The problem with YouTube Premium

YouTube has recently started cracking down on ad-blockers, preventing playback of videos until you allow them through. And I get it. They need to pay creators, and they need ads to fund it. Fine. But the whole experience is just so obnoxious.

It's already a well known problem that ads have ruined the web. News (especially local news) and content publishing sites are the worst for it; some are so loaded with banner ads and popover ads and ads in the middle of the content and ads that slide up/down/across that they become beyond unusable. Sometimes you literally cannot even read the content as the page is completely filled with ads.

YouTube isn't much better, and recently they seem to be really doubling down on how annoying the ads are. You can skip some pre-roll ads after 5 seconds but not all of them, and I frequently get not one but two 15 second ads. If that's before a long video then sure, but the number of times I've had to watch 30 seconds of ads for a sub-60 second clip is ridiculous. When they banned ad blockers and physically stopped me from playing a video until I whitelisted the site, I was flipping through a playlist and had an ad play at the start of every video, and this is with me skipping to the next one after literally 2-3 seconds. It played me the same ad that I had to wait 5 seconds before skipping, about ten times in a row in the space of a minute or two. It's completely ridiculous to play an ad at the start of every video when you've barely actually watched anything, they should be displayed once you've racked up a certain number of viewing minutes. And don't even get me started on mid-roll ads, perhaps one of the most anti-user forms of advertising possible. They're not like TV ads that happen at convenient points, it'll just suddenly switch to an ad for some scam iPhone app. It's a purposely terrible experience.

But of course, YouTube has the answer to the problem its artificially created: YouTube Premium. For £12.99 a month you get ad-free playback, offline downloading, background play/picture-in-picture, and YouTube Music. I have 3 main issues with this product.

1. The gatekeeping of features like background play/picture-in-picture, which is literally an OS feature they've disabled. I guess their logic is that if you're doing that you won't be watching ads so they have to charge for it somehow.

2. The fact that this is an all-in-one plan with no option to only have what you want. I have absolutely no need for YouTube Music, so why am I being forced to pay for it if I want ad-free videos?

3. The price. £12.99 compared to other services is way too much, especially when you have no option to not have everything on offer.

Let's compare to other music streaming services:

I can't believe that YouTube Music offers a better experience than Apple Music or Spotify. The price is likely inflated by the YouTube video features.

Then compare to other subscriptions and the main features they offer:

That's quite a lot of options, but some takeaways:

• Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and NowTV, with large TV and movie libraries, have affordable ad-supported plans for under £10

• Netflix and Disney+ have ad-free plans for less than YouTube Premium

• Disney+ is surprisingly good value considering the amount of content and video quality for the price compared to Netflix (Disney+ Premium plan with 4K same price as Netflix Standard with 1080p)

• Amazon prime probably has the smallest library but good value with free delivery

• NowTV is a touch pricey but does have live channels (and is from Sky, so...)

But what I can't help but think is how much better value all of these services are compared to YouTube Premium if you have no need for YouTube Music. I'm already paying £10.99 for Apple Music and I don't want to switch away from that, so why would I pay more than that for a music service I don't want, just to remove video ads?

The problem is not that I don't want to pay for the service and not that I don't want to support creators, but simply that the pricing structure is completely nonsensical. Other than Amazon Prime which doesn't really need to do it, every service has multiple tiers depending on what you need, and they give you access to a large library of on-demand content whereas YouTube Premium just removes ads on content you can already access, for more than any of the other services. You could say that YouTube's ad-supported tier is free while the others charge, but the type of content is wholly different and it wouldn't make sense if all of YouTube was paywalled. The difference is that while the other services have a graduated pricing scale, YouTube Premium has a much steeper cost with an all-or-nothing offering. Surely they're just shooting themselves in the foot here by pricing themselves out of the market for a lot of people.

Let's look at some similar pricing models based on the above:

Now suddenly this makes a degree of sense. The Plus tier is the same as what we have now, but we now give people the option to only have an ad-free experience, or ad-free with other app benefits, while also having the full package for people who need everything. And the crazy thing is that if this was on offer, I'd have subscribed to the Basic tier long ago, and would probably go with the Standard tier too. But I cannot on principle pay £12.99 when it includes a service I do not want, have no use for, and will never use. I can only see it appealing to people who watch a lot of YouTube and only use YouTube Music, for everyone else it just seems like terrible value compared to pretty much every other streaming service.

As it happens, after I disabled uBlock Origin on YouTube so I could continue watching, I enabled it again and ever since I haven't had any warnings, and no ads either. I'm not sure if they've toned down the messages blocking playback or if there's a glitch in the system, but I'm currently continuing to experience ad-free playback on web. On mobile, it's as invasive as ever. I hope YouTube's decision makers eventually come to their senses and offer a wider range of plans, until then I will just put up with it on principle.