Give me ad-free for $5/mo or less and I may be sold. I have no interest in YouTube music and the price of regular premium is far too steep to justify for me. I have issues with how Google has run...
Give me ad-free for $5/mo or less and I may be sold. I have no interest in YouTube music and the price of regular premium is far too steep to justify for me.
I have issues with how Google has run YouTube over the years but I do recognize they need to recoup money for hosting and delivering videos. Unfortunately I feel like $5/mo is going to be asking far too much, I imagine it would likely be closer to $8.99/mo at least.
I pay for regular premium currently, but similarly don’t get much use of some of the frills like YouTube Music (I have Apple Music for that). All I want is to eliminate ads in a way that doesn’t...
I pay for regular premium currently, but similarly don’t get much use of some of the frills like YouTube Music (I have Apple Music for that). All I want is to eliminate ads in a way that doesn’t make the site break and to better support creators (the less dependent they are on ad revenue, the better). If Google can offer a cheaper version that excludes Music, etc, I might be interested in that.
As for the trial version mentioned in the article with just reduced ads, well, no thanks. If I’m paying anything I’d better not be seeing ads.
I missed where it said "most videos" ad-free. I think earlier it hinted that maybe music videos are the ones that would have ads? In a way I guess it makes sense, if you want the ad-free music,...
I missed where it said "most videos" ad-free. I think earlier it hinted that maybe music videos are the ones that would have ads? In a way I guess it makes sense, if you want the ad-free music, you sign up for premium and get YouTube music with it. I can see people using ad-free lite version to just create playlists of music videos, which isn't really the intended use.
I don't like that music videos would have ads, but I guess I can see the logic.
They can stop sponsored segments, in fact, if the creators flag the segment as such, which I believe they're required to do. Premium allows auto-skip of sponsored segments, I believe. I hedge a...
They can stop sponsored segments, in fact, if the creators flag the segment as such, which I believe they're required to do. Premium allows auto-skip of sponsored segments, I believe. I hedge a bit because I don't actually pay for Premium, I just use ReVanced on my phone, and that feature is enabled by default.
ReVanced uses the sponserblock database that is just comprised of user submitted segment data. As far as I know sponser segments aren't flagged in any way on YouTube itself. You can get the...
ReVanced uses the sponserblock database that is just comprised of user submitted segment data. As far as I know sponser segments aren't flagged in any way on YouTube itself. You can get the sponserblock addon for other browsers to use the same functionality though.
You know things have gone to enshittification hell when it requires piracy just to use the damn service the website supposedly offers. All I wanted was to cut down on unskippable ads and to keep...
You know things have gone to enshittification hell when it requires piracy just to use the damn service the website supposedly offers. All I wanted was to cut down on unskippable ads and to keep audio playing when I locked my phone, and I accidentally got a better user experience all-around.
According to @Gummy, it's a feature that ReVanced uses, but it's available as an add-on for browsers too. Might be worth looking into. I don't mind sponsored segments so much as 30-second...
According to @Gummy, it's a feature that ReVanced uses, but it's available as an add-on for browsers too. Might be worth looking into.
I don't mind sponsored segments so much as 30-second unskippable ads from shit like PragerU. At least with sponsored segments I know the creators are getting paid decently.
Indeed, it is. https://sponsor.ajay.app/ cc: @updawg And I highly recommend it since it's, unfortunately, pretty much essential these days with how many channels are putting sponsor and...
And I highly recommend it since it's, unfortunately, pretty much essential these days with how many channels are putting sponsor and self-promotion segments in the middle of their videos. But it's also great for auto-skipping the non-music parts of music videos too, which makes listening to music playlists on YouTube way less annoying.
I have Premium and don't use ReVanced or Sponsorblock. There's definitely nothing to let me manually skip, much less automatically skip, sponsored segments.
I have Premium and don't use ReVanced or Sponsorblock. There's definitely nothing to let me manually skip, much less automatically skip, sponsored segments.
Yeah there is. When you double tap to skip forward, a button pops up (sometimes) that slips the segment. It depends on how old the video is, so usually videos a few days old don’t have it yet, but...
Yeah there is. When you double tap to skip forward, a button pops up (sometimes) that slips the segment. It depends on how old the video is, so usually videos a few days old don’t have it yet, but basically everything over a week old will have it.
Interesting. I wonder if that's related to that heatmap that displays "popular" parts of videos. (Naturally, the end of sponsored segments are very popular.) I don't think I've ever been able to...
