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p4bl0today at 9:50 AM2 repliesview on HN

What a shame. What's the point even? I'm not going subscribe to YouTube premium anyway, and even less install and use the YouTube app. What happens with this move is just that I will just use YouTube less. I believe that's the case for most people who chose to use YouTube in a browser precisely for background playback.

As an example: knowing that I won't be able to keep the sound playing for the 5 minutes in between two buses when I need to walk and pay attention, I'll probably just launch a podcast from the beginning of my hour of transportation so that I'm not interrupted. For these five minutes, they loose me for almost an hour.


Replies

renewiltordtoday at 10:04 AM

Perhaps that's what they desire. Serving YouTube video has marginal cost and you provide marginal zero value. Losing you as a customer is probably desired.

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nikanjtoday at 9:51 AM

The point is that youtube is an ad-funded service, and if you're not watching the ads, Google is losing money on you.

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