TL;DR – No absolutely not. For now.
Near the end of 2023, Alphabet/Google had decided to price hike YouTube Premium in Australia. I was a subscriber to the YouTube Premium Family Plan. After getting the price hike email and seeing how much the price was increasing by, I thought it was absolutely not worth the new price and had a chat to my family to see what they thought about the price hike. An increase of nearing 30% in Australia compared to what I was currently paying without even giving concrete changes in my opinion that warrant this new fee was enough for me to drop the subscription.
Here is an excerpt from the email that I got from the YouTube team:
Thank you for being a YouTube Premium member. We hope you and up to 5 members of your household are enjoying your YouTube Premium benefits, including ad-free and downloadable videos, background play, and uninterrupted access to over 100 million songs with the YouTube Music app.
To continue delivering great service and features, we’re increasing your price to A$32.99 /month. We don’t make these decisions lightly, but this update will allow us to continue to improve Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube.
YouTube Team
Less than an hour later I cancelled my subscription and I have never looked back (for now).
To give some perspective, I also don’t use an ad-blocker when I browse the internet. I believe that websites need to be able to make money (somehow) and if that is done through advertising then so be it. I do however use Privacy Badger and I encourage anyone who does not use an ad-blocker to install Privacy Badger on their respective browser if they don’t want to install an ad-blocker specifically. I was trying to be a good consumer in buying YouTube Premium so that content creators were getting paid and I wasn’t seeing ads on my mobile, TV and browser but with a near 30% increase in price was just not worth it.
Now that I have been blasted with ads on YouTube on all my devices now, how has my experience been? Well not too bad actually. I can say for a fact that I’ve been watching less YouTube now. I’m spending more time doing other things like reading comics, going outside, playing games or working on side projects instead. This is obviously not something that Google really wants as my engagement with the platform has dropped. As a service provider you would want your consumers to stay on and engaged with the platform for as long as possible. This is no longer happening now. Are the ads shown during videos a little annoying? Yeah, sure they are. But I can wait the 30 seconds or skip the ad when the prompt appears. Are there features that I’m missing? I did enjoy the background play of videos as sometimes I watch discussion videos and I don’t need to actively view them but I can live with having the screen on for his now.
With YouTube Premium I also got access to YouTube Music. YouTube Music is nowhere near as good as Google Play Music was; it’s not even close in my opinion. With my YouTube Premium subscription now lapsed I uninstalled the YouTube Music app on all my devices and now I have just the one music/podcast app in Spotify. Really, I wouldn’t have Spotify but the Joe Rogan Experience is on there, so if I want to listen to him and the people he has on then I need Spotify (even though I don’t pay for a Spotify Premium subscription either). Another service that Google would like to have their consumers to stay engaged with in YouTube Music has been dropped by me.
Overall I believe Google got greedy here. With so many subscriptions now out there, the current economic climate, etc. consumers need to drop or make concessions on services to save where possible. YouTube Premium and YouTube Music here is the one that I decided to drop as what it was offering for the new price was absolutely not worth it at all.
Christopher Tom Kochovski 