YouTube’s recent price hike has clearly left a hole in the market. If you want a fully ad-free YouTube experience, you currently need to pay $13.99/month (up from $11.99) or use a third-party workaround. But now, YouTube has a compromise. The service’s new Premium Lite plan comes in at $7.99/month ($6 cheaper) and is supposed to block ads on most, but not all, content.
With YouTube Premium Lite, YouTube won’t show ads on popular categories of long form video, like gaming, fashion, beauty, news, and more. That’s a bit vague, but in a video with Johanna Voolich, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, she says this means that all “core creator content“, including podcasts, gaming streams, and makeup tutorials will all be ad-free.
The catch is that other content, like music and music videos, won’t be. That said, I am curious where the line between “core creator” content starts and stops—it’ll take some time before subscribers really test the boundaries of this system. What if a smaller creator has a gaming video that doesn’t get flagged as being part of YouTube Gaming?
Missing features
Credit: YouTube
Aside from ad-free play, the cheaper plan misses out on two other big Premium features. Namely, you won’t get offline downloads or background play. There’s no access to YouTube Music either, since that would give you ad-free listening.
YouTube Premium Lite is designed for people who want to watch creator-uploaded long form content in peace, without ads, and who don’t care about supplemental features or YouTube spin-offs. If you instead prefer to watch offline or like listening to long podcasts in the background or have playlists saved in YouTube Music, the $13.99/month YouTube Premium plan will probably still be more up your alley.
YouTube is rolling this out as a pilot test program in the US, so how the subscription works might change in the future. The company plans to expand the testing to Thailand, Germany, and Australia in coming weeks.
