A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give my wallet a little bit of a break, and I stopped paying for YouTube Premium.
I wasn’t watching any of the original content YouTube was putting out, and I have Spotify, so I didn’t need to use YouTube Music. My main reason for paying for the subscription was so I didn’t have to sit through ads while I watched my videos. As a consequence, I have watched more advertisements in the past three weeks than I have in all of the past three years.
As you can imagine, this has come with its ups and downs. On one hand, I am exposed to a lot more movie trailers, and there have been a couple movies that I exclusively heard of through YouTube ads. One of those movies was “Jexi,” where Adam Devine’s phone’s operating system falls in love with him a la “Her” but with a comedic twist. Granted, I didn’t particularly care for this movie, but I would not have known about it at all had I not seen countless ads for it.
Another upside of having to constantly sit through ads is that I find that I watch a lot less YouTube. I know it may sound a bit petty, but I think that many people around my age would agree that if a video has a 15-second unskippable ad, I’d seriously reconsider whether I’d want to sit through that.
Also, I was unaware that YouTube videos can now have ads in the middle of the video. I’m going to come back to that later, but if I see a bunch of ads throughout a 10-minute video, nine times out of 10 I’m going to watch something else. With that in mind, I have been stealing from Peter to pay Paul by watching a lot more Netflix. As a tangent, I have just started watching “New Girl” on Netflix, and I have been highly recommending it to just about anyone who will listen to me.
Back to the topic at hand, there are many disadvantages that come along with suddenly being thrown back into the population of YouTube ad watchers. First off, I just have to say, if I have to see one more ad for William Painter sunglasses, I am going to flip my lid. I get it, your sunglasses are made out of titanium and they have a bottle opener, but I just couldn’t care less. It wouldn’t be so bad, but it feels like that is the only ad I ever see anymore.
Also, I cannot stand how if I look something up on Google once, YouTube automatically assumes that I only want to see ads regarding what I looked up. Case in point, I was watching clips from the movie “Sully” about the pilot who landed the “Miracle on the Hudson.”
As another sidebar, if you haven’t seen this movie, or have no idea what the “Miracle on the Hudson” was, you have to see “Sully” as soon as you can. It’s a pretty short movie, and it is excellent. Sidebar over.
So I’m watching these clips, and I think to myself, “I wonder how much schooling a person has to go through to become a commercial airline pilot?” so I Google it and get my answer. Case closed, or so I thought. That was two weeks ago, and I am still getting targeted ads for a budget flight school. I’m going crazy.
With all this in mind, I am still glad that I’m not spending $15 a month on YouTube Premium anymore. The price was just too high, and that’s money in my pocket now.
Looking back on the whole situation, I don’t know why I ever thought that $15 a month was a fair price, but that’s beside the point.
For now, I guess I’m just going to have to sit through ads like everyone else.

BENJAMIN HAYLETT

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