Interesting. I wonder if that's related to that heatmap that displays "popular" parts of videos. (Naturally, the end of sponsored segments are very popular.) I don't think I've ever been able to skip right to that most popular point exactly, but maybe that's just reflective of how much my YouTube watching is on my TV. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
I think it’s almost the exact same feature. I think they build a heat map of sections which are skipped instead of popular, and build the skip locations based on that.
I think it’s almost the exact same feature. I think they build a heat map of sections which are skipped instead of popular, and build the skip locations based on that.
It does also depend on what platform you're using as well. I mostly watch via my TV, and it's just straight-up not a thing there, but I've seen it on my phone sometimes.
It does also depend on what platform you're using as well. I mostly watch via my TV, and it's just straight-up not a thing there, but I've seen it on my phone sometimes.
Alternatively, giant techs could pay their fair share of taxes and make society better so I could afford to sprinkle $10 here there everywhere without thought. Until then, I'm thinking deeply...
Alternatively, giant techs could pay their fair share of taxes and make society better so I could afford to sprinkle $10 here there everywhere without thought.
Until then, I'm thinking deeply about my costs and they're not getting any of mine.
Also: they only achieved a de facto monopoly in internet videos by driving all competitors out by having a huge subsidy from Google, until network effects do it for them. I’m so tired of the...
Also: they only achieved a de facto monopoly in internet videos by driving all competitors out by having a huge subsidy from Google, until network effects do it for them. I’m so tired of the modern version of embrace extend extinguish of tech companies.
This has been my position for a while as well. YouTube is scummy, but I acknowledge things cost money. $5 a month for me, or $10 if I can attach it to my family plan and I might just bite....
This has been my position for a while as well. YouTube is scummy, but I acknowledge things cost money. $5 a month for me, or $10 if I can attach it to my family plan and I might just bite.
Somewhat related, google get you billing system unified. It's a joke how many separate charges I see a month.
Unified charge systems at Google scale are a nightmare to go back and add. Every single department has to be convinced to support one unified system, and then they have to actually implement the...
Unified charge systems at Google scale are a nightmare to go back and add. Every single department has to be convinced to support one unified system, and then they have to actually implement the changes everywhere for everything...
Even though there's a huge financial incentive to limit interchange fees by bundling monthly charges, it's an extremely hard lift for management to coordinate and prioritize.
Is it not the kind of thing that can just be mandated top-down? For us, the most effective changes are the ones where we can tell anyone pushing back "tough titties; you don't get a choice."
Is it not the kind of thing that can just be mandated top-down? For us, the most effective changes are the ones where we can tell anyone pushing back "tough titties; you don't get a choice."
Sure, anything is possible. It could probably happen if someone around the C-suite level seriously prioritised it and gave enough authority to some amazing project managers. With some luck, they...
Sure, anything is possible. It could probably happen if someone around the C-suite level seriously prioritised it and gave enough authority to some amazing project managers. With some luck, they could probably corral every relevant team into making the necessary changes within a year or two.
As to why they haven't done it? I imagine they don't think the saved interchange fees are worth the engineering time. Granted, I haven't worked at Google, so your guess is as good as mine.
Coincidentally I was just about to make a thread about "Paying for a worse experience". I've used Youtube a lot since 2008. And I mean A LOT. Yet I'd never seen an ad since I always used adblock....
Coincidentally I was just about to make a thread about "Paying for a worse experience".
I've used Youtube a lot since 2008. And I mean A LOT. Yet I'd never seen an ad since I always used adblock. Recently though, Google's been working hard to fix that, by changing how extensions work, and the video player started to get a little buggy here and there. I figured I might as well subscribe to Premium for the first time, since I had been leeching for quite literally half of my life.
Since then (tbf, it's only been 2 months or so), I've now occasionally started to get problems where, on embedded videos, the player throws up a message saying something along the lines of "Playback has been paused because your account is being used somewhere else." The video would refuse to play for a while, though fortunately it only takes a few minutes to resolve.
The thing is, I'd never seen that message when I used adblock, not once. Also, in Finland Premium gets bundled with Youtube Music, which I have no need for, for a total of 15€/month. I pay for a worse experience than if I was "stealing", as some people put it.
At least there's some solace in knowing that now creators actually get paid for my views, however miniscule that number might be.
If you truly want to support creators, have you considered paying for individual creators on Nebula and Patreon and continuing to use a full-featured adblocker in Firefox? Paying Google for this...
