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Comment by cm11

17 hours ago

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.