Is YouTube Premium Lite Worth Saving?
YouTube’s recent price hike has clearly left a hole in the market. If you want to experience YouTube completely ad-free, you currently need to pay $13.99 per month (was $11.99) or use a third-party workaround . But now YouTube has a compromise. The service’s new Premium Lite plan costs $7.99 per month ($6 cheaper) and includes ad blocking on most, but not all, content.
With YouTube Premium Lite, YouTube won’t show ads in popular long-form video categories like gaming, fashion, beauty, news, etc. It’s a little vague, but in a video with Joanna Vulich, YouTube’s chief product officer, she says this means all ” core creator content ,” including podcasts, gaming streams, and makeup tutorials, will be ad-free.
The catch is that other content such as music and music videos will not be available. However, I’m curious where the line between “main author” content begins and ends – it will be a while before subscribers really test the limits of this system. What if a smaller creator has a gaming video that is not labeled as part of YouTube Gaming?
Missing Features
Besides ad-free play, the cheaper plan lacks two other important Premium features. Namely, you won’t get offline downloading or background playback. There is also no access to YouTube Music, as this will allow you to listen to music without advertising.
YouTube Premium Lite is for people who want to watch in-depth content uploaded by creators quietly, without ads, and who aren’t interested in YouTube’s extra features or side effects. If you instead prefer to watch offline or listen to long podcasts in the background or have playlists saved in YouTube Music, the $13.99 per month YouTube Premium plan will probably still suit you better.
YouTube is running this program as a pilot test program in the US, so how subscriptions work may change in the future. The company plans to expand testing to Thailand, Germany and Australia in the coming weeks.