If you truly want to support creators, have you considered paying for individual creators on Nebula and Patreon and continuing to use a full-featured adblocker in Firefox? Paying Google for this shitty degraded experience seems like 'voting with your wallet' in altogether the wrong direction, IMO. And Google only passes a fraction of your payment along to creators anyway.
This is one of those arguments that holds up in theory but not in practice. If YouTube premium is ~$15/mo, you could use that same money to support 3 creators on Patreon instead. But for everyone...
If you truly want to support creators, have you considered paying for individual creators on Nebula and Patreon?
This is one of those arguments that holds up in theory but not in practice. If YouTube premium is ~$15/mo, you could use that same money to support 3 creators on Patreon instead. But for everyone else you watch, they'd get nothing (assuming ads are blocked). And I'd imagine most people who are that invested in creators are watching more than 3.
YouTube creators make more from premium viewers than they do from ad views.
And Patreon takes a cut too - from their website it looks like that's an 8% cut in most cases, and additional fees related to subscriber location sales tax, as well as fees when you withdraw funds.
There's no perfect solution here. Any creator who's been at it for a while knows it's hard to reach a level where you've got enough of a following to make good money. They're mostly operating at the mercy of the big hosting or social media sites to help with discovery of their videos. There were tons of cries for help during the potential TikTok ban because the creators who pushed everything there didn't know where to go next.
But doesn't the inverse apply? If you follow 500 creators and are paying 15 a month, you're giving them 3 cents a month *before" YouTube pays a cut. Essentially, you're giving them nothing and...
But doesn't the inverse apply? If you follow 500 creators and are paying 15 a month, you're giving them 3 cents a month *before" YouTube pays a cut. Essentially, you're giving them nothing and might as well pirate.
Does anyone really follow that many creators? It feels like a slippery slope or straw man argument here. I went back through my YouTube history and counted 15 creators I watched at least 3 videos...
Does anyone really follow that many creators? It feels like a slippery slope or straw man argument here.
I went back through my YouTube history and counted 15 creators I watched at least 3 videos from. Let's assume that the metrics give more weight to those creators I watch more frequently - they're getting a larger slice of the pie there than a few cents, and it's more sustainable for me on my mediocre income than trying to support each of them at $5/mo.
There's certainly a lot more going into determining creator revenue than that, but if we're oversimplifying anyways...
As an aside I sometimes wish I could tip creators for specific videos - Eg, send a dollar for a useful DIY repair video (goodness knows how many highly specific repairs I've been able to do thanks to some random guy with a shaky camera) or a particularly informative video essay. If this is already a thing, I'd love to know!
🙋 I subscribe to well over 1000 channels, and have about 100 channels with the Bell notification set to 'All' for, that I watch pretty much every video they release. I refuse to pay for Premium,...
Does anyone really follow that many creators?
🙋 I subscribe to well over 1000 channels, and have about 100 channels with the Bell notification set to 'All' for, that I watch pretty much every video they release. I refuse to pay for Premium, but I support quite a few of those creators via Patreon, and often donate via YouTube Live to those I don't.
Impressive, though I expect you're an outlier! I've seen your video posts and suggestions before and certainly believe your number. I'm just amazed that you have the time to invest in watching...
Impressive, though I expect you're an outlier! I've seen your video posts and suggestions before and certainly believe your number. I'm just amazed that you have the time to invest in watching that all.
Most of my TV/Movie/YouTube watching these days is done passively. I almost constantly have media playing on my bottom screen while I am doing other things on my PC. So it's not like I am...
I'm just amazed that you have the time to invest in watching that all.
Most of my TV/Movie/YouTube watching these days is done passively. I almost constantly have media playing on my bottom screen while I am doing other things on my PC. So it's not like I am exclusively focused on the videos.
They would be indeed getting a larger slice of the pie than my example, but still a very small one. There's also other things a flat fee incentivises. Do you follow people that make well-argued...
They would be indeed getting a larger slice of the pie than my example, but still a very small one.
There's also other things a flat fee incentivises. Do you follow people that make well-argued and well-supported quality videos? If split equally, those people get less money comparatively than the rest. Wouldn't it be better to directly support them in Patreon, then?
It would be, and I have supported them in the past when I am able to. This is why I would love a way to specifically tip a creator for specific videos.
It would be, and I have supported them in the past when I am able to. This is why I would love a way to specifically tip a creator for specific videos.
You already can, at least for channels that are eligible for fan funding (memberships, store, etc), and have enabled Super Thanks. You just click the "Thanks" button under the video.
