YouTube is the best source of free videos on the planet, but it’s not really free. You pay for YouTube by looking at advertisements, whether they take the form of sponsored search results, banner ads, or pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll video ads. You probably already know this, because YouTube ads have become significantly more intrusive over the years. Almost every video has unskippable ads. Although YouTube Premium is the subscription designed to help you avoid them, I decided that paying $15.99 per month for YouTube was worse than watching frequent ads.
Years passed as I continued to ignore YouTube Premium, and YouTube continued to raise prices. Finally, a new YouTube subscription dropped into my lap following Google I/O. YouTube Premium Lite is now free for Google AI Pro subscribers, and I’m starting to see the appeal. With Premium Lite available for just $8.99 per month, I don’t understand paying nearly double for YouTube Premium.
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YouTube Music isn’t good enough to make the bundle worth it
Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOfCredit: Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOf
Google throws in a handful of extra features to make YouTube Premium appear to be an outstanding value. The big one is access to ad-free YouTube Music Premium. The value proposition is clear — Google wants you to think $15.99 is a fair monthly price to pay for access to ad-free YouTube and a dedicated music streaming service. With an individual plan for Spotify costing $12.99 per month, the offer looks good on paper. That’s until you realize that YouTube Music Premium isn’t a good streaming service, and you’ll probably want to keep your Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal subscription anyway.
This sounds harsh, but YouTube Music Premium does almost nothing better than competing music streaming services. It isn’t the best for social features, as Spotify earns that title. It also isn’t the best for sound quality, because it is limited to merely 256kbps AAC or Opus streaming. YouTube Music Premium lacks any semblance of spatial audio, Dolby Atmos, or special mastering — Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music Unlimited all have at least one.
If you’re into obscure releases and fan mixtapes, YouTube Music Premium will be the best for niche song availability. But this is a blessing and a curse. YouTube Music is loaded with content, and that means you’ll get irrelevant songs and podcasts included in search results for the thing you’re actually trying to find.
For these reasons, YouTube Music Premium alone doesn’t make YouTube Premium worth it. The other extras compared to Premium Lite include Continue watching, Jump ahead, queuing, and higher quality audio and video. These perks fill out the spec sheet, but do any of them make you want to pay $15.99 each month for a service that would otherwise be free with ads? The answer, for me, was a resounding “no.”
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YouTube Premium Lite is the perfect sweet spot
Everything you need to love watching YouTube, and nothing you don’t
I would’ve never shelled out for YouTube Premium or YouTube Premium Lite on my own, had the latter not been included with my AI Pro subscription free of charge. Now that I’ve used YouTube Premium Lite for a few weeks, I get why the subscription service exists.
The improved experience really hit me when I listened to a 90-minute episode of the New York Times’ Popcast video podcast. Usually, a lengthy episode like this one would include numerous, lengthy ads scattered throughout. They broke up the flow of the conversation and required me to drop what I was doing to skip them. After getting the upgrade to YouTube Premium Lite, it was delightful to enjoy a video podcast on the platform without being hit with a blitz of ads.
YouTube Premium Lite’s $8.99 monthly price is easier to stomach than YouTube Premium, but there’s one word that scares people off: “most.” Premium Lite offers ad-free viewing, background play, and downloads for most YouTube videos. That limitation sounds worrying, but it isn’t. YouTube Premium Lite subscribers won’t see any ads on the overwhelming majority of long-form videos. The big exceptions are YouTube Shorts and music content, as both content types will still have ads on Premium Lite. This makes sense, because YouTube Music is the key reason to upgrade to Premium.
There will also still be ads that take the form of sponsored YouTube search results. However, Premium Lite indeed offers a lighter ad experience than the free version. I don’t watch Shorts or music videos on YouTube, and that’s how I’ve avoided watching a single ad since getting the boost to Premium Lite.
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YouTube Premium is a controversial subscription. Some people would rather watch a gazillion ads than pay for a free service, while others view their time as more valuable than the monthly subscription fee. Neither group is inherently wrong, and I’ve always fallen into the former camp. I’ll watch a bunch of ads to avoid adding another subscription to the growing list of services I pay for each month. After using YouTube Premium Lite for free as part of my Google AI Pro subscription, my mind hasn’t really changed.
If anything, using YouTube Premium Lite reinforced my belief that the regular Premium plan is overpriced. Unless you’re dying to switch to YouTube Music Premium as your music streaming service, it’s hard to justify the $15.99 subscription cost, and the price keeps climbing. YouTube Premium Lite is much more affordable, and at $8.99 per month, it offers the thing you’re really after — ad-free videos.
I recommend the Google AI Pro subscription to anyone deeply invested in the Google ecosystem, as for $19.99 per month, you get 5TB cloud storage, exclusive Gemini features, Google Home Premium, Google Health Premium, and YouTube Premium Lite included. But for everyone else, I have to admit that subscribing to YouTube Premium Lite as a standalone service isn’t a bad deal.
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YouTube Premium Lite is Google’s entry-level YouTube subscription, offering ad-free viewing, background play, and offline downloads for most videos. Those that want a completely ad-free experience can upgrade to YouTube Premium, but they’ll end up paying almost twice as much each month.
