Dang it. YouTube Premium Lite is now value $8/month

I watch a whole lot of YouTube…. and I block all of the advertisements, refusing to pay for Premium in an instinctual push in opposition to deliberate enshittification. However as crusty and ornery as I’m, I’ve to confess that the latest additions to Premium Lite make the $8/month plan much more interesting. With background playback and offline downloads on cellular, the equation for ponying up now makes much more sense.

YouTube Premium Lite launched not fairly a 12 months in the past, providing a significantly cheaper method to do away with the omnipresent, teeth-grinding promoting that’s turn into an (virtually) inescapable a part of the platform. On the time I dismissed it because it didn’t block the advertisements on music (or within the devoted YouTube Music app/interface), it didn’t supply downloads, and it didn’t supply background listening in your cellphone. That final one is a fairly core a part of how I take advantage of YouTube, listening to deep dives and essays whereas I stroll round and do different stuff.

The brand new adjustments are an enormous improve that make the $8 subscription a lot nearer to the (nonetheless far overpriced) $14 choice. It appears to be like like promoting remains to be going to be built-in into YouTube Shorts (or as I consider it, TikTok for previous folks), however with the swiping nature of that system, they’re lots simpler to disregard. So, the plan may simply make sense for me now. I think about that somebody who listens to much more music most likely gained’t be swayed, however additionally they have much more choices for different companies. (And that being the case, I’m wondering if YouTube is feeling extra stress now that TikTok isn’t beneath fixed menace of banishment within the US.)

I’m nonetheless fairly indignant with Google and YouTube over the best way it’s dealing with the de facto house of video on the internet, making it more durable and more durable for creators to thrive, censoring content material seemingly at random, contributing to the scourge of “AI” slop, and simply usually doing a very poor job of being a digital landlord. However $8 a month is much more cheap, no less than for the second. I’ll give it a strive… however my AdGuard and Revanced instruments aren’t going wherever, both. I’ll see how large of an asterisk follows on that “Most movies ad-free” declare.