YouTube Premium Lite: Ad-Free Viewing for $7.99/Month
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blog.youtube
The timing makes this the most obvious alternative when you find yourself getting ads again - they're hoping to capture the portion of adblock users that are unwilling or unaware that they can switch off of Chrome (or continue using uBlock on chrome for the time being if you ignore their warnings). To add insult to injury, it only stops "most ads".
I say this as a long time subscriber to YouTube Music + Premium. I want to support the people, services, or content I value - and doing so directly with money is much more appealing to me than doing so through ads. But when you ask for money and still show ads, I get a particularly bad taste in my mouth. (See Netflix and Hulu's half-ad-supported tiers)
When was it removed? It's still on the chrome web store, and google's docs suggests they were removing manifest v2 extensions as early as October last year, so if they launched premium lite any time in the past 4 months, you could have plausibly claimed "Coincides suspiciously with the removal of uBlock on Chrome".
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
Swapped to firefox not looking back.
Because uBlock Origin Lite works on Chrome, and seems to currently block YouTube ads just fine...
Seems like when your pitch is 8$/month for no ads they could have spared a paragraph to explain what "most videos" encompasses.
"For Premium Lite, ads may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse"
(although I'm wondering if it means the ads between video thumbnails...)
Singles used to be an advertisement, they would make the artist more known and be ads for the full album. This is no longer the case since the whole album is available on youtube on release day. Public tv has shows you can watch for free, you have to sit through commercials though, why would it be different for music ? Producing an album is extremely expensive and we don't expect movie studios to distribute their movies for free because they'll sell merch. Not even children movies that are obviously made to sell toys.
> to watch trivially profitable videos ad-free
I know I'm cynical, but any time there is anything vague in a plan, I just assume it will be as asymmetric as possible. I assume this will allow for a ratchet that can adjust for more ads during lean times, and maybe reduce them during the good times.
Do I think it's a good idea? Sure, but if I don't know exactly what I'm getting, I'm probably not buying.
I wish there was a Premium tier that let me auto-skip these too.
I don't use YouTube music and they likely have millions of users who are in the same boat, don't use YTM but uses background play.
I'm not sure who this is for.
I primarily watch YouTube on my TV and it would be great to be able to unbundle YouTube Music. They've already tried this in Denmark, but failed to advertise it, like at all. There also was no option to downgrade, you had to cancel and then sign up again.
Makes me wonder how many people would use YTM if they only had the full premium option, but will split subscriptions across YT and Spotify with this new offering.
YTM wants to be a peer of Spotify in the same way that Google Music was positioned against iTunes. Google Music was actually a better product if you're used to buying music (the Library section in YTM is a total afterthought). YouTube Music assumes you're streaming. It's still primarily a music player - I think you can watch music videos through it if you try, but its main purpose is audio, and the corpus it pulls music from I assume is the same as all the music streaming services. It's not like it's playing music videos and hiding the picture.
Honestly, the experience on YTM can be a little rough. It doesn't have the level of polish that Rdio had before it. But subscribing takes the ads off of YouTube, and I can deal with a slightly rougher app to also make my streaming video experience better.
It's impressive the amount of work the NewPipe folks put in, both to keep up with this and to make the app more feature complete over time.
That aside, Premium Lite is for people who use YouTube for the video content (as opposed to only for the audio), which is most people.
I probably wouldn't even use it, but don't like to reward stingy dark patterns
As far as outdated information goes, especially for programming knowledge, I could make the same case for college and university. Even worse in their case.
The utility it brings for me is quite high.
What percent of battery life loss in phones that can't easily have their batteries replaced is attributable to this business decision and how many millions of phones has this resulted in being sent to the landfill years before they otherwise would end up there?
[1] Firefox is _the_ killer app for Android, esp., if you add more anti-adblock/paywall filter lists (NYT, WaPo, Boston Globe, Quora logins, etc): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/m... https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clea... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/mas...
However, YouTube Premium never made sense to me. Sure, I get to block YouTube's ads. But, without other ad-blocking tech, I still have to watch baked-in advertisements/sponsorships. I can't bring myself to pay for ad-free viewing, when the ad-free viewing still has half the ads.
The (current, temporary) price is reasonable, so I'll probably give it a try.
EDIT: Nevermind, I didn't realize that background play wasn't included.
"Most" is doing a heavy lifting here.
Refusing to provide free hosting for videos counts as a "shakedown" now?
Despite that ^ Ad-sense rates drop, youtube decides to arbitrarily de-monetize; no human review.
do you think they should further be able to arbitrarly request payment on top of routinely arbitrarily reducing ad revenue share from the content creators work, which are already bolstering the platform?
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A somewhat exxagerated comparison/Scenario: insulin provider provides you insulin thru paid insurance.They make X money, are profitable.You get used to this routine of getting meds, paying insurance, insurance pays med provider.
Nothing changes, but insulen provider realizes you have XXX money. so wants a cut of your paycheck on TOP of insurance...
Why are you moving the goalposts from "a cut of direct sponsorship money" to "arbitrarly request payment on top of routinely arbitrarily reducing ad revenue share from the content creators work"? It's fine to lament about youtube's capricious judgements on what can or can't be monetized, but there's nothing inherently "arbitrary" about asking for a cut of sponsorship revenue.
>A somewhat exxagerated comparison/Scenario: insulin provider provides you insulin thru paid insurance.They make X money, are profitable.You get used to this routine of getting meds, paying insurance, insurance pays med provider.
I don't see that happening any time soon. If anything, the current trend is the opposite, ie. brand-name drug makers charging an (inflated) amount to insurance companies, and rebating the patient's copay. There's also nothing fundamentally wrong with a company "double-dipping" (ie. charging both sides). Delivery apps charges both the restaurant and the customer, for instance.
I now feel weird that I've been paying for basically that arbitrary feature for like 10 years and in that time, the cost has gone up, creator shares down, and the service far worse.