Once upon a time, the only way that YouTube made money was the ad revenue from the thousands of advertisers who trusted its platform. Unfortunately, ads are annoying for viewers, and Google realized it could make money and also provide relief to its users by providing an ad-free subscription. That’s how YouTube Premium was born.
YouTube has been finding new, aggressive ways to push people to YouTube Premium, thanks to its war on adblockers, but now, it looks like there’s no winning. For some reason, certain users are seeing ads despite being subscribed to YouTube Premium. Either something isn’t right or Google is out of its mind.
Several YouTube Premium Subscribers Have Reported Encountering Ads
There’s no future I envisioned where YouTube Premium subscribers such as myself would have ever needed to contend with ads again. Unfortunately, I clearly wasn’t “envisioning” well enough, as some users on Reddit, such as Turbulent_Coconut_28, have reported seeing ads despite paying for YouTube Premium.
For people living in developed countries, digital subscriptions are already ridiculously expensive. There’s no reason whatsoever why YouTube Premium subscribers should find themselves contending with ads when the reason most people subscribe is to free themselves of the burden of ads. It’s hard to believe that this is an intentional move from Google but to be honest, company execs think very differently from consumers.
And just to demonstrate how much of an issue this could potentially be, here’s another user complaining about this problem.
YouTube Support Essentially Told One Premium Subscriber That It Is Intended Behavior
Needless to say, any Premium subscriber who encounters ads on their subscription has every right to escalate things with support, and that’s what one of them has done, sharing the response he was given with the rest of us over on Reddit.
The team member who responded decided to “shed some light” on the situation, confirming that YouTube Premium is meant to provide an ad-free experience, but in the next line, says that “promotional ads can sometimes appear for specific partnerships or limited-time offers”. The whole idea of YouTube Premium is that ads should never appear, no matter what, so the response feels like YouTube might be shifting the goalpost.
The email goes on to say that the user could have received the email for a variety of reasons, including their location, viewing history, or a specific marketing campaign. However, nowhere in the email is it acknowledged that it could simply be a bug or a glitch. Instead, the response seems to try to explain it away.
Could this mean that YouTube will still push ads to Premium users as long as the advertiser pays them enough? That’s not a future I’m particularly fond of.
Regardless, I’ll Give Benefit Of The Doubt And Hope It’s A Bug
Despite what the response says, I’m going to be optimistic and give YouTube the benefit of the doubt. This might be a bug and the support team member in the earlier email was simply trying to do damage control without realizing that the problem is far from normal.
Hopefully, Google will make a statement on this, but either way, a few weeks should tell us whether YouTube is going to keep this going for some (or maybe all) Premium subscribers or whether it was just a temporary niggle.
