Summary
- YouTube Premium’s main perk is ad-free viewing, but many added features don’t apply to me.
- Premium Lite blocks most ads for $8/month — perfect for me, but no family plan; music/Shorts may still show ads.
- I’d pay about $10 to skip ads, but beyond that, extra Premium perks don’t justify the higher price for me.
YouTube Premium is one of the most underrated subscription services, and you don’t even get exclusive shows and movies with it. The big draw of YouTube Premium is the complete lack of ads across all content on the platform. Perhaps the biggest criticism of YouTube is how many ads there are, so paying a monthly fee to get rid of them is nothing to scoff at.
It’s not just ad-free viewing that gives Premium a good value, either. You get a free subscription to YouTube Music, the ability to play videos in the background, and you can download videos when you’re traveling. These are all nice things, but a lot of them are completely wasted on me. I don’t use YouTube Music, nor do I plan to. I do most of my YouTube viewing on my TV, so background play and downloaded videos don’t move the needle either. YouTube brings a lot to the table with a Premium subscription, but hardly any of it applies to me.
- 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
YouTube Premium is a subscription service that offers ad-free viewing, background play, and access to YouTube Originals and downloads for offline use.
YouTube Premium has many cool things I don’t care about
The honest truth
The main thing I’m looking for from YouTube is the ability to watch something without ads, and that’s exactly what it provides. I’ve been using Premium for so long now that I can’t imagine a world where I go back to seeing them. A lot of people solve this problem with an ad blocker, but that doesn’t really help me if I’m mostly watching on a TV. I’m not sure if there is a way to install an ad blocker on TV, and if there is, I’m not really trying to figure it out. I just want a way to sit down on my couch after a long day and watch some videos without any extra hassle.
For a lot of people, spending more than $10 a month just to get rid of ads is a steep ask, so having these extra features is a nice bonus. In practice, I just don’t know how much value it really is. I’m sure they’re out there, but I don’t personally know anybody who uses YouTube Music — as Spotify just has so much brand loyalty — and it’s kind of scary sometimes.
YouTube brings a lot to the table with a Premium subscription, but hardly any of it applies to me.
This leaves expanded bitrates and downloaded videos as the main selling points. The increased bitrate is nice, I can’t lie, but I don’t know how much of a difference it really makes. It’s not like I have a problem with how YouTube looks, and it’s not as important to get good picture quality as it is for a streaming service such as Netflix. Travelers undoubtedly get a lot of value out of being able to download videos and watch them without an internet connection, but that simply doesn’t apply to me. I don’t travel very often, and when I do, watching YouTube videos is one of the last things I think about.
Ultimately, this leaves me with a lot of YouTube features that I don’t get much use out of. It’s not YouTube’s fault, as there’s only so much that can be offered. The big draw is having no ads, but $14 a month is a bit outrageous. YouTube can keep adding things to Premium to give it more perceived value, but I think a lot of them would simply fall flat for me. That’s why I’m a bigger fan of Premium Lite than I am of Premium.
Premium Lite solves most of the problems
It feels like a service made for me
Premium Lite is a stripped down version of the regular Premium, and it comes in at a fraction of the cost. Lite is just $8 a month, so it’s nearly half the price and provides most of what I’m looking for. This version of Premium doesn’t come with any fancy bells and whistles or a YouTube Music membership, but it blocks ads. It’s not every ad, and if you watch music videos or YouTube Shorts, you’ll see them periodically. That’s just fine for me, since I don’t watch that, so Premium Lite came at the right time. There’s a reason it’s one of my favorite monthly subscriptions.
Lite isn’t without its own problems, however. The big drawback is that I’m unable to join a family plan, so I have to be on it individually. The issue is sharing an account with my whole household, and that means messing with my own algorithm. It’s not as much of a problem when you watch the same videos with just one person, but it can get messy if four people are all trying to watch their own thing.
Aside from that, I don’t have a lot to complain about with Lite, and I’m happy there’s an option out there that fits my needs. It’s not often that I feel like a subscription service offers excellent value, but that’s how I feel with Premium Lite.
- Free trial
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1-month free trial
- Ads
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Most content ad-free
- Downloads and background play
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No
YouTube Premium Lite removes most ads from YouTube for $8 a month.
Now, I want to be clear about one thing — Premium is great for a lot of people. YouTube Music is a great cherry on top of the ad-free pie if you have no loyalty to Spotify or Apple Music. It might not be the most well-known music service, but it gets the job done, and if you’re looking for music, it’s great.
For its price, I can’t ask for much — honestly, I’d personally spend around $10 a month to not see ads. When we move further past that mark, I’d have to think a lot more about what I’m willing to pay for. Subscription services eat up a lot of my monthly bill, and while I try to cancel things where I can, the reality is that it’s difficult to do that.
There’s always something interesting coming out that requires me to have a certain service, so it’s a tough thing to juggle. One subscription that’s remained through it all is Premium Lite, and it’s going to stay that way as long as the price remains the same. All good things come to an end, and you can look at the price of YouTube TV as an example of what Google can do to a once-great service.
