YouTube is the premiere entertainment platform available today; bigger than TV, bigger than movies, with plans to grow even more. If you’re watching something these days, there’s a good chance you’re watching it on YouTube.
Obviously, parent company Alphabet, Inc. is going to capitalize on this. Enter YouTube Premium, a paid subscription that gives you special permissions, including ad-free viewing, the ability to play videos in the background, and the ability to download videos to view later.
It’s an appetizing package…but it’s not enough.
The ad issue
How much is ad-free viewing really worth?
If you ask around, easily the thing people most seem to like about YouTube Premium is the lack of ads, which makes sense. It’s nice to watch a video without being interrupted in the middle.
At minimum, YouTube should do a better job of finding places to place ads, or give creators more robust control over exactly where they go, because it seems like they sometimes start up in the most awkward, inconvenient places. But if you want to avoid ads entirely, YouTube Premium isn’t the only option. While YouTube has been waging a war against ad blockers lately, they still exist and have a pretty high success rate. Browser extensions like uBlock Origin, alternative browsers like Brave, and third party apps like ReVanced have all been proven effective.
But here’s where I say something heretical: even without ad blockers, I personally don’t think the ad experience on YouTube is that bad, or at least not so bad that I’m anywhere close to willing to shill out money to address it. Ads can last for a long time…if you let them play for a long time. But the great majority can be skipped if you wait five seconds and click the “Skip” button. I remember being unable to skip commercials back when broadcast and network TV were still widely watched, so I don’t find this overly obtrusive. I realize that not everyone is as ancient as me, but I have a hard time being terribly frustrated over the occasional five-second waiting period.
I refuse to pay for features that were once free
May spite nourish me
I’m also old enough to remember when there were no ads on YouTube, and it rankles to be asked to pay for something that used to be free.
I feel similarly about YouTube Premium subscribers being able to play videos in the background of their phones, even if their screens go dark. Again, that’s something that you used to be able to do for free, and still can if you use a workaround. For instance, if you download the browser Brave onto your phone, you can still play YouTube videos in the background by following the steps visualized above: you navigate to the video you want, hit the little musical note, open the video you want to play, and then leave your phone on as the screen dies and the sound keeps going.
I don’t even mind opening videos on the normal YouTube app and just minimizing them and letting them play in the corner of my screen, even if it means my screen won’t ever go dark for their duration. It would be better and save more energy if the videos could play purely in the background, but once again, it’s not a function so indispensable that I’m willing to pay money to have it.
I fear that YouTube may keep crippling its basic functionalities until they put behind a paywall something I truly can’t live without, at which point I may have to pay for YouTube Premium. But that’s where the spite would kick in. Why should I pay you for making your product worse?
Not enough plan options
Woo me, YouTube
That said, if there was a good pricing option for me, I might be tempted to give YouTube Premium a try. But at the moment, there isn’t.
There are several pricing tiers currently available for YouTube Premium. An individual plan will run you $13.99/month. A family plan, which covers you and five additional family members, costs $22.99/month. If you’re a student, you can get Premium for just $7.99/month, which could be a good deal. If you’re not, $7.99 will only get you access to a few Premium features, sometimes, but not all; that’s called the Premium Light plan.
I am a non-student living in a household with more than one person but less than five. I could get a family plan and put friends and family who live outside my house on it, but there’s no guarantee that YouTube won’t follow in Netflix’s footsteps and eventually crack down on that practice; in fact, I’d bet good money they would.
If YouTube had a two or three-person plan priced somewhere between the individual plan and the family plan, it might be a good deal for me, but as of right now, I don’t get enough back for the amount paid.
YouTube Music Premium Is the Best Music Streaming Service You’re Not Using: Here’s Why
Even as a subscriber, I didn’t realize how many features YouTube Music Premium was hiding.
YouTube Music and downloadable videos
YouTube Premium also comes with YouTube Music, which I don’t use at all, so it’s not a selling point for me; services like Spotify are still far more robust, and again, I think it’s pretty easy to play music even without paying for a music subscription service. As for downloading videos to watch later, I’m lucky to live in an area with good internet access where streaming is rarely a problem. Even when traveling, I rarely find it hard to stream the videos I want to watch.
But those features might be more or less important to you. At the end of the day, this is going to be an individualized calculation, but I still think YouTube needs to offer more (or charge less) to make the math work.
