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I love YouTube, but damn, I hate the ads. Every day, my precious streaming time is rudely interrupted by some snake oil salesman promising to make me a fortune in seconds. The 2015 launch ofYouTubeRed (now rebranded as YouTube Premium) offered an escape, but €11.99 per month is a hefty price tag when you’re already strapped for cash. Six years later, a more affordable alternative has appeared on the horizon:YouTube Premium Lite....

Following its acquisition of Next New Networks back in March, YouTube has been working to encourage original content creators to make its site the home of good, quality, monetisable, original content. In the US, it recentlylaunchedthe YouTube Creator Institute and now it hasannounceda European initiative called NextUp. This programme will see up to 25 partners from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Netherlands receive €20,000 funding each, a place at a four-day ‘YouTube Creator Camp’ in London where they’ll receive one-to-one training, and additional promotion of their channels and videos....

YouTube’s algorithm recommends “regrettable” videos that violate the platform’s own content policies, according to a new investigation by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. The crowd-sourced study found that 71% of the videos that volunteers deemed regrettable were actively recommended by YouTube’s own algorithm. Non-English speakers were far more likely to find videos that they considered disturbing: the rate of YouTube regrets was 60% higher in countries that don’t have English as a primary language....

YouTube removes record number of videos after increasing role of AI in content review The company has relied more heavily on automated content review since telling staff to work from home Has YouTube struck the right balance? Not every type of video was given the same treatment. For particularly sensitive content, such as violent extremism and child safety, YouTube relied more heavily on AI. This led the company to remove three times as much content flagged as violent extremism or potentially harmful to children....

YouTube Rewind is no more. Aftercancelinglast year’s Rewind because nobody wanted to look back at 2020, the company has decided to cancel rewind for good (perhaps because 2020 never really ended, did it?). The yearly round-up of popular creators and trends has been increasingly maligned through the years, peaking (or should I say, umm, valley-ing?) in2018with what is literally the most disliked video ever posted to YouTube, at over 19 million dislikes....