Google would assume: there is advertising, even if you pay for YouTube Premium

News JVTech Google would assume: there is advertising, even if you pay for YouTube Premium

Advertising even on YouTube Premium? Google would have admitted

The affair has been making noise on Reddit for three weeks: yes, some YouTube Premium subscribers are still eating the advertising. This takes the form of sponsored videos which are displayed to users in huge format and at the very top of their screens.

The principle of YouTube Premium is however clear and precise: in France, we pay €12.99 mainly to skip the ads. So yes, the subscription also offers other advantages such as background playback, access to YouTube Music or Picture in Picture mode, but let's be honest: THE thing that decides most people to take out the credit card , it's the end of ads.

Faced with the problem encountered three weeks ago, a spokesperson for Google, the parent company of YouTube, spoke to our media colleagues Android Authority. According to this spokesperson, Google was going to investigate because seeing advertising when you pay “should not happen”.

Less than a month after this rather reassuring statement, Google finally confessed. This time, it was not a media outlet but another Reddit user who contacted Google. The Mountain View firm would have jabbered this time a corporate response that says it all. Come on, I'll do it for you by copying the very good translation from our French friends from phoneandroid :

Although YouTube Premium offers an ad-free experience for most content, sometimes promotional ads may appear for specific partnerships or limited-time offers. These promotions are often targeted based on various factors, including your location, viewing history, and account settings

A hellish dynamic for Youtube users

It seems important to us to remember that all of this is part of a so-called enshititification dynamic. from YouTube. The video sharing platform has not been profitable for a very long time. She seeks more and more to maximize her income and… to ruin your life.

Because that’s what enshitification is. This term was popularized in 2023 by author Cory Dotorow to describe the degradation of the quality of service of platforms. In French, we could speak of merdification. The idea is to get you hooked with a quality service, then spoil it, especially with advertising, in order to encourage you to choose fairly expensive subscription options.

So yes, YouTube is bombarding us with more and more ads. But that's not all. Small discreet changes such as the arrival of ads on paused videos (for the YouTube TV application) or the end of the countdown which precedes the appearance of the “Skip” button at the bottom right of an ad are just as many. markers of this strategy of merdification.