The increasingly left-leaning Google-YouTube cabal has come up with an interesting bait-and-switch method of selling a premium service, YouTube Red, even at the expense of the advertisers underwriting YouTube's profitability.

Recently, YouTube has begun offering an ad-free YouTube experience, known as YouTube Red.  To help sell this, YouTube has begun aggressively dropping ads into the middle of YouTube programming.  YouTube doesn't wait for a built-in commercial break, but interrupts programming mid-sentence, sometimes mid-word, guaranteeing that the advertiser will appear in a negative context.  If you're engrossed in the latest episode of Kennedy or Rachel Maddow, Tucker Carlson or Wolf Blitzer, are you going to react positively to an ad that disrupts your viewing experience?  Of course not.

Sure, these rude and repeated awkwardly placed interruptions makes the YouTube Red ad-free experience feel a lot more attractive and – at just $0.33 a day – cost-effective.  That, in turn, helps the bottom lines of Google and YouTube by providing an uninterrupted revenue stream for which they have to do nothing.  However, if you're an advertiser, in effect, the Google-YouTube cabal's real customer (for whom corporate loyalty should be expected and is certainly deserved), you're getting shafted even as you help to underwrite the destruction of what, at one time, seemed like a viable and valuable advertising channel. 

The big question: Should you be surprised that left-leaning Google-YouTube is playing fast and loose with organizations who are pumping money into its coffers?  No, not really.

Ned Barnett, owner of Barnett Marketing Communications, has been an advertising, P.R., and marketing professional for forty-five years.  He has taught P.R. and communications at three colleges and universities, he's testified (twice) before Congress, and he has been an expert witness in legal cases involving advertising and professional media communications.