If you want an ad-free experience on YouTube while still ensuring creators get paid, you have to pay $13.99 for YouTube Premium. It’s not a bad price, given it comes with the $10.99 YouTube Music Premium included, but it’s not ideal for those who get their tunes from Spotify, Apple Music or Tidal.
However, it sounds like parent company Alphabet will soon have something more competitively priced for those who want YouTube for the vlogs, tutorials and other entertainment without the music.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, YouTube Premium Lite will “soon” be announced in the U.S., Australia, Germany and Thailand. The latter three are unsurprising, as the service has reportedly been in testing there since last year, but this will be the first time it reaches American shores.
The service will be for those who “primarily want to watch programs other than music videos”, the piece explains. In other words, most content barring music will be stripped of advertising, letting viewers get to the content right away, without reaching for the skip button.
“As part of our commitment to provide our users with more choice and flexibility, we’ve been testing a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free in several of our markets,” a YouTube spokesperson is quoted as saying. “We’re hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future with our partners’ support.”
Interestingly, this isn’t a new concept, but the resurrection of an old idea. YouTube Premium Lite was first tested in Europe back in 2021, but was killed off in 2023 without making it to the U.S.
If it proves successful this time around, that could make a huge difference. The United States has the second most YouTube watchers in the world after India, and if a decent percentage decide to pay for video, content creators may not be quite so reliant on adverts — which are less reliable than they used to be thanks to the prevalence of ad blockers.
Devil in the details
This all sounds very promising. Personally, I’d consider paying for YouTube without ads, but it’s steep given I already subscribe to Apple Music. Even if YouTube Music is a freebie for Premium subscribers, psychologically it still feels like much of the fee would be spent on a service I wouldn’t use.
But there are some important details we don’t yet know. For one thing, does the “Lite” version strip out established Premium features like offline downloads or background playback, where you can listen to video content with the screen off?
More importantly, we don’t know the price yet. Without needing to pay for music licences, Alphabet should have some wiggle room here, but it has to balance things: cheap enough to be appealing, but not so cheap as to lose content creators money from the missing ads.
In the U.S., YouTube Premium costs $13.99 a month, so it’ll clearly be less than that, but how much less is the key factor. $9.99 wouldn’t be particularly appealing, but $6.99 or less could be the biting point for potential buyers.
If Bloomberg’s source is correct, we should find out exactly where YouTube prices this new tier very soon.
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