Thanks, but I prefer Revanced.
As an entry-level subscription, the new tier won’t offer several benefits in the full YouTube Premium ($13.99 per month) subscription, like downloads, background play, or the ability to watch music videos ad-free.
I wonder how much electricity is wasted on this alone. Probably so many people leaving their screens powered on just to continue listening to something without it stopping.
It literally costs them money to make YouTube worse so that you can pay them to make it better again. NewPipe go brrrrrr
blocks most ads
Super important and makes this completely useless.
Somebody didn’t read the article! It’s only Music videos that will have ads. It seems the cost savings here are all from cutting out record label contracts
I did read the article. Music videos on YouTube are YouTube videos. Adding ads to them doesn’t magically make them something else.
What they’re really saying is “oh, well, we want you to get used to the subscription model having ads on some things, because we plan to expand it massively in the future.”
We’re arguing about whether music videos are videos and therefore there will be ads on videos… Here’s what the article says. Pretty straightforward.
With YouTube Lite, customers will be able to watch videos across verticals like gaming, fashion, beauty, cooking, news, and more, ad-free, but will be shown ads on music content and music videos.
My YT usage includes exactly zero anything related to music, so this seems relevant for me.
They also appear on the main screen, as you’re browsing and on shorts
I don’t want ads in any of my videos, but if I have to have intrusive and distracting profit generating clips interrupt what I actually want to watch … I think music videos are among the ones I’d prefer disrupted the least.
Then you are using it for music and pay the full rate.
Well, in fact, I just tolerate the ads and don’t directly offer financial recompense. Indeed, if I were to go for a paid tier, you are correct that it would likely be one that didn’t put ads where I want them least.
uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock are still free.
Freetube (desktop) and newpipe (android) is great for those who would like a subscription feed without an account, local Playlist, download videos, and save view history while remaining account free.
I use pipepipe on mobile with it being a fork of newpipe with sponsor block, and lets you use a throw away YouTube account it uses only to access age restricted videos.
FreeTube is great, but I wish there was a non-Chromium based alternative.
They really need an iOSapp too.
Unfortunately Chrome just rendered uBlock Origin useless, and borderline demands you remove it from your browser. I can confirm that mine stopped working yesterday :(
And now you switch to Firefox. The better browser for years at this point.
uBlock works fine in Firefox and its forks.
Don’t worry, there are plenty of alternatives to Chrome with built-in ad-blocking.
Eight dollars a month for fucking “premium-lite” is insane.
The only problem I have with the premium subscription is the lack of ad control from the content creator. They should have to put them into some kind of wrapper that I, as a premium member can decide to enable or not. As a paying subscriber I should be able to watch it 100% ad free without going through sponsorblock, which is a big pita to do on set-top boxes.
I will sit through ads of the people I watch that are small and trying to make a buck above YT’s pittance. OR, maybe YT could share a little of that sweet sweet profit with them and then not allow them to do their own ads (hahahahaha)
Check out Nebula. Lots of YouTubers host there. Subscriptions go straight to the creators, and they cut the sponsor blocks out of the versions they post there.
Sponsorblock built in would be nice.
It’s built in on free apps that block the rest of the ads.
There are a few apps you can get for like Google TV (nvidia shield etc…) Like smartyoutubetv. But they’ve gotta be side loaded. So you need to install some way to get the APK on the device. It’s all doable, but it’s a pain.
I’d prefer just paying and losing the ads. Since I’m dreaming, I’d also like a check box to remove shorts all together from my experience.
You can probably bribe a tech-savvy friend to do it for you with a fraction of YouTube’s yearly cost
I actually don’t mind paying for stuff I use or get value from.
I do have smartyoutubetv Installed on both an Nvidia Shield and a Google TV, I originally did it when my kid was on a child account but couldn’t sign into the Google yt app. I kinda wish Futo would make a TV version of Grayjay I’d probably use it.
I use premium for both YouTube and yt music and it’s our primary music streaming service too. I even have 11 CCA (Chromcast audios) powering rooms all over the house where we listen to ytm from.
Considering i get premium Peacock for like $6 a month after discounts I agree. I get the live channel plus a ton of other stuff and other pre-made channels to watch. Some sports as well plus the Olympics when they are relevant. Asking $8 just to remove some ads sounds awful. I will stick to using Firefox on mobile and pc with ublock origin which removes all ads.
I feel the same. I pay $5/month for my Nebula subscription, and I think that’s a bit high for my usage.
Could I get an ala carte option where my first X hours are ad free? I don’t watch a ton of YouTube, but I’m willing to pay a little to support the platform. Or let me pay for the handful of channels I actually watch.
Yeah especially without full feature parity with YouTube premium. This $7.99 price should omit music but everything else from premium should be included, and even that feels a little expensive.
Good for them. Still won’t give them money ever
“ad-free” sure, I heard that before.
