disable "open links in apps" under settings/useful features, I now get the YouTube icon to open the current video in the app - this lets me browse for videos without being bugged by Shorts, and I can then open in the app if I want some of its features such as play in background etc. Thanks again, great tip.
From time to time I turn it in to look something up quick. Maybe a recipe or something. A topic I don’t want recommended to me constantly for the next few weeks.
But it also turns all ads back on. Instead you can watch it normally and remove it from your history, but I’m not sure that works.
What exactly are folks expecting here? Google to break out of the explicitly requested sandbox?
I want the app to keep a single boolean flag in memory: user is authorized to not see ads.
They don’t need to know who I am, just that I don’t need to see ads.
That seems imminently doable.
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.
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.
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 yes, 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 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 some sort of encoded identifier that an extension couldn't generate, then they will know who you are.
But almost everyone I ask thinks it’s a “scam”. The more technical the user, the more likely they are say something like “why should I have to pay when I have an add blocker”.
Like so many thing, there is almost a sense of entitlement to free content with clickable ads, which doesn’t bode well for the future.
The others either are willing to put up with the ads or think the price is much too high for the value of not seeing ads even if they watch tons of content.
I pay because I want to support the channels I watch and at this point the YT ads are just infuriating to me.
And is it really worth 4x its price? I mean its just ads getting removed. I can tolerate ads easily.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zipp...
From what I've seen creators say, they get more revenue from a Premium user than they would have if the user had just watched some ads.
I wish there was more transparency around what my money is actually buying.
(But any info I can find seems anecdotal, I don't think youtube publishes any numbers -- and earnings will depend on where in the world those viewers are, etc...)
I'm not blaming the creators. I get it. They aren't making enough money from YouTube to avoid having to do their own promotions. But that means that YouTube is not giving me what I'm paying for. I'm paying for an ad-free experience and--because YouTube doesn't use my money to compensate creators well--I'm not getting and ad-free experience.
Its how the kids learn faster these days.. tutorial videos in small bites about specific subjects.
Some of those ads were truly atrocious for a child to watch, especially - if you're in Australia - those for WorkSafe.