I actually pay for Premium at the moment, but still would need to sit through baked in sponsored messages, and YouTube Shorts or other internal YouTube big banner service advertisements. So i still have uBlock (and sponsor block) anyway to remove that stuff. At which point... Why am i paying for Premium again? They made their site awful to use regardless of if you pay, unless you use adblocking and other extensions.
I left YouTube when they took away my grandfathered family plan, but Spotify has the same crap. Sponsored home screen recommendations, concert recommendations for bands I've never listened to, etc...
I used to be grandfathered in to premium for years and I happily payed it because it was at a price point I thought the service was worth. Then they email me saying they will raise the price from $17 to $22. Now I use revanced and get it free on my phone. I would have happily been paying the original price but they decided to be greedy.
Thank you for the heads up on revanced. I've been using NewPipe, and while it works very well, I like that revanced provides a more genuine YT experience.
Part of the reason YouTubers have 3rd party sponsor spots is because viewer an blocking makes their Adsense revenue unreliable.
YouTube premium helps address that for creators.
It wouldn't surprise me if some sponsors already demand viewership data to know how many people are skipping baked-in sponsor spots and uses that to pay creators less.
Finding more ways to avoid compensating creators isn't going to make the situation better.
Part of the reason YouTubers have 3rd party sponsor spots is because viewer an blocking makes their Adsense revenue unreliable.
I think the primary reason for that is so they still have revenue when YouTube randomly demonetized their videos. Whether for a false detection of something that's not "advertiser-friendly", false copyright claims because someone remixed music you've licensed and uploaded it to a library to be scanned using Content ID, or if YouTube just decided to say "fuck you" and say your videos are getting Invalid Traffic for no reason. It's a diversification of revenue streams.
I think the creators are free to bake in sponsored segments, but I totally agree with the rest of it. YT is treating us like lab rats and pushing tons of unwanted unnecessary stuff on us. I don't really want to reward that behavior with a monthly subscription.
This is a problem with so many monthly subscriptions: Instead of treating the continuously paying customers well to keep them in, they treat them as fat wallets that they can potentially milk more out of.