I signed up for YouTube Premium and it was the best tech decision I made all year
I only became a regular user of YouTube relatively recently.
First launched in 2005, the video platform wasn’t something I spent much time with for the first ten years of its existence. I had heard about how it was bought by Google and that it was popular with kids.
I saw parents at the mall or airport put a tablet in their kids’ hands and let them watch what kids were watching on YouTube (a whole other discussion for another time), and heard about the first YouTube influencers who started making real money on the platform. But it was the early 2010s, and a lot of that was happening, so it was just background noise for the most part.
It wasn’t until my first computer science courses in 2015 that I first started using the platform with any regularity, almost exclusively for programming tutorials to help me navigate C++ memory allocation, or how to program a game in Unreal Engine.
At the time I was a free user, and you know the saying: if you don’t pay for a product, you Are the product. The ads weren’t that bad at first, but once YouTube got a sense of who I was (a guy in his 30s, living in the US and interested in computers), that quickly changed.
YouTube ads are some of the worst I’ve ever seen
When you know, you know. The kind of targeted ads my audience sees can be laughably bad at best, and downright offensive and maddening at worst (I’m looking at you Evony: The Return of the King).
As a regular YouTube user, it never occurred to me to pay for a premium subscription for almost a decade. After all, ads are the price you pay for free media, and always have been. They’re annoying, sure, but without ads, the media you consume can’t exist without you paying for it.
But, boy, there are only so many misogynistic mobile game ads you can watch repeatedly before you break down. In early 2024, I started watching various craft videos much more often than even my computer science and programming content.
Initially this was just a form of white noise that I used when I was working or testing computer hardware on a test bench in our New York office, but I soon discovered that there was a certain meditative quality to watching someone who made a steel kitchen knife from Damascus. without comment, or carving a beautiful wooden vase with shop tools and a lathe.
As you can imagine, my algorithm was now really broken, and the targeted ads I was getting weren’t for normal things like, I don’t know, woodworking tools or maybe shop equipment. Hell, try to sell me some Carhart outerwear and I might buy it.
No, my demo as a middle-aged man was completely identified, my meditative background watching of a bunch of guys quietly putting together a deck of cards in their backyard, interrupted every few minutes by mobile game ads that look like they were run by the absolute Worst people on 4chan.
I won’t detail what exactly was so bad about these ads (aside from the fact that none of the gameplay shown is ever what you’d get if you played these cash-grabbing, social city builders microtransactioned to the extreme). But many of you know exactly what crass, juvenile BS I’m talking about. If you don’t, consider yourself lucky.
YouTube Premium saved my sanity
I don’t know how exactly I came across YouTube Premium, but I do remember that all I saw was that it meant all YouTube content could be viewed without ads.
I signed up for YouTube Premium on the spot, and I haven’t looked back since. I don’t even know what other features come with the subscription. It doesn’t really matter to me.
Before I get bombarded with emails: yes, I know ad blockers exist, but I won’t use them. Monetization for YouTube creators is complicated, but blocking ads doesn’t help them keep doing what they’re doing, and an ad blocker can always be turned off, or introduce security vulnerabilities into your browser, and so on.
Here’s the problem. We probably all have more streaming subscriptions than we ever actually use. So, if you’re like me and spend a lot of time on YouTube, consider swapping one of these for YouTube Premium. You’ll save yourself a lot of hassle, headaches, and sanity in the process.