YouTube Premium, despite its recent string of price hikes, has continued to grow and even diversify its subscription tiers with low-cost, watered-down plans. The most notable of its perks is ad-free video watching, which remains a core subscription driver for people who flock to the service for entertainment, work, or education.
The company has now started testing a new feature that lets YouTube Premium subscribers share ad-free videos with their friends, family members, or any other acquaintances. It’s not a free buffet situation, however, as the number of shared ad-free videos maxes out at ten per month.
The core premise is pretty straightforward. If you pay for an ad-free video-watching experience, can you share the same ten times each month. In hindsight, it’s a clever strategy to give more free users a taste of the ad-free nirvana, with hopes of eventually luring them into paying for a subscription.
How ad-free links work on YouTube?
The experiment is currently limited to YouTube Premium subscribers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. However, it may never launch globally, or take a while to expand, if the history of such experimental features is any indication.
“Sharing ad-free videos is an optional benefit and subject to be withdrawn at any time,” warns a Google support page, while also adding that Google may choose to expand it to more users in the near future. For YouTube Premium subscribers who are currently in the test pool, the platform’s share tool lets them pick a dedicated “Share-ad free” option.
This one creates a custom ad-free viewing link, just the way subscribers to news sites can share gift links that temporarily take down the paywall for the recipients. In YouTube’s case, there are a bunch of exceptions for sharing ad-free links. For example, they won’t work for premium music videos, user-generated song content, YouTube Originals, Shorts, Livestreams, and Movies & Shows.
Moreover, each ad-free link can only be watched ten times, and it only removes commercial breaks from a video for a span of 30 days. Another restriction is that the recipient must be signed in to YouTube and viewing it within the official Android or iOS app.
Notably, the quota of ten ad-free links is counted on a per-video basis, and not how many people it is shared with. Moreover, if the ad-free link is shared with someone who is already a YouTube Premium subscriber, it won’t count towards the monthly allowance for sharing such video links.
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