YouTube is making people pay up for background play

Platforms have decided: Life is meant to be lived with two screens in hand.

You’ve probably heard about the latest Netflix debacle, where–as it’s scrabbling to acquire one of Hollywood’s legacy movie studios–it’s urging the dumbing-down of filmmaking.

How? By telling people like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck that when they make original films for its streaming service, they need to ensure those films have big, eye-grabbing, brain-numbing explosions in the first five minutes to keep viewers’ attention. Oh, and they also need to keep restating the–preferably straightforward–plot in dialogue because viewers on their phones missed the point of what’s going on the first three times everyone talked about it. (That sounds familiar. *cough* Stranger Things Season 5.)

The most sigh-worthy thing about Netflix’s production rubric, though, is that it might be right about a lot of modern viewers. People whose primary form of entertainment is short-form dopamine hits delivered via TikTok can have a marked difference in attention span.

(Also, let’s be real, has anyone tried going to a movie in theaters lately? My thankfully anti-phone partner and I went to a Lord of the Rings 25th anniversary showing last weekend and the guy next to us was watching Reels and playing Pokémon GO on full brightness the entire movie. It’s a problem.)

Anyway–the point is that as Netflix is rearranging content to make it second-screen friendly, its competitor YouTube is also recognizing widespread attention span issues.

And it’s monetizing them.

YouTube Premium, the $7.99+/month subscription tier originally designed to give users access to YouTube’s in-house-produced films and TV shows (before YouTube stopped trying to make them), now offers viewers a set of perks to make the general content viewing experience better. No ads is the big one, but mobile device background play, where you can listen to a video while leaving YouTube and browsing other apps or turning the screen off entirely, is also a top offer.

Until recently, some non-Premium users were able to also access this perk, simply by opening videos in a mobile browser like Samsung Internet, Brave, Vivaldi, and Microsoft Edge.

YouTube did not like that. In a recent update, it nuked this ability, making it so whenever a YouTube video is playing for someone who’s not coughing up cash, it has to take up their mobile screen. The only way to get mobile background play now is to join Premium. (You can also go low-tech by watching YouTube on your desktop or TV screen while being on your phone–and honestly, given YouTube’s insistence on TV dominance, it might like that better.)

“Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members. While some non-Premium users may have previously been able to access this through mobile web browsers in certain scenarios, we have updated the experience to ensure consistency across all our platforms,” a Google spokesperson told Android Authority.

This follows YouTube’s other crackdowns on non-Premium viewers using ad blockers.

To be clear, it’s not some noble attempt by YouTube to make viewers pay attention to creators’ content as their first and only screen. Its sole goal here is to get more people paying for Premium. But it is interesting that platforms are prioritizing short attention spans to this degree. Netflix is bending its entire content formula around them, and YouTube is betting that people will pay to satisfy them.

And it might be right.