• rozodru@piefed.world
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    1 day ago

    there’s no point. I tried the free trial of youtube premium cause i’m on Qutebrowser and the adblocking isn’t the greatest. even with Premium i’d still randomly get ads every now and then. IF i were paying for it I’d be pissed.

    Now I circumvent this by just opening all the videos in MPV.

    • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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      1 day ago

      With respect, I don’t believe you. I paid for Premium for half a decade and never saw a single ad. I stopped my sub and will advise people against it going forward, but your claim is highly suspect to me.

      • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        my folks pay for premium, and i have to sit through constant tide or liberty mutual commercials surrounding every video when i visit. i asked why they pay for premium and they say it’s worse without it

            • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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              30 minutes ago

              A cheaper tier than Premium that offers fewer features. Along with this, there’s still some ads.

                • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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                  22 minutes ago

                  I actually think there is some value in the way YT is trying to do it versus other streamer sites. Most are not available to you at all for free, even with ads. And then you can pay, but get ads, or you can pay more to get no ads (or still get some, in the case of like Prime Video that serves ads for their own shows but don’t call those ads for some reason).

                  This is not a recommendation for it, to be clear.

      • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        These kinds of things are often A B testing to see what they can get away with - especially in countries like the US where consumer protection laws basically don’t matter. It’s kinda like when they raise subscription prices in one country but not another, but with showing some people in that country a certain amount of ads per watch time vs another group with a different amount of ads. They see how much they can get away with before people start complaining, and then what they can get away with before people start cancelling.

        I watched a video just this morning talking about how YouTube has built-in systems for similar A B testing with video thumbnails to tell creators which gets more watch time. You give it 2 thumbnails and it randomizes which one people see, and then tracks click-through rates and watch time percentages before giving you a result of which one performs better.

        • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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          16 hours ago

          There’s a difference between AB testing, and fraud. Charging someone a sub cost to not see ads, and then AB testing if you can get away with still showing them ads, is fraud. If they saw ads with Premium, it’s a million times more likely it was an error, but I frankly just don’t believe it. That’s just my opinion.

          • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            16 minutes ago

            You’re laboring under the impression that consumer protection laws mean anything in the US. They don’t. Unless it’s something absolutely egregious, then maybe they might get a slap on the wrist. Maybe.

            Another perfect example is my buddy who was looking at digital watches yesterday. The same watch was $100 more expensive on Amazon than at Walmart, and Prime prices are often higher than if you don’t have Prime. I’ve also had Amazon completely lie to me about an item being on sale, claiming that it was 50% off on a Prime day sale, and then when I went and checked it the day after it turned out that it had been more like $5 off than the several hundred they claimed the sale would’ve saved. They marked it up wildly just to pretend that it was on sale. And they’re not the only ones to have been caught doing that. Plenty of other places have been caught doing the same thing, but since they’re big companies, unless you can get a settlement from a class action suit, nobody cares.

          • qaeta@lemmy.ca
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            6 hours ago

            Have you been paying like… literally any attention to US corpo activities lately? Fraud is not only not being punished, but actively rewarded, so long as you bend the knee to Trump, which Google has.

      • rozodru@piefed.world
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        23 hours ago

        I didn’t say it was constant. I only said every now and again on the free trial I’d get an ad. Maybe it’s because I only used it with Qutebrowser. I don’t know. but I know that sometimes I would get an ad on a video.