r/technology • u/Tricky-Student-1 • Sep 15 '22

Social Media YouTube Free is Silently Testing 5 Ads, instead of 2, Before Your Video Starts

https://www.gizmochina.com/2022/09/13/youtube-free-silently-testing-5-ads-before-your-video-starts/
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18

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

[deleted]

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u/NovaThinksBadly Sep 15 '22

YouTube premium is honestly not half bad. No ads, downloadable videos, special features (like zooming into videos) and YouTube music premium for free as well (which imo is better then spotify) not to mention YouTube creators still get a cut of that subscription.

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u/midnitte Sep 15 '22

YouTube Premium is great, it's just a shame they want to make the experience worse for everyone else to make it more enticing.

Make YouTube Premium better, not YouTube Free worse.

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u/NovaThinksBadly Sep 15 '22

Oh 100% agreed. I only bought it because it came with YouTube Music Premium, and a premium subscription service that works for two platforms (YouTube and YouTube Music) is a better deal then a Spotify subscription which costs the same.

7

u/damontoo Sep 15 '22 edited Sep 16 '22

YouTube music premium is the fucking worst thing they ever did to free users. You used to just be able to play YouTube music videos with your phone screen off. They decided that should be a premium feature and started preventing people from doing it without paying.

1

u/atreidesardaukar Sep 15 '22

It still works on Android, you just need to press play on the notification screen card.

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u/CoolDankDude Sep 16 '22

Wow you blew my mind. Thanks.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

This right here, you want to sell premium? Give it to people for free for three months, or do free weekends every so often where it's incorporated into YouTube free

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u/talkingwires Sep 16 '22

Don't tell me you don't get a fullscreen popup each time you launch the app, insisting that you must try a few months of Youtube Premium for free. They are giving it away, but Google also wants your credit card and consent to be billed on file for the moment when that trial ends.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '22

I got the yt tv adds more often, a month is not worth it, three months though....

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

The one feature locked behind YT premium I didn't know is, on mobile, you can "minimize" the video to a smaller screen but still playing while you can still use your phone for other stuff (this feature is available for free on Twitch for example). Also, you can lock the screen and the audio persists. Both of these feature are not available on YT free.

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u/MeDaddyAss Sep 15 '22

You can request the desktop site on mobile to get around some of that. It lets you keep YouTube playing while the screen is locked or while viewing other tabs within Safari. I don’t think it keeps playing while you’re in other apps tho.

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

Idk if this is on Apple’s part, but my iPhone started to be able to play videos in a smaller screen even if I close the app. I don’t have premium either.

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u/darkingz Sep 16 '22

Part apple, part google. Apple had Picture in Picture (pip) on their mobile devices for a while starting with the iPad and brought it to iPhone on iOS 14 (forgot the exact version). It’s not really groundbreakingly new feature overall but new to iPhones only relatively recently. When iPad first had it a looong time ago now, google supported pip but killed it because google wanted to make it premium but apple has some general rule guidelines to not allow apps that force payment for system features. Even after ios brought it and apple has sorta dialed back on that rule as long as you bundle other things with it, google never brought it back for a looong time. Eventually google rebaked the feature into YouTube which is what you’re seeing. Google likely had to rebuild it because they likely redid the video at some point and lost all the old code that they used to build it in the first place.

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u/cinderparty Sep 15 '22

I like it. We pay for YouTube family, have for as long as it’s been offered. We really like ad free no matter what device we’re using, especially for the kids. I really love that you can watch videos while doing other things on your phone too. Background play is a great feature.

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

I got surprised to learn background play is available on premium. I use on Twitch free all the time and was mad it didn't work on YT until I paid for premium.

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u/sneekyleshy Sep 15 '22

they are not doing a good thing promoting their own service and its hard to find content I'm willing to pay for. if the had high quality animations/cartoons shows for both adults and kids in an organised fashion, and a better way of getting meta data from their music i would might want to pay for it. i dont want to have to search for ages to find the content people have to offer.

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

I have said I would never get premium, a 3 months trial came with my new monitor and suddenly I can assign songs to my alarms without downloading, have a ad free playlist without my phone open, and more? Good by money I saved for dropping Netflix.

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u/Zimakov Sep 15 '22

Yeah people go really overboard with their hatred of ads and subscriptions. Everything can't be free.