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Comment by darth_avocado

17 hours ago

Id pay money to not see ads. Like YouTube premium. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Can’t believe they rolled out all these different plans and left out the one thing a lot of people would buy.

Does Youtube Premium track and build profiles and use and sell them? I assume so because Google, but does Premium remove advertising (in the broad sense of the business model and profiling) or remove just ads? YT in general seems "kinder" than others at a few things, like you can remove history and activity and even get a blank homescreen.

Aside: I think it's funny how with an NYT subscription, you still get not only ads, but frequent article-covering ads for NYT subscriptions (asking to upgrade to a family account).

  • Most of these big companies don’t actually sell your data directly, they monetize it through first party ads. If you have a well-oiled ad machine with strong first party data, selling the data just gives it to competitors, and is overall less valuable than using it for yourself.

    I’d assume they’re still building that profile while you use the product, but you won’t see any ads, and can still delete the data from the various points like you’ve mentioned.

  • I've been considering writing a nastygram to the NYT about their nonsense popups. Every time I open their web page I get not only the family account popup, but also a "use our app, it's better!" popup.

    I refuse to install your app just because you intentionally trash the web experience with popups.

  • “full” premium removes all advertising, and it’s quite pricey in the US. “Lite” premium removes ‘most’ ads but doesn’t allow downloads at all.

    • I believe the ads that "lite" Premium doesn't remove are on anything that has ContentID music in it, as they have to pay higher fees to the record labels for those.

    • It’s $16/month for full premium. It’s all relative, but I wouldn’t describe that as quite pricey for a platform with that large a library.

Someone willing and able to pay for something as frivolous as Instagram or Snapchat makes them priceless to an advertiser. They want to make it easier to identify those people.

But yeah, when Snapchat rolled out their subscription program, I was all set to buy it to get rid of the annoying ads and AI in my chat list, then I realized I could do none of that. So now I just use it a lot less, which is probably better for them anyway.

Those plans exist in Europe. Not sure if they're available elsewhere or how popular they are there

I paid for YouTube Premium until they started showing me ads for YouTube TV (and maybe YouTube Red at the time?). Cancelled and got into DNS adblocking.

  • Of all of the sites/apps that are immune to DNS adblocking, I thought YouTube was at the top of the list. Not that DNS adblocking isn’t a good thing, but I’d think Google & meta would make sure they couldn’t be defeated so easily.

  • Maybe this was something country or region specific. I don’t remember ever seeing ads for TV, Red, or other products with my US premium subscription. Now, some channels will promote specific products in their videos (like the mini ads some do for square space, nordvpn, etc), but YouTube, now has a button you can click to jump over that garbage.

    • It must be country/region specific.

      Other people are mentioning that in the US there are two tiers of Premium, "Full" and "Lite", but I only see one tier in my country (fully ad-free, allows downloads).