Google confirms more ads on your paid YouTube Premium Lite soon

There's one in the article comments. Talks about getting the material "dishonestly" and violating the TOS.

If they could they would only show you ads and charge you for the pleasure.

I guess it’s their “pay for ads” tier which sounds fucking stupid to me.

Premium Sike.

It's Premium, but not really.

It's like cable TV, pay $100+/mo just to watch ads

Also starting to spread on the cheapest plans of streaming services like Prime and Netflix.

Yeah, this will work for a while but I think the days have gotta be numbered.

Best long term solution? Leave YouTube.

I guess in the meantime: if on PC grab the freetube flatpak. Really decent client, anonymous and create subscriptions without actually subscribing.

Mac also has the excellent Orion Browser where you can install uBlock origin

You can also use the Orion browser with Ublock Origin on iPhone.

No Grayjay? Been using that almost exclusively since they released the desktop version. Had to log out and back in with my (new, basically blank) YT account a few times after updates, and there are very rare cases of certain videos not wanting to load, but overall it's been working well so far.

🤷(https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases)

Imagine paying for "Premium Lite"

For your web browser, don’t use Chrome. Use Firefox with uBlock, NoScript, Sponsorblock, and a VPN like Mullvad.

For Smart TV usage, block your TV’s built in “smart functionality” and its access to the internet via MAC address blacklist on your router. Also use SmartTubeNext on a Shield Pro with FLauncher instead of Google’s.

For mobile, use 3rd party YouTube clients on your device like Vanced on Android, and Unwatched on iOS.

Same here. And I’m waiting for them to finally do it because it’ll free up so much of my time. I might start reading books again.

Also, it’s the last Google-service I’m using. So, banning me from it will allow me to finally delete my Google account.

There is no end to the greed of those with millions and especially billions and they aren't content to just keep running a profitable business, they have to get all the money.

This is just the history of humanity and finances forever, the one saving grace in all this is every big business gets complacent in its money making and seeks ever increasing profit (and becomes management heavy) until a young upstart finds a way to do it a lot better and cheaper and disrupts the market. Google has become the big lumbering unable to change organisation seeking maximum profit now, its become IBM.

Ah, the grand circle of enshittification.

And it has an Android fork (FreeTube Android), and can have playlists, subscriptions etc. synced across devices with Syncthing. It does sometimes result in sync conflicts though, but if you reload it before using it on a device, you will be fine. Most sync conflicts I get are for history, and that's fine by me to lose some history.

What pisses me off most is that the way the internet works now is that ten years ago, someone who wanted to share about how to service your 90s Volvo that would have written it on a web page with a few photos that would have been quicker, cheaper and easier to write, quicker and easier to read, and cost next to nothing to host.

But because Google control fucking everything, that same person is now heavily incentivized to make it a pointlessly long video instead, that took days to make and edit, and is harder to use while working, and if they don't do that then they ain't getting anywhere near the top of the search results and you weren't going to find it anyway.

It sucks and I can't wait for people to wake up and tell Google to fuck off and stop ruining the internet.

You are absolutely right!

Knowledge is power - Google has tons of it. Not only on YouTube, but also the data they collect about every user, every click and interaction, etc.

I think the Tech-Giants have way too much power and even have some sort of monopoly. Like you said: No one has or even can recreate something like YouTube. Same with (for example) Microsoft. Even though FreeBSD, Linux Distros, OpenBSD, … gain popularity, they are nowhere near Microsoft’s Windows (or any other Product). And if you look at schools, businesses or governments, they (for some ungodly reason) use and pay for Microsoft products. Children get hooked on their Products in school!

Something has to change, I honestly don’t know what exactly, but these monopolies destroy our freedom! Maybe it would be better, if our countries had politicians, that do their work, not care about some “make America great again” shit.

To keep using walled gardens like Youtube, Reddit or Discord in an effort to share and preserve knowledge is just a losing proposition. The sooner we stop using them, the less of a headache it will be when the companies behind these gardens decide it's finally time to cash out and start to charge for access.

The knowledge you grow in a walled garden doesn't belong to you.

It reminds me of Reddit (human solutions/ideas for random problems and interests), except the costs of storing and serving video are probably really high with a large userbase. (I wonder exactly how high, though. I'm sure it's hard to put a single unit price per GB/hour or whatnot, but still . . .) It's unfortunate that so many people have put so much work into sharing their knowledge but have basically experienced vendor lock-in.

Just recently I found old reddit and forum threads and a few YouTube videos that helped me and a buddy fix her car. The solution(s) was provided by just enthusiasts and random people helping others in their spare time by documenting stuff. Although there's also a lot of unhelpful threads and videos out there too, lol.

Had my first ones yesterday too.

I'll use FreeTube if I have to, though I don't quite like the UI, but cleaning the cache seems to have done the trick for now.

An interesting component here is that it's possible that the video creator is responsible for this silly level of ads, but it's impossible to know. Creators can select points in the video where ads will happen, which they can use to preserve the video's flow as much as possible. In theory, you can even select to not monetise your video at all, which is a useful tool if the topic is something particularly dense or sensitive. In practice, I've seen plenty of creators apologizing when an inappropriate ad plays at a sensitive part of the video, despite them having tried to disable ads on the video. It must suck to have so little power over one's own work.

In your case, I suspect this was a creator choosing to maximally monetise their video, given the regularity and number of ads. However, it's possible that this is a 100% "Fuck Google" situation, given how opaque they are. I find it frustrating that when we have poor experiences like yours, we don't even have a clear target to get angry at. It leads to accountability so diffuse that it's like homeopathy. Getting angry doesn't necessarily help change things (at least individually), but it can be incredibly cathartic even then

I used to watch YouTube with ads since they added ads. It wasn’t too bad.

Then during the start of Covid tons of people watched YouTube and googles greedy eyes lit up… they went from 1-3 (skipable) ads per video to ads every minute of video. I was like WHAT THE F&$@… then installed U-block.

I couldn’t believe their greed.

I also spent Covid downloading (yt-dlp) every video I wanted to archive for offline (never know if they will someday block downloads), I’m also worried for a time we loose YouTube. 99% of the things I loved about the internet is dead now, someday it will happen to YouTube too.

That way of thinking is a trap. They did have a more reasonably priced ad free tier but people using it only made it worse over time because it got so popular that Youtube could confidently raise prices and slash benefits. And the line has to go up. That‘s the only thing that matters to them.

WE WOULDNT BE BLOCKING ADS IF YOU REGULATED ADVERTISERS LIKE YOU ARE TRYING TO REGULATE VIEWERS.

I still would.