About fifteen years ago, online advertising was the implicit deal: you saw a banner or a pre-roll fifteen seconds and you had free access to everything. It wasn’t ideal, but it was logical: someone paid for the content you consumed so you didn’t have to pay for it. It worked because the discomfort was proportionate.
That exists less and less.
What we have now is something else: the platforms have discovered that advertising serves less to monetize than to push. To degrade the free experience until paying premium stops being a whim and becomes the only tolerable way to use the product. And no one does it with more brazenness – or mastery – than YouTube. That’s how he hunted me.
If you use it without paying, you know: increasingly longer and more frequent ads, several before starting the video, the same shady spot repeated three times in ten minutes. Ads that cut sentences in half, destroy the rhythm of a song, or appear just when you got to the part you were interested in. It is that way by design.
YouTube doesn’t need to show you so many ads to monetize. You would probably earn more with less, better targeted advertising. But it’s not about that. It’s about making the free experience so unbearable that you end up paying to stay sane. I don’t pay YouTube Premium for what it offers me, but for what it takes from me. And more and more people pay not because they want extra features, but so they don’t end up crashing their phone on the ground.
Other platforms do the same but disguise it better. Netflix with shared accounts, Disney+ with the video quality on the cheap plan, Spotify putting ads on you and forcing random mode. They are visible tricks, but at least you have less and what you have works. YouTube has gone further: it doesn’t take away your features, it poisons them. The catalog is still complete, but the experience is hostile. You pay with your patience and with your fragmented attention.
The curious thing is that YouTube is pretty honest. It doesn’t talk about Premium as an “improved experience” or “exclusive content.” It basically tells you: if you want this to stop being hell, check out. They don’t deceive. They tell you what the deal is.
Forks the Internet model in the 1920s. Platforms no longer build something so good that people want to pay for it. They make the free plan so bad that there is no other option. The logic is identical: friction is no longer a side effect. It’s the lever.
This also says something about us: a decade ago, ads were annoying but bearable. Today they are intrusions that we cannot tolerate. We have normalized that the Internet should be fluid, without interruptions or waiting. The platforms know it. They know that we have lost the ability to endure any friction. So they make it, multiply it, and then charge you to remove it.
YouTube has perfected something that other platforms may not want to admit: The ad no longer sells products. Sell your own absence. And that is perhaps the only advertising that really works.
Featured image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio
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