Lately, I’ve been annoyed by YouTube.
Don’t get me wrong…
I love YouTube as a platform.
In fact, I spend most of my streaming time on YouTube.
From news to upcoming movies, it’s YouTube all the way!
And that’s why I’m a YouTube Premium subscriber.
My expectation after paying $14/month for YouTube Premium? No Ads.
Here’s the annoyance though…
Some creators have started including Ads as part of their content.
Take this new podcast from Dwarkesh, for example.
By the way, great conversation with Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer on LLMs and the CapEx required for training and inference.
The conversation is 2 hours and 15 minutes long, and it had at least 3-4 Ads inside the content, each over a minute long.
The first one? At timestamp 22:25.
It lasted around 1 minute and 20 seconds.
And you can’t even skip the Ad if you’re driving or doing chores—my usual podcast time.
I don’t know if this violates YouTube’s content policy.
Though it creates extra monetization opportunities for creators, I’m fairly certain YouTube doesn’t get a cut from these embedded Ads.
Also, YouTube pays out more per view from Premium subscribers than regular users.
I believe YouTube should have a strict policy against inside the video Ads.
My fear is without a clear policy, more creators will start exploiting this.
I believe YouTube is losing on three fronts by allowing this:
1. The direct Ad revenue loss
2. The increased payout to creators for each premium view
3. Breaks the promise of no Ads to premium subscribers, and ultimately, a not so ‘premium’ user experience.
On the flip side, it does help creators to prioritize sharing their content on YouTube without expensive deals such as the Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper signed with SiriusXM for $125M across three years or Joe Rogan’s exclusive deal with Spotify.
Either way, as a consumer, if I’m putting up with Ads and also paying for a subscription…
Left me wondering – why am I even paying for YouTube Premium?
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