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Ads, Subs... Or both

YouTube wants to look a little more like Netflix... Netflix feels the same

YouTube’s latest move shows it’s doubling down on subscriptions, while Netflix wants a piece of its ad game.

2/24/25 11:22AM

YouTube has made billions from ads. Now, it keeps exploring ways for users to pay to see fewer of them.

According to Bloomberg, the streaming giant is planning to roll out a cheaper, ad-free subscription tier called “Premium Lite” in several markets, including the US and Australia. For less than the current $13.99/month price, users can ditch ads on most content — music videos being the crucial exception.

The move makes sense, given YouTube’s deep reliance on advertising: in 2024, it pulled in a staggering $36 billion from ads alone, just shy of Netflix’s entire $39 billion haul. That’s even before factoring in what YouTube makes from its more than 100 million Premium and Music subscribers.

While Alphabet doesn’t reveal the exact splits between YouTube’s ads and subscription revenues, the company revealed last year that YouTube’s total revenue topped $50 billion for the first time during the 12 months ending Q3 2024. Some quick math shows that 70% of sales came from ads, with the remaining ~30% from subscriptions. Two weeks ago, YouTube hit another major milestone, saying that more people now watch YouTube on TV than on phones — further evidence that YouTube, rather than Disney or Amazon, might be Netflix’s stiffest competition for attention after all.

Of course, while YouTube is going after subscribers, Netflix is making moves in the opposite direction.

Once famously anti-ads (cofounder Reed Hastings once criticized ads for “exploiting users”), Netflix changed course in 2022, launching a cheaper, ad-supported tier after suffering its largest-ever subscriber loss. Two years later, over 55% of new sign-ups in ad-supported regions now opt for this ad-backed plan.

Still, ads are “not a material component” of Netflix’s total revenue, per its latest annual report. But the subscription juggernaut expects its ad business to “transition from crawl to walk” in 2025, Co-CEO Gregory Peters said during last month’s earnings call.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5