This is why I would love a way to specifically tip a creator for specific videos
You already can, at least for channels that are eligible for fan funding (memberships, store, etc), and have enabled Super Thanks. You just click the "Thanks" button under the video.
I've seen tipping as an option on YouTube sometimes now. Not often, and certainly not on my TV, but it's occasionally there. I've never used it, though.
I've seen tipping as an option on YouTube sometimes now. Not often, and certainly not on my TV, but it's occasionally there. I've never used it, though.
This comes up for me because I share my account with my family, but they're on separate channels of my account. It generally doesn't kick in until 4 people are trying to watch at the same time,...
This comes up for me because I share my account with my family, but they're on separate channels of my account. It generally doesn't kick in until 4 people are trying to watch at the same time, and it doesn't interrupt for long (I can kick my kids off lmao).
emphasis mine. I really hope this is just CYA speak for "but creators can have sponsors" and not "we'll still put our ads into your subscription". If it's optimistic: I'd definitely been willing...
“a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free”
emphasis mine. I really hope this is just CYA speak for "but creators can have sponsors" and not "we'll still put our ads into your subscription".
If it's optimistic: I'd definitely been willing to step down to lite since I'm mostly there for ad-free and background play. I've never used Google Music.
I have been on a family plan for 5+ years for premium and it has been great. We only pay $4 a month or something. I use all of the parts of the plan so I see it as money well spent.
I have been on a family plan for 5+ years for premium and it has been great. We only pay $4 a month or something. I use all of the parts of the plan so I see it as money well spent.
Nah, they've already lost me for good. I just use Youtube through a web browser with ad blocking on mobile, then the rest of my Youtube watching is through SmartTube sideloaded to my NVIDIA Shield.
Nah, they've already lost me for good. I just use Youtube through a web browser with ad blocking on mobile, then the rest of my Youtube watching is through SmartTube sideloaded to my NVIDIA Shield.
I almost never watch YT on my Shield, but I remember installing https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ (or maybe some equivalent) a few years ago. Since the Shield works like any Android device, you just...
I almost never watch YT on my Shield, but I remember installing https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ (or maybe some equivalent) a few years ago. Since the Shield works like any Android device, you just have to download and install the .apk file.
Next will be Youtube Premium Lite Plus and the next one Youtube Ultimate. When they stop effing around I will stop using Grayjay. I know there are costs associated with running the site, but I...
Next will be Youtube Premium Lite Plus and the next one Youtube Ultimate. When they stop effing around I will stop using Grayjay. I know there are costs associated with running the site, but I also think there is greed. Which one of those two is higher, I don't know.
Give me ad-free for $5/mo or less and I may be sold. I have no interest in YouTube music and the price of regular premium is far too steep to justify for me.
I have issues with how Google has run YouTube over the years but I do recognize they need to recoup money for hosting and delivering videos. Unfortunately I feel like $5/mo is going to be asking far too much, I imagine it would likely be closer to $8.99/mo at least.
I pay for regular premium currently, but similarly don’t get much use of some of the frills like YouTube Music (I have Apple Music for that). All I want is to eliminate ads in a way that doesn’t make the site break and to better support creators (the less dependent they are on ad revenue, the better). If Google can offer a cheaper version that excludes Music, etc, I might be interested in that.
As for the trial version mentioned in the article with just reduced ads, well, no thanks. If I’m paying anything I’d better not be seeing ads.
I missed where it said "most videos" ad-free. I think earlier it hinted that maybe music videos are the ones that would have ads? In a way I guess it makes sense, if you want the ad-free music, you sign up for premium and get YouTube music with it. I can see people using ad-free lite version to just create playlists of music videos, which isn't really the intended use.
I don't like that music videos would have ads, but I guess I can see the logic.
It could also by a legal CYA thing. They can't stop sponsored segments.
They can stop sponsored segments, in fact, if the creators flag the segment as such, which I believe they're required to do. Premium allows auto-skip of sponsored segments, I believe. I hedge a bit because I don't actually pay for Premium, I just use ReVanced on my phone, and that feature is enabled by default.
ReVanced uses the sponserblock database that is just comprised of user submitted segment data. As far as I know sponser segments aren't flagged in any way on YouTube itself. You can get the sponserblock addon for other browsers to use the same functionality though.
You know things have gone to enshittification hell when it requires piracy just to use the damn service the website supposedly offers. All I wanted was to cut down on unskippable ads and to keep audio playing when I locked my phone, and I accidentally got a better user experience all-around.
