Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads. There are a few other benefits, but being ad-free is the big one. If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers. It makes more sense to just increase the price, as they do.

It is not like Amazon. Most people get Amazon Prime for the "free" shipping, and Prime with ads is a good value proposition, you get shipping but get a discount on the part that doesn't interest you. I don't get why tying a shipping to a streaming service isn't more controversial by the way, it is borderline illegal.

Oh, and by the way, ad-free is not really ad-free, you still have sponsored segments, but these are not under YouTube control.

Price discrimination. They currently divide users into two groups: people not willing to pay anything to remove any ads, and people willing to pay the current price to remove all the ads.

As the number of users and the price go up, it may make sense to add a middle group: people who are willing to pay some smaller amount to remove (or otherwise reduce the impact) some of the ads.

> Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads

The entire point is to find more ways to make money. They will try new ways as longs as there is too big drop in the users.

>Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads.

You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.

>If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers.

Doing this successfully on your smart TV is a barrier that most non-techy folk aren't going to climb over. In the case of Hulu, most people just... accepted it. Same with the Amazon Prime ads you mentioned.

At least the sponsored segments can almost automatically be skipped now. If you press forward on the remote it will jump ahead of the sponsored bit. A little annoying that I have to actively skip it but still better than watching them.

Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premium will be "reduced ads" and then there will be YouTube Premium+ that has no ads, for a nominal fee, of course.