- YouTube is experimenting with charging users for its playback-speed tool, a recent experiment reveals
- A Reddit user shared an image that says a YouTube Premium subscription is required to access playback speeds, although it’s not appearing for everyone
- If YouTube decides to lock the feature behind a subscription, it could encourage more Premium sign-ups – or turn off free users
While many people subscribe to YouTube Premium, its free experience is still widely used by millions, myself included – but one of its best free features could soon be locked behind the Premium paywall.
Playback speed is one of the platform’s last remaining handy free features, but now there’s evidence that reveals YouTube has been experimenting with making it a new paid feature as part of YouTube Premium. If this is true, it will join other Premium benefits such as offline listening, ad-free viewing, and background viewing, as well as the five handy new features it rolled out in September last year.
The experiment was first spotted by a user on Reddit, who shared a screenshot of a YouTube Premium pop-up showing they had lost access to amending video playback speed – but it’s not appearing for everyone.
It appears that YouTube is testing this out by splitting users into two different groups – ‘Group A’ and ‘Group B’ as categorized in the Reddit thread. Users in Group A will still get access to free playback speeds, so nothing changes, whereas users in Group B will run into the pop-up which requires them to be subscribed to YouTube Premium to use playback speeds.
Although it’s not set in stone, we’re not ruling out the possibility of this happening just yet. We’ve reached out to Google and YouTube for a comment, and we’ll update this story when we know more.
Opinion: What a way to push away more free users
It just goes to show that YouTube is desperate to persuade more free users to come over to the Premium side, but at what cost?
For the most part, I find that most YouTube users are pretty content with what the free experience offers. Though the benefits of Premium are game-changing, there are enough free tools to suffice not paying for another subscription service – but this potential move could be the one that pushes free users over the edge.
Playback speed is one of the last remaining free tools that’s keeping me locked in, and it’s the same for many users out there. I love using it to speed up videos that are far too long to watch at the standard 1.0 rate, especially long interview videos. Thankfully, I haven’t been hit with a YouTube Premium pop-up yet, and I hope it stays that way.
While this would be a huge inconvenience for us free users, I’ve always been intrigued by YouTube Premium and how much it upgrades the viewing experience. I can’t say that I’ve never been tempted by a free trial – I think it would be a game-changer for music video viewing. Who knows, maybe this is the year where I cave.
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rowan.davies@futurenet.com (Rowan Davies)
