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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

They got me to pay for premium just to avoid ads. But I’m really struggling to justify paying for it, and its more likely that I’ll abandon the platform altogether.

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Only a matter of time now before Premium goes from no-ads to 'reduced-ads' ... bet on it

I've actually started to get short ads (3-4s) on YT starting about 3-4 months ago even though I've been paying YT premium for years at $18/month. I realized it's only when I cast it to my TV, so maybe that's how they can get away with it. It doesn't happen every time but was still pretty pissed about it.

It might be the casting depending on the device. I believe casting just refers a url to the device. Since you're not logged in there it will not know you have premium. TV apps where you can log in should work fine.

I don't think that's it because when I tried casting YT from an account that doesn't have Premium, I get way more ads, i.e. 10-20x as many, and much longer ads, just like in the app, so maybe 100x the total ad time. When I cast with YT Premium they're literally 2-3 second ads, and they occur very rarely, so it looks to me that these ads are specifically "calibrated" for YT Premium subscribers, maybe on the order of 1% (or less) of the total ad time of a basic account. And they only occur if I've watched a lot of YT, maybe over 3-4 hours in a day. I don't understand why Google thought it would still be worth pissing off Premium accounts for this little ad time.

Might very well be the case. We do not seem to be having that yet in our locality.

> .. only when I cast it to my TV

Was it a LG TV? it could be the LG's own ad.

No it's clearly within Youtube, you can see the countdown within the app. My TV is over 10 years old and I've never seen an ad like this.

I'm paying and I find it worth it because YT Music is included so I could cancel my Spotify subscription.

Yep same here. If Apple had something similar to YouTube I’d ditch paying them tho for Apple one

I’m so hopelessly addicted to YouTube that premium only made sense. I should probably work on that, though.

Last night was the first time I can remember where I intentionally avoided YT. I just couldn’t stand trying to find what I wanted amongst all the click bait and advertisements.

The good news is I found what I wanted and didn’t have to deal with a barrage of bullshit and click bait videos.

Yea I used it later on and found some user info but I’m finding that I hesitate to bother with it now.

I'd considered it, but so many videos are just filler to drive ad impressions that I can't justify it because the content quality is still lacking for what I want.

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