I’m tempted by YouTube Premium, but at £12/month in the UK it seems so expensive. Thats around double what I pay for Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, or Spotify!

I also don’t really want to use ad blockers with YouTube, because I do want to support the small content creators I watch. But the volume of ads (and especially the unskippable ones!) is getting out of control at times, particularly in the app.

If they brought out a “YouTube Premium lite” or whatever at £6 a month I’d be in.

Does YouTube premium also include ad free YouTube music like it does in the USA? I don't subscribe to a music service like Spotify because my YouTube premium subscription covers both.

Sometimes a friend (you doesn't subscribe to YouTube premium) will show me a YouTube video on their device. I find it impossible to watch YouTube without a subscription. I don't understand how the average user can tolerate the amount of ads.

I'm sort of happy that average joe shmoe can tolerate using youtube with the ads, because if everyone couldn't tolerate them as much as I can't tolerate them, then youtube would not exist.

Even if you pay for youtube you get the sponsor spiels within the videos.

I wouldn't use youtube at all without sponsorblock.

I just don't like the algorithmic sorting that YT Premium does for me. I keep losing the stuff I want to watch, and it keeps ramming crap in front of me.

I tried the free month, and ran screaming. No way.

I have no problems at all, paying for streaming (I pay for quite a few channels). I just didn't like the YT Premium user experience. I suspect, if I was a lot younger, I might like it more.

YouTube premium doesn't do any special sorting

Huh. I must be talking about some other service, then.

> Nevermind

–Emily LaTella

> I keep losing the stuff I want to watch

Why not use the "Watch later" feature to add it to your queue? I use that feature all the time.

You mean the feature literally called YouTube Premium Lite? ;) https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite

Another option is to just VPN to Turkey when setting it up (Can be done with a UK account and UK card) and then it's about $1.5/month.

When I click on that link in the UK, I just get a “this offer is not available” error. Seems like they don’t yet offer such a thing here.

Ah I see! Might be US exclusive. Anyway the VPN solution works well in all countries.

> Might be US exclusive.

It's not available in the US either. The latest list I can find says it's being tested in Belgium, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, and Luxembourg.

When doing those vpn tricks to get lower pricing you run the risk of services terminating your account and that's something a lot of people can't afford when it comes to their google accounts

Use a VPN and sign up through Argentina. It's around £2/ month then, have been doing that for a year.

I pay the equivalent of £2 every month for YouTube premium in the UK using a non-UK account.

I don't feel guilty about this because I only want YT-Premium for blocking the ads, I don't need the music, videos etc that comes with it.

Assuming the creator has the option to do this, you would both be better off if you blocked YT ads and just sent them some money directly

The YouTube Premium part paid out to creators (by proportional watchtime) is surprisingly high at 55%, especially if you consider that they use remainder to also pay for music licensing.

You can get it pretty cheap using a VPN, I think to turkey?

I think PiP still doesn’t work in the app for me and sponsors aren’t blocked. I get less value from Premium than just SponsorBlock + YouTube PiP. I just have to deal with 720p videos though

I love YouTube premium but the most frustrating thing is that there is no guest mode. You can go incognito but then there are ads. Which means my recommendations get messed up whenever people visit and play things on the TV!

Try creating a sub-account channel/brand account.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQBLBvY1Pw8

Yep, this is exactly what I'm doing and what the "Switch Account" feature uses. It should maybe be called "Switch Profile" as they are kinda tied together.

This is how I share with my kids at no extra cost!

Gets a bit convoluted as they have their own gmail accounts as well. But it works :-)

I still have my original Apple YouTube Red subscription active!

You can remove, and pause, your watch history (YouTube desktop), and remove searches from your search history

I don't know how much that effects recommendations, but Google support claims that's has an effect.

Might be easier than the alternatives listed by sibling comments.

YouTube recommendations are based on watch history (and a bit of extra info for each one, like how many seconds you watched of each video)

Doesn't the "Switch Account" feature do exactly that? If I use it I have the "default" YouTube recommendations that are not based on my main account but it still says YouTube Premium on the top and there's no ads.

YouTube Premium is unreliable when you're traveling. I traveled to Turkey (which is in the list of Premium-compatible countries[1]) and ad-blocking stopped working with a notification (so it wasn't an accident/glitch).

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en

YouTube Premium has the same problems that other legal means have; namely that it's much more hassle than the illegal methods of obtaining media.

I travel outside of where it's "supported", or trigger their broken algorithms, and boom, it stops working. Meanwhile, my adblock software works 24/7.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I've been using YouTube Premium for several years, and this all sounds like made up scenarios to me.

I was curious and Google is explicit about this:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en#zipp...

Travel to any country where Premium isn't supported (about half the world's countries) and, bam, it shows ads again.

Normally I can understand content licensing agreements per country, but that doesn't apply to YouTube mostly. So it seems like a real BS move indeed.

FWIW, I've seen YT premium features geo-revert themselves while traveling, but ad display never reenables itself as far as I can tell.

Downloading new videos is the one feature which usually goes away, though I remember embeds getting squirrelly too, but that may just be vanilla YouTube.

You you ++ has sponsor block and feels most polished and feature rich(though it's just built on official client) even compared to revanced or official YouTube app. I use them both.

I do have youtube premium, but I still use modded clients just because even with YouTube Premium, the experience feels very sub-standard.

Same way people pay for cable tv even if it has ads, because it gives them enough benefits to justify it.