I pay for premium and most videos with sponsors don't let me skip. Even when I've been able, I don't think it has really skipped the whole segment.
According to @Gummy, it's a feature that ReVanced uses, but it's available as an add-on for browsers too. Might be worth looking into.
I don't mind sponsored segments so much as 30-second unskippable ads from shit like PragerU. At least with sponsored segments I know the creators are getting paid decently.
Indeed, it is. https://sponsor.ajay.app/ cc: @updawg
And I highly recommend it since it's, unfortunately, pretty much essential these days with how many channels are putting sponsor and self-promotion segments in the middle of their videos. But it's also great for auto-skipping the non-music parts of music videos too, which makes listening to music playlists on YouTube way less annoying.
I have Premium and don't use ReVanced or Sponsorblock. There's definitely nothing to let me manually skip, much less automatically skip, sponsored segments.
Yeah there is. When you double tap to skip forward, a button pops up (sometimes) that slips the segment. It depends on how old the video is, so usually videos a few days old don’t have it yet, but basically everything over a week old will have it.
Interesting. I wonder if that's related to that heatmap that displays "popular" parts of videos. (Naturally, the end of sponsored segments are very popular.) I don't think I've ever been able to skip right to that most popular point exactly, but maybe that's just reflective of how much my YouTube watching is on my TV. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
I think it’s almost the exact same feature. I think they build a heat map of sections which are skipped instead of popular, and build the skip locations based on that.
Lol not in my experience. Basically nothing has it at all for me.
It does also depend on what platform you're using as well. I mostly watch via my TV, and it's just straight-up not a thing there, but I've seen it on my phone sometimes.
Alternatively, giant techs could pay their fair share of taxes and make society better so I could afford to sprinkle $10 here there everywhere without thought.
Until then, I'm thinking deeply about my costs and they're not getting any of mine.
Also: they only achieved a de facto monopoly in internet videos by driving all competitors out by having a huge subsidy from Google, until network effects do it for them. I’m so tired of the modern version of embrace extend extinguish of tech companies.
This has been my position for a while as well. YouTube is scummy, but I acknowledge things cost money. $5 a month for me, or $10 if I can attach it to my family plan and I might just bite.
Somewhat related, google get you billing system unified. It's a joke how many separate charges I see a month.
Unified charge systems at Google scale are a nightmare to go back and add. Every single department has to be convinced to support one unified system, and then they have to actually implement the changes everywhere for everything...
Even though there's a huge financial incentive to limit interchange fees by bundling monthly charges, it's an extremely hard lift for management to coordinate and prioritize.
Is it not the kind of thing that can just be mandated top-down? For us, the most effective changes are the ones where we can tell anyone pushing back "tough titties; you don't get a choice."
Sure, anything is possible. It could probably happen if someone around the C-suite level seriously prioritised it and gave enough authority to some amazing project managers. With some luck, they could probably corral every relevant team into making the necessary changes within a year or two.
As to why they haven't done it? I imagine they don't think the saved interchange fees are worth the engineering time. Granted, I haven't worked at Google, so your guess is as good as mine.
How so?
Coincidentally I was just about to make a thread about "Paying for a worse experience".
I've used Youtube a lot since 2008. And I mean A LOT. Yet I'd never seen an ad since I always used adblock. Recently though, Google's been working hard to fix that, by changing how extensions work, and the video player started to get a little buggy here and there. I figured I might as well subscribe to Premium for the first time, since I had been leeching for quite literally half of my life.
Since then (tbf, it's only been 2 months or so), I've now occasionally started to get problems where, on embedded videos, the player throws up a message saying something along the lines of "Playback has been paused because your account is being used somewhere else." The video would refuse to play for a while, though fortunately it only takes a few minutes to resolve.
The thing is, I'd never seen that message when I used adblock, not once. Also, in Finland Premium gets bundled with Youtube Music, which I have no need for, for a total of 15€/month. I pay for a worse experience than if I was "stealing", as some people put it.
At least there's some solace in knowing that now creators actually get paid for my views, however miniscule that number might be.
If you truly want to support creators, have you considered paying for individual creators on Nebula and Patreon and continuing to use a full-featured adblocker in Firefox? Paying Google for this shitty degraded experience seems like 'voting with your wallet' in altogether the wrong direction, IMO. And Google only passes a fraction of your payment along to creators anyway.
