Interesting. If you can DM me the username and email associated with the account, I can look into this and get it fixed for her.

Perhaps set the account to only show ads until she’s caught up!

That would be illegal.

And by fixed you mean.. show more ads??

"We're sorry for any inconvenience this error may have caused"

More like Mitch Hedberg would have said: "Sorry for the convenience."

Why would anyone want this fixed?

It's a joke

How would you know what to buy without ads?!

Woooosh

Your GF is essentially in the "control group" for ads. Her behavior can be compared to the behavior of people who see ads to better understand how ads affect those other users.

In which case she should've been shown noncommercial ads (government services and promotions of YouTube features) instead of no ads so that she would be less likely to notice.

Maybe she is in a holdback experiment. To understand how a feature affects the metrics (such as running ads), they often have some people in a holdback. I worked there and we did have such experiments for our features.

How does ethics even come into this? They didn't require consent to show ads in the first place. Why require consent to not show ads?

this comment is hilarious no matter how you look at it

The is the advertising industry, unethical is their middle name

That's academic ethics. Academia holds itself to a high standard - voluntarily. Used car salesmen do not.

I mean, it’s Google.

Long ago a Google music subscription would disable ads on YouTube. When they discontinued it / I cancelled, it took a good 6+ months before YouTube ads started up for me.

But of a “oh I see what people are complaining about” moment for me ;)

I am still paying for mine. My Google music all access I'm feeling lucky subscription turned into a YouTube music one, which includes YouTube premium, and I'm still only paying 8 bucks a month, which seems like a pretty good deal even if I also pay for Spotify.

How did you manage to avoid the last price increase? I thought they’d ended that sweet deal for everyone (myself included)

I have no idea. I signed up for the music service under the $8/mo plan basically the day they announced it, and i've never canceled or missed a payment, but they've never increased my price. I just hope I haven't jinxed myself here.

I don't like to advertise this just in case it gets fixed, but I have that same experience for Twitch.

I don't run an adblocker and yet as long as I'm logged in, I get no ads. Not in the website nor in the mobile app. I don't have "turbo" and I don't even have amazon prime any more (which itself only very briefly suppressed adverts across twitch globally before they replaced it with a "Free sub" perk ). I don't have any of the other Turbo benefits, so it's not like I've been fully flagged as Turbo either.

I don't know if I accidentally bugged my account profile messing around back when they ran a bug bounty, but I'd happily provide more details in return for keeping this perk.

What's weird is that I vaguely remember once having a near-meltdown over the level of adverts on twitch when all I wanted to do was watch TV while I was heavily medicated and in pain in the hospital. Then some time a year or two later I was reflecting then suddenly realised I hadn't seen an advert for years.

I guess most likely there's some long forgotten ad-free A/B test that it's not worth cleaning up.

I've definitely benefitted over the years, I easily watch more twitch than any other platform. At £12/mo (roughly $15.50), twitch turbo is among the more expensive in the world. In the US and Europe it's $12 or €12, so we're getting straight ripped off in comparison.

> some long forgotten ad-free A/B test that it's not worth cleaning up.

That sounds about right. Different context but I once got on the good boy list at work by accident and it wasn’t fixed for about 6 month. On the first of every month I got a little corporate swag box in the mail thanking me for going “above and beyond”. Lots of cookies, blankets, coffee mugs and other trinkets.

Afaik Youtube cannot legally display ads to some countries' residents, it could explain this behavior.

The above is true. Some countries don't get ads. Lucky them. Albania, Cambodia, Ivory Coast, Laos, Myanmar, Macau, Madagascar, Maldives, and Russia.

Use a proxy server/VPN and go ad free.

Presumably he lives in the same place as his girlfriend.

She may have created the account abroad.

Which begs the question: if you used a proxy server/VPN and created an account "overseas", would you get ads?

Why don't they serve placeholder unpaid noncommercial ads (YouTube features, government services) to such users instead?