There is a lower price tier of Youtube premium being tested in Europe right now that has ads, but still gives offline viewing and youtube music. This is what that is for. People who are seeing ads know exactly why they are seeing ads; because they signed up for a plan with ads. The regular plan at the regular price is still ad free.

Bruh, why pay for Youtube in the first place? Fuck them

If my youtube premium gets ads its back to ad block.

Google is an advertising company, never expect anything better than that.

This is apparently from an ad-supported tier being trialled in EU and not them sneaking ads into an ad free tier. Read comments below for more context.

This thread was reported for being misleading but I'm going to leave it up for the context.

The only reason that I (and I suspect many many other people) pay for it is because of the value proposition of not having ads on Youtube + Youtube Music for slightly more than Spotify. They better be careful about their subscriptions because their service is also available for free. If I feel like im being ripped off, instead of them getting 12$ a month they will get 0$ and I will still get to use the service. It's different from Netflix in that in their case there is no free tier to go back to.

Fuck YouTube!

Oh hell no, not after they started raising prices in other countries. I don't want to pirate again.

When I had Premium for the whole family, they were also showing ads AND still using trackers.

I emailed Google support about it, and they said it was a "bug". I cancelled soon after.

I'm always so appalled and offended when I go on YouTube and there's a 60 and even 90 second and. Wtf year so you think this is YouTube? I'm not watching 60 seconds of ass. Funny thing is if I keep pressing back and play, after 2 or 3 times it goes down to a 5 second ad, so I at least know how to bypass those long ones

Been using NewPipe for years. What are ads?

Didnt noticed it with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)

I have grandfathered in YouTube premium from like 10 years ago because of a business cell phone promotion deal. I have not seen a single ad yet.

I guess it's not premium enough.

It reminds me of Unlimited data mobile services in which the data is not turned off or surcharged but throttled to a crawl after a limited time. We've not since been able to get a straight answer from any of the major telecom providers.

Marx predicts enshittification in Das Kapital

Wow, they really downsized the Barbie… same price?

Some of them may be hardware related - any time I sign in to one of my TCL TV's with a Premium account, the first result in any search is always one marked Sponsored. It's gash, but it doesn't happen on any other of my devices than that TCL TV which makes me think it's some sort of vendor problem.

Either way, YouTube/Google/Alphabet/whoever won't give a fuck so if it's that bad, then vote with your wallet.