This is one of those arguments that holds up in theory but not in practice. If YouTube premium is ~$15/mo, you could use that same money to support 3 creators on Patreon instead. But for everyone else you watch, they'd get nothing (assuming ads are blocked). And I'd imagine most people who are that invested in creators are watching more than 3.
YouTube creators make more from premium viewers than they do from ad views.
And Patreon takes a cut too - from their website it looks like that's an 8% cut in most cases, and additional fees related to subscriber location sales tax, as well as fees when you withdraw funds.
There's no perfect solution here. Any creator who's been at it for a while knows it's hard to reach a level where you've got enough of a following to make good money. They're mostly operating at the mercy of the big hosting or social media sites to help with discovery of their videos. There were tons of cries for help during the potential TikTok ban because the creators who pushed everything there didn't know where to go next.
But doesn't the inverse apply? If you follow 500 creators and are paying 15 a month, you're giving them 3 cents a month *before" YouTube pays a cut. Essentially, you're giving them nothing and might as well pirate.
Does anyone really follow that many creators? It feels like a slippery slope or straw man argument here.
I went back through my YouTube history and counted 15 creators I watched at least 3 videos from. Let's assume that the metrics give more weight to those creators I watch more frequently - they're getting a larger slice of the pie there than a few cents, and it's more sustainable for me on my mediocre income than trying to support each of them at $5/mo.
There's certainly a lot more going into determining creator revenue than that, but if we're oversimplifying anyways...
As an aside I sometimes wish I could tip creators for specific videos - Eg, send a dollar for a useful DIY repair video (goodness knows how many highly specific repairs I've been able to do thanks to some random guy with a shaky camera) or a particularly informative video essay. If this is already a thing, I'd love to know!
🙋 I subscribe to well over 1000 channels, and have about 100 channels with the Bell notification set to 'All' for, that I watch pretty much every video they release. I refuse to pay for Premium, but I support quite a few of those creators via Patreon, and often donate via YouTube Live to those I don't.
Impressive, though I expect you're an outlier! I've seen your video posts and suggestions before and certainly believe your number. I'm just amazed that you have the time to invest in watching that all.
Most of my TV/Movie/YouTube watching these days is done passively. I almost constantly have media playing on my bottom screen while I am doing other things on my PC. So it's not like I am exclusively focused on the videos.
E.g. I am watching the latest How to Drink video while typing this. ;)
They would be indeed getting a larger slice of the pie than my example, but still a very small one.
There's also other things a flat fee incentivises. Do you follow people that make well-argued and well-supported quality videos? If split equally, those people get less money comparatively than the rest. Wouldn't it be better to directly support them in Patreon, then?
It would be, and I have supported them in the past when I am able to. This is why I would love a way to specifically tip a creator for specific videos.
You already can, at least for channels that are eligible for fan funding (memberships, store, etc), and have enabled Super Thanks. You just click the "Thanks" button under the video.
Thank you for bringing it to my attention!!
Oh goody
I've seen tipping as an option on YouTube sometimes now. Not often, and certainly not on my TV, but it's occasionally there. I've never used it, though.
Are you positive there isn't just someone else signed in? I've never had any issues of any kind (other than network issues).
This comes up for me because I share my account with my family, but they're on separate channels of my account. It generally doesn't kick in until 4 people are trying to watch at the same time, and it doesn't interrupt for long (I can kick my kids off lmao).
Still cheaper than a family plan.
emphasis mine. I really hope this is just CYA speak for "but creators can have sponsors" and not "we'll still put our ads into your subscription".
If it's optimistic: I'd definitely been willing to step down to lite since I'm mostly there for ad-free and background play. I've never used Google Music.
The way I read it is that music videos won’t be ad free. But maybe there’ll be other exceptions.
I have been on a family plan for 5+ years for premium and it has been great. We only pay $4 a month or something. I use all of the parts of the plan so I see it as money well spent.
Nah, they've already lost me for good. I just use Youtube through a web browser with ad blocking on mobile, then the rest of my Youtube watching is through SmartTube sideloaded to my NVIDIA Shield.
Tell me more about sideloading on an Nvidia Shield. I have a shield but ive never tried what you mentioned
I almost never watch YT on my Shield, but I remember installing https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ (or maybe some equivalent) a few years ago. Since the Shield works like any Android device, you just have to download and install the .apk file.
Next will be Youtube Premium Lite Plus and the next one Youtube Ultimate. When they stop effing around I will stop using Grayjay. I know there are costs associated with running the site, but I also think there is greed. Which one of those two is higher, I don't know.