YouTube warns Premium Lite users of ads in Shorts

YouTube Premium is well worth paying for, giving users ad-free access to maybe the broadest library of content in streaming history. But especially if you get your music fix from another provider (like paying for Spotify Premium), it doesn’t make a ton of sense to be paying full price for YouTube Premium and not taking advantage of its YouTube Music access. That’s exactly why we were so happy to see Google introduce YouTube Premium Lite, which just focuses on removing (most) ads without worrying about any extras — and does so for a fraction of the price.

While Premium Lite removes the vast majority of ads from normal videos, we’ve known that Google has carved out a series of exceptions. Those consist of “music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.” So far, at least in our experience, those have proved to be minimal, and we’ve found Premium Lite to offer a very reasonable compromise to paying full price.

That said, the situation is now changing a bit, and not for the better — at least for Premium Lite subscribers in some regions. Google has recently been sending out emails to Premium Lite users in Germany, according to Deskmodder (via 9to5Google). These advise subscribers that ads in YouTube Shorts will start appearing as of June 30. We’ve also uncovered TWiT Community user big_D  sharing the same message (this time in English).

Curious why Google would be sending out notifications about ads we already knew about, and wondering why these messages didn’t seem to be targeted at Premium Lite users in all nations, we reached out to Google in the hopes of getting some clarification. And it turns out that there’s a simple explanation for all of this.

You may recall that when we first began hearing about Premium Lite in testing last fall, it wasn’t yet available in the US, instead getting started in Australia, Germany, and Thailand. And it turns out, as Google was still getting its plans for the service together, it hadn’t told subscribers in Germany and Thailand that they’d be seeing ads in Shorts. By the time access expanded to the US, ads in Shorts were on the table from the beginning, but Google is only going back now and notifying customers in Germany and Thailand that they’re getting them, too.

So that’s what going on with these emails: Most Premium Lite subscribers already knew about ads for Shorts, and now YouTube’s telling the rest of you.