YouTube Premium users across the globe are facing significant price hikes as Google increases subscription costs in over a dozen countries. This follows earlier price jumps in various regions, including the United States last summer. The latest increases vary by region, with some countries experiencing hikes between 30% to 50%. For instance, in Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, the Family plan will rise from €18 to €26 starting November, while the individual plan will increase by €2 to €14.
Countries affected by these changes include Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, UAE, Switzerland, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Colombia, Thailand, Singapore, Norway, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Denmark. Although most Reddit reports are from European users, the price hikes also impact the Middle East, Colombia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. YouTube had already raised its subscription prices in India by 15–20% in late August.
Line must go 🆙
And that, kids, is why you should pirate. Paying customers are restricted and being ripped off. Piracy gives freedom, it pays off, it makes sure you dont have to agree to stupid user agreements which take away you rights. Make sure to support your favorite creators though, through other platforms like Patreon. Don’t take the money away from them. Just take away the power and control away from the evil mega corps like Google and Meta.
You don’t even need to pirate, just use an ad blocker and support your creators directly. My perspective is that, unless you agree to their TOS, it’s on them to prevent any activity that’s unprofitable to them, and so far, uBlock Origin on Firefox works fine on YouTube directly.
Take what you would’ve spent on YouTube premium at a more reasonable price and send that to the creators you follow.
Just Vivaldi browser works too. On your phone I recommend grayjay.app
Streaming in general is approaching the old cable prices. Once you’ve subscribed to the fractured marketplace to find the shows you want you are spending far more than you expected.
Revanced.
Grayjay
Yeah they are continuously slowing down Firefox and I see a future where I will simply stop using YouTube.i thank them in advance for when that day comes
More and more I try to find my entertainment elsewhere. I am slowly, but surely, migrating away from youtube (and google in general).
Do you know of a good free alternative to YouTube? Preferably one with a smarter algorithm that doesn’t just feed me the same boring bullshit over and over again?
Yes I like cars, computers, and video game history, YouTube, but I like other things too, you know. I wish there were a way to view other people’s YT homepages so that I can find something new to watch.
My usage of Youtube slowed down considerably when the algorithm stopped giving me anything new. I’d end up asking friends and people on social media about their own favorite videos and channels, just to get something interesting.
Whoever is designing these algorithms seems to be forgetting that our brains crave novelty. If we’re not getting it, we’re going to feel bored and start looking elsewhere.
Woah. I just cancelled my subscription last week because it’s too expensive, and now they raise the prices further. Guess they really don’t want me back.
They don’t. They probably raised the prices just so you’d quit.
Remember: Everything premium offers used to be included for free
Except youtube music, I guess
YouTube Music Revanced or Innertune (on fdroid)
Get the RiMusic app. YouTube music without ads.
What does YouTube music have that regular YouTube doesn’t? I have a ton of playlists on YouTube for music. Everything is on there.
The awesome algorithm for recommendations on YouTube was turned off to prevent fake news bubbles. This means that when you listen to a song and want YouTube to create a Playlist with similar artists for you, this doesn’t work anymore. But this function does still work with YouTube music.
Better quality and nicely sorted discographies
The whole reason I got on YT Premium was because it was free with Google Play Music. I have real issues watch non-Premiun now, because I’ve always disliked advertising methods. (Not so much th ads, which can be entertaining, but just being shown content I didn’t request instead of the content I did request.)
RIP Google Play Music. The best music service to ever exist.
I sure hope their recent heavy prosecution of the Invidious project isn’t related
Youtube doing what I told every Premium adversary they would logically do after dumping more and more ad space onto the site. And to make Premium look worth the price, they’ll continue to shove more ads in your face just before, you guessed it, doing another price hike. Rinse and repeat. Premium users are strong drivers of this enshittification so I will continue to call them out on it whenever they tell you to join the scam as well. I’ll stick to my ad blockers.
People pay YouTube instead of using an adblocker?
I use the PS5 to watch YouTube on the TV, no way around the ads there. But no way in hell I’m paying them!
Thank goodness for mute buttons.
Please tell me a simple, idiot-proof way to block YT ads on all devices incl. Mobiles, Shield etc. that doesn’t require something complex like piHole, works outside the home (family’s phones etc. ), and doesn’t risk blocking stuff it shouldn’t. That’s my trouble. Premium solves all of that, while bringing other small benefits. Maybe there’s a better way.
Easy peasy. Lemon squeezy.
Firefox-ublock (even better on Linux but not required)
Revanced for mobile.
Pihole doesn’t stop youtube ads anyhow.
OP just needs to switch to Linux and set up a pihole and teach his entire family to do the same.
Easy peasy.
Creators get way more money with Premium viewers than ad-based ones, or at least it used to be that way.
I’m slowly using YouTube less and less. The experience is worse because of the ads and Premium costs.
I just checked and ublock origin is still free. What a relief
Absurd to pay so much just to remove ads only for smart TVs. There are easy ways to block ads on phones and computers.
You don’t need to pay for smart TVs, if you have an Android TV you can just install SmartTube Next. It’s even better than the official app!
Honestly, every YouTube app alternative I’ve tried has been better, and my only issue is occasionally streams break, which is due to changes from YT, not the app. Instead of putting effort into making the experience worse elsewhere, why not make the experience on the official app better? Features I really like on other apps:
- adjust brightness and volume by sliding finger on half of the screen
- nice offline downloads manager
- remove unnecessary crap from the app
- access other content than just YT videos
- run in background (audio only or picture-in-picture)
Some of those are premium features (why?), and others just don’t exist in the YT app. If the experience was better and the price was reasonable, I’d probably pay. But it’s not, so I use alternatives.
This is just the pregame for unblockable ads.
YT ads will never be unblockable. They legally have to be indicated somehow and people will always write software to detect them. Worst case scenario, you have to download videos you want to watch ahead of time.
I’ve been paying $25 CAD to support five family accounts and prevent my daughter from seeing ads during her monitored viewing. If that price goes up 30-50%, I’m fucking done. This was an expense I was willing to incur, as YouTube is literally the only media platform my family even uses anymore. Better price than cable and multiple streaming platforms, and (again) I’m paying that for five active accounts.
If anyone knows of a way for me to adblock through my Roku TV so that we can continue watching YouTube on it without a Premium account, I’m all ears. The TV is the only reason I’m not just using uBlock to begin with. I’m really not into the idea of hooking a laptop up via HDMI if I can avoid it. Just feels like a sloppy user experience for anyone else in the household wanting to watch YouTube on TV.
You got a scrap Roku and move into a platform that supports one of the ad-free clients but I wouldn’t do that just yet. YouTube’s about to shove in-stream ads down which is going to break every bit of that blocking for quite a bit It might turn out something else is the way to go by the time the dust settles.
Invidious used to work, it’s a self hosted YouTube instance that blockw out ads and has things like sponsorblock. I have Playlet installed on my roku pointing at my instance but about a week or so ago it’s been giving only errors 😔.
Pi-hole, although really you can accomplish network ad blocking with just about any spare computer.
Pihole doesn’t block YouTube ads as it’s only a dns blocker, Google serves the ads from the same servers as the videos from what I understand. Adguard home works the same.
Correct. I use the AdGuard DNS servers on my router and get less ads on things occasionally but it YouTube. It’s been most noticable on Duolingo because now it always plays the Duolingo premium version ad. I’m guessing that it plays that when it fails to fetch a normal ad.
