I have a family plan but it’s not for any reason other than my children use it and I can afford to pay to reduce their ad exposure. We live in a swing state so they were previously bombarded with political advertising.

The way I see it, I swapped the Netflix account for a YouTube account because that’s what the kids favor now. If they move on, I will drop it immediately. If the price goes up then I am very likely to drop it. It’s already overpriced for what it is.

The problem is that the paid premium is NOT better than free with extensions. Piracy is a service problem, and the paid service is NOT better than the “pirated” one. Even if premium was completely free, if it didn’t allow extensions I would still use the ad version with extensions.

Revanced android apps also exist, and I won’t use them with premium accounts (no point) and they are the only way of having sponsorblock, return youtube dislike, manual HDR and many other small but very useful features.

I would gladly pay for the content if and when the youtube official apps and website had features similar to those extensions.

I didn’t really mind until the recent pay rise. It was ok value (for me) before. Now it’s getting expensive. Not sure if I’ll cancel or not yet.

Good post, I vehemently disagree in every way

There was a time where I would have been happy to pay for it too, back when the ads were less intrusive. However, the number of ads increased drastically when they started pushing premium, and it’s only gotten worse - not to mention the fact that, even though they make more money, the content creators (employees) are paid less per view. I don’t mind paying for a product or service. I do mind paying to make an engineered inconvenience from a mega corporation that has a de facto monopoly go away.

I agree with this, though part of it is that I am still grandfathered into the $7.99/mo original Google Music launch promo price. It is worth it to me not to see ads to continue paying for it. The current monthly premium at $14/mo for new users is insanity.

Just use Brave browser and you will not see any ads, anywhere, on any website… for free.

I also don’t mind using ReVanced and getting the same features as YouTube Premium for free.

It made economic sense for us to get the YouTube Premium family plan. When we dropped several streaming services and also Spotify, it was a bit more expensive than Spotify’s family plan, but YouTube without the ads was worth it, especially considering they have a huge library of movies that they are offering in high quality for streaming.

Honestly, I’m more satisfied than when I was paying for Spotify Family and Disney+ and Paramount+. And if I must see the eight billionth Marvel show of the year, which I generally don’t, there’s always the high seas.

I already paid for a lifetime of free Google services with all the data they stole from me before I had any sense that something so massive and invasive could even exist.

Thanks to ReVanced and Freetube and some others, Google can effortlessly pay out their equitable share.

Would rather pay the creators directly instead of it going 80% to anyone in ceo position and maybe 5% to the creator.

If you are paying for premium, you are paying twice.

Once with money, a second time with your data.

I’d gladly pay for an option where they stopped tracking me.

I only wish they’d kept the “premium light” option (which I paid for until they canceled it). I don’t need another music service or locked screen playback, so I wish I could still pay a bit less for not using those.

I don’t mind ads.

But I do mind having targeted ads. To be fair, most of what Google presumes about me is wrong, but from the ad patterns it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. Our data shouldn’t be hoarded and we shouldn’t be herded like cattle from which they can extract money through ad placement.

I’m fine with subscription services, and ads, but the steps they’re taking to maximize their revenue is gross and I don’t just mean youtube. This is just the stuff we know about for sure.

I enjoy making Google hurt by blocking the ad revenue.

I would be ecstatic if they failed as a company.

Google is evil, supporting them financially is unethical.