Google confirms more ads on your paid YouTube Premium Lite soon

It's amusing how they unironically continue to do this so plainly even after dystopian shows like black mirror and others mock this tactic aggressively in their latest outings. In the past, companies would try harder to hide a highly publicized bait and switch scam if they continued to make use of it. Subscription monetization schemes have truly hit a dead end if they can't bother even hiding it anymore.

> Who on earth is the target group ...

Folks who aren't paying much attention, but are paying $8/month.

the "target" group is probably bundles of useless products from partners like "buy our useless SaaS and get a free Youtube Premium subscription!"

The deal here is that maintaining a free hosting service for 4k videos is not profitable, even with shitload of ads. This is hard truth that nobody wants to hear. My suggested solution is that once businesses grow beyond certain size, the government should step in and buy them out. This would allow to provide such services at a loss. Like, for example, railway in Europe. The only reason why it's even remotely usable is because it's funded from taxpayers' money. And they also started as private companies that would later become de-facto branches of the government.

Firefox (or Ironfox) with ublock origin and background play fix works great on Android too, no need to use an app.

> If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.

There is a beta version of ublock origin lite available now on iOS [1]

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/327

> If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.

Sure! I literally just picked up a new Razr 2025 last night.

Out of the box, its built in “device pulse” application sideloaded another 15 apps out of the box I never asked for, consented for, or wanted, ranging from scammy games to garbage like Tiktok and Pintrest.

I didn’t get to say “no” to those applications… sounds like a big corp controlled what software I can run. They even put the application installer into the ‘nodisable’ list so I can’t kill it, and I can’t unlock the bootloader or any of that other great stuff everyone says Androids can do.

What now?

I'm using Firefox with UBO and for quite a while now every YT video stops playing after 45 seconds with an error message. So I made a bookmarklet that opens the embed link instead, which does not error out, but some videos can't be played that way at all.

No one else seems to have that specific problem. Am I the only one with this issue?

Sponsorblock has a Safari extension in the iOS app store and it works quite well. Doesn't block ads though.

How does Tubular compare to PipePipe (https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe). Both seem to be forks of NewPipe + SponsorBlock, but PipePipe seems like it might be a bit more active.

I don’t get ads on YouTube in my iPhone, and all it took was using the website instead of the app. What am I missing exactly?

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why YT premium now has ads.

I have uBlock Origin on FF, just this morning it stopped working on YouTube. YouTube now tells me I am allowed for 3 videos because I'm adblocking them.

i thought lite was removed again because it just doesnt work

Add the usual army of bootlickers in the comments, defending those corporate interests against their own.

Unhook and Channel Block also make my youtube experience much better. I did pay for Premium at one point but they kept pushing "features" that couldn't be disabled, I provided feedback, but I imagine it goes nowhere, so I stopped paying them.

I put a youtube video on the TV last week and all the adverts were deep fakes of famous people saying you can get rich with this one trick and a QR code to scan. One of the videos was a deep fake of the UK PM Keir Starmer saying thousands of people can claim an unknown benefit. How are these adverts not considered harmful?

I used this fact to get rid of my YouTube addiction.

I used to have Premium and listen to videos in the background while working, doing chores, all kinds of stuff. I realized 95% of the content I'm listenting to is garbage, and another 5% percent is good content that deserves my full attention, not just me listening to it while doing other stuff.

Stopped paying for premium, the experience is so unbearable that after a couple of days, I stopped watching YouTube.

I guess I could also just adblock, but they keep breaking every couple of weeks (gee, I wonder why), but honestly I don't mind less YT in my life.

This cannot be stresses enough. I genuinely do not understand how people can use the free version of YouTube without an adblocker.

I used to be very happy with the old Premium Lite, I didn't need YouTube Music or other features of Premium, just wanted to pay to have ads removed on all devices and it was the perfect product for that.

Then they cancelled it, got the email back in 2023 and resorted back to add-ons to block ads, stopped watching videos on devices that didn't support that, generally only watched YouTube on the computer for educational purposes.

When I saw it was back my first thought was "are you fucking kidding me?", I simply cannot comprehend Google's product strategy, at all. The "data-driven" bullshit for determining features, product tiers, etc. turns out to be just the McNamara fallacy applied to digital products, I can't see another way to explain the whiplash Google goes through in their product decisions, feels like everyone over there responsible for these decisions is only looking at insights, dashboards, etc. without ever thinking about what the hell the product is at its core.