>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be intere

>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling. Well, YouTube found out definitively that the answer was a resounding no. It's not so much that the audience isn't interested in paying for long form storytelling (or at least myself), but maybe just not interested in paying YouTube for it. YouTube is a place for short videos, I go there when I want to watch tech reviews, recipes, or something silly. When I want longform storytelling, I go to Netflix or something else that I pay for. I'm not sure what the solution is, but YouTube hasn't done a good job of advertising or raising awareness of Premium content at all. The most I see is a few thumbnails of things that I need to pay to watch on the homescreen. I would be happy to be proved wrong, but I have low expectations of drama or any longform content on YouTube - I expect it to be low budget and badly acted, so I may as well just go elsewhere. Perhaps ad blockers are a double whammy against YouTube Premium. I don't see ads on YouTube anyway, so I don't need to pay to get rid of them. And maybe they're advertising Premium content on there, but I've not seen them anyway. I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable. Still, it wouldn't take much for them to draw more attention to Premium videos, whether it's from ads, creating more social media buzz around them, or just putting a larger section on the home page that at least gives me a description of the content that I'm missing. As always, YouTube relies too much on their algorithm of placing more of the same content in front of you. When the experience is designed to just keep you clicking on though the recommendations of videos like the ones you just watched, it's no wonder that they're not getting eyes on original content. And yet it should be so easy for them.