If this goes live, I'm out. YT premium is my most expensive subscription, but I watch enough YouTube that I'm OK with it, especially considering that it supports creators more than ad viewers. If I still get ads? Nah dawg. I'll divy up that money amongst patreons or whatever, and install add blockers.
Seems like the user tracking "special promotion" overrides the premium. They don't even say whether it's expected or not. But my take away is that paying for premium may or may not show you ads, but you are definitely tracked and harvested for data. (Maybe even more so, since, well, you are more valuable to them.)
I'd bet that channel "members" don't get ads for that channel regardless of premium status.
IMO, Google made premium, almost nobody bought it. So they went after adblockers, hoping that people would get premium to get rid of the ads. People most just Adblock harder.
While this is happening, one exec is peering over the fence at twitch. Where they only way to get away from ads without a pretty good Adblock, is to subscribe to the individual creator.
So they make "memberships" to channels a thing.
Almost nobody buys that either. So they go... What if, even if someone is premium, we give them ads, unless they're a channel member.
Genius.
Paying to block ads per creator/channel/whatever, is a special level of bullshit that twitch has always had.
The system is working as expected. The companies are trying to find the best way to extract the most value from you using their platform.
Grayjay on Android has been working damn near flawlessly for me. No clue if the parent company is to be trusted at this point or not- but I cannot argue with the results.
Or sometimes it doesn't let me play YouTube in a minimized floating way. Seems to be if I've been going back and forth between horizontal and vertical vids. Both normally allow floating minimized play but something about how they interact often leads me to having to force close the app, which loses me the custom queue I've been constructing. If the official solution is buggy...
This looks like either a bug in the platform or people with Premium Lite. The article made no attempt at investigating this because all they did was to reprint complaints from anonymous people on Reddit. Customer support offering boilerplate reply about why someone is seeing ads sounds like par for the course here because it’s all either LLM chatbots or people in third world countries who couldn’t care less.