Yeah we’re like a decade into Hulu having an “ad free” plan that includes ads. I lump them in with companies like Verizon offering “unlimited” internet with data caps.
In 1990 Tele+ started as a pay-tv channel which featured only movies all day long, with no advertising!. It didn’t take long for them to start having ads, although not in the middle of the movie.
With YouTube Lite, customers will be able to watch videos across verticals like gaming, fashion, beauty, cooking, news, and more, ad-free
Oh wow. They’ll remove some, but not all, ads!
[T]he new tier won’t offer several benefits in the full YouTube Premium ($13.99 per month) subscription, like downloads, background play, or the ability to watch music videos ad-free.
Price-gating downloads seems pretty evil. The feature doesn’t cost Google any extra money. It could even save them a little server strain if a user wants to watch the same video repeatedly. But clearly, this is where Google’s surveillance pays off: they know what people want, and they know to demand an extra $6/month for it.
But why would you pay that if all it takes to download is installing yt-dlp and typing “yt-dlp url” in a terminal?
Is “verticals” marketing speak for “categories” or “genres” or does it mean something else?
It varies by org but yes verticals are usually product silos that serve certain types of customers or needs.
I appreciate the information and that you took the time to answer, but I hate that combination of words.
Still … Thank you for the response.
It definitely sounds a tad dehumanizing, and I’m not sure if that’s intentional or not…
Vertical market, where they do all of one thing soup to nuts, as opposed to a horizontal market, where they do a little bit of one thing but sell it in a wide variety of scenarios.
I don’t get the people shitting on this. It’s a very fair plan. Something I’ve been wishing existed for the past month, even. Like the article states, it’s for people who use YT to watch TV (me).
I just hope there’s a yearly plan to get a little bit more of a discount. Student plan is the same price but no yearly plan, so it comes to ~$90 per year.
Weird flex to pay $90 to one of the richest companies in the world for something that you could just have for free.
You know they’re just going to raise prices and enshitificate it further every x years right?
Even the content creators themselves hate the platform.
I don’t like that a paid plan gives worse experience than free tools. For example, the downloads not being files you can store indefinitely and play by anything. Or not all ads being guaranteed to be blocked.
Edit: it would not fit my usecases entirely. First - I listen to a lot of Youtube videos as podcasts, so the audio downloads have to be in my podcast app together with downloads from my RSS feeds, so app-locked ones would be useless. And second - those would be useless for archival. Something increasingly necessary given how Youtube has already deleted some of my favorite videos.
Smart tube
Yep. Smart tube on the TV, Firefox + ubo on phone and laptop.
I’m using revanced on my phone
I have HTPC for that, connected to my TV, with uBlock Origin.
I can only speak for myself, but I refuse to give Google a dime because they’re unfriendly to consumers.
I pay way more in Patreon subscriptions than I would pay for YouTube. I don’t see ads, and the creators make more money from me. And, importantly, Google sees none of it.
I heard people still get ads even on full price
Have it . Never seen an ad besides what the creator makes in his video.
What about homepage?
Nope. Unless you’re talking about sponsors that content creators hock.
The app allows you to skip to commonly skipped-to-areas, which often makes skipping that kind of content very quick and simple. I’m not sure if that’s a a feature of the free version though
Had it for years no ads ever anywhere on YouTube.
I’ll continue watching ad-free as I please with my extensions, thank you. Until YouTube has the balls to shut down UBlock Origin and all ad-blockers, you can take your premium tier and shove it.
Oh a corporate advertising shill downvoted me. Aren’t you cute? Don’t you love being marketed to? Idiot.
Too little too late, I wish there was a non-US alternative to YouTube.
Well we have Peertube
PeerTube isn’t one of these “YouTube, but without ads” apps? I might check it out, but I still think YouTube has the total monopoly on video form content right now.
Peertube is like, “what if people could self-host their own YouTube videos”
This. Its like Mbin or Mastodon but for videos.
Nebula is US based, but it’s quite different and has some overlap with some popular YouTube channels. $6/month or $60/year, and you can find discounts through various YouTube channel referral codes
Or get uBlock for $0 😁
Tempting, but I’ll stick with free sponsorblock. I could be convinced to switch if they started paying me though
If they bundled youtube music with it, maybe I’ll consider it. But this lite version will have ads on music and music videos.
Wait… Isn’t that what premium is?
lol wait, that’s just YouTube premium isn’t it?? and that’s existed for a long time already
Every previous YouTube premium post used to be inundated with people asking for a YouTube premium that didn’t include music because everyone already has music from Apple or Spotify. This is YouTube’s offering for that, except it’s a shitty version that takes away more than just music.
That’s YouTube premium, that product already exists.
Honestly a music video is basically one long commercial anyway I’m surprised they would have ads.
how is a music video a commercial?
It’s advertising for the record label and the artist.
and the song itself isn’t? That’s like saying a movie is advertising for the director
