Two things are happening on YouTube right now.
One, it really, really wants people to stop using ad blockers so it (and its creators) can keep getting those sweet, sweet ad dollars.
And two, it also really, really wants people to subscribe to YouTube Premium.
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These things are not separate. For nearly two years now, YouTube has been running a campaign that pushes ad block → YouTube Premium as a pipeline. It figures (rightfully) that people who use ad blockers do not want to see ads–so it seems to view Premium as a compromise. If people just pay $13.99 per month for Premium, they don’t have to see ads!
But, of course, people have been resistant to paying, leading YouTube to recently debut “Premium Lite,” a lower-cost tier that will remove ads from most videos for a halved price of $7.99 per month.
Turns out Lite isn’t YouTube’s only stab at enticing more subscribers, though. As Digital Trends spotted, it’s also now testing a feature that lets YouTube Premium subscribers share up to 10 ad-free videos with non-subscribers each month.
It works like this: If you’re a Premium subscriber, you can share a special link to a video with your friend, your mom, or anyone else who isn’t a subscriber. Thanks to your link, they’ll be able to watch the entire video without ads.
This a smart move on YouTube’s part, since it gives the link-ees a taste of what the platform’s like on Premium, and might encourage them to subscribe once they’ve seen how the other half lives. It also gives subscribers a way to reduce the ad irritation for their friends and family–especially if those friends and family are watching long videos on TV screens, where ads have become especially frequent and lengthy.
Currently this is an experiment, and YouTube warns that ad-free videos are “an optional benefit and subject to be withdrawn at any time.”
There is, as we mentioned above, also a limit to how many videos Premium subscribers can send per month. They can generate ad-free links to 10 videos, and each of those links can be watched up to 10 times within a 30-day period. Basically, if you share the link with 10 people, they can each watch it once. If you only share the link with one person, they could watch ad-free 10 times.
Not every video can be turned into an ad-free version. Shorts, YouTube Originals, YouTube Music content, livestreams, and movies and shows are all exceptions, so non-subscribers are stuck watching ads on those no matter what.
For now, this experiment is available to Premium subscribers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, and the U.K. It may, like with any YouTube experiment, be expanded to more countries, or it may disappear altogether. But we suspect that while it’s available, this tool will be popular with Premium users.
