Summary
- I mostly keep YouTube Premium for ad-free viewing; many bundled features go unused.
- Bring back visible dislike counts as a Premium perk so I can gauge controversy again.
- Let me hide Shorts and live channels, and let me subscribe to playlists to cut the clutter.
YouTube Premium has a lot of benefits aside from ad-free viewing, but how much value you get out of them varies by person. Personally, a lot of what YouTube Premium includes falls flat because I have no intention of using it. YouTube Music, for example, is included with the subscription, but I don’t use it at all.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a positive experience as a subscriber, because I’m mostly in it for the ad-free viewing. Everything extra is just a bonus for me, but prices of services like this are constantly rising, and sometimes companies try to sweeten the pot. If you use all the benefits of Premium, it might even be viewed as a steal, as it comes with a whole music streaming service and an ad-free YouTube experience. For me, I’d like to see some other features before fully committing. I understand that there’s no guarantee these ever arrive, but they’re something I’ll keep dreaming of.
- What’s included?
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YouTube mostly ad-free
- Price
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$8 a month
- Live TV
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No
Bring back the dislike button views
Sometimes you want to know
YouTube made waves when it got rid of the dislike button view count, and while the reason may have been good, sometimes, I like to look at the controversy. The dislike button counter isn’t a needed feature by any means, but it would be cool if people you pay YouTube a monthly fee could get it as a bonus. At the very least, it’d be something I see on every video I watch, so I’d get more use out of it than something like background play, a feature I never use.
I don’t expect YouTube to bring the dislike button views back since it’d just create a lot of drama, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it happens. Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m a person that hits the thumbs down video often, but sometimes, it’s necessary. It’d also be nice just to see how many people agree with me.
Let me hide Shorts and live channels
Enough is enough
I understand Shorts being something fun to watch if you’re on a mobile device, but there’s very little I’d ever want to watch on my TV in that aspect ratio. YouTube Premium lets me see fewer Shorts, but I wish I could take it a step further and stop seeing them entirely. The same goes for live channels, too. Just because I watched Lo-Fi Girl once doesn’t mean I want to see a million variations of the same video.
I don’t have a problem with Shorts, but I don’t want to see them either.
Shorts and live streams are typically things I search for on my own, so I don’t need to see them clogging up my recommendations. It’d be nice if a Premium subscription gave me more control over this. Admittedly, the Shorts videos are more of a problem when I scroll through YouTube on my computer. I don’t notice the Shorts if they are on my TV, and if they are, then it hasn’t been enough of an issue for me to get upset.
Subscribing to playlists would be cool
This cuts out the middle man
I subscribe to a lot of channels, and some of the bigger creators on YouTube come out with videos daily. This can very easily clog up your subscriptions feed and make finding things you want to watch more difficult. A lot of YouTubers have series going on, along with regular videos, and they separate them into playlists. It’d be nice if I could subscribe to a playlist directly instead of being notified each time a video gets uploaded.
This would make it a lot easier to find what I want to watch, and it would let me skip a lot of the things I’m not interested in. Considering how long people have been able to create playlists, I’m not getting my hopes up about this becoming a reality, but I’d certainly love for it to happen.
