I do the same. I am a little annoyed that I can’t pay for ad-free Youtube without also buying YouTube Music, which I didn’t need.

Content costs money, and if I don’t want ads, I need to pay the difference. I where a little surprised to see Linus Tech Tips break down they income and showing that Youtube Premium as significant source of revenue.

I think it’s they’re intrinsically baked together as YouTube has had to license music for all those YouTube music videos, which are hugely popular as you could imagine.

Yeah. I don't use YouTube Music and don't care about downloading or background playback, so I'm not ready to pay $11.99/month just to hide ads.

As a music listener I love YouTube music app, it's great being able to listen to almost anything I want in high quality any time.

I tried a couple years ago, but didn't like it that much. Ended up going back to spotify.

I remember trying to get the Guardians of the Galaxy awesome mix, and it only had a youtube video with all songs glued together. Also, it was a bit weird experience overall because they matched so many random videos

When I tried it, I couldn't deal with it auto-generating a 'related' playlist whenever I played anything. (I pay for YT Premium, so if I could use YT Music then I wouldn't have to pay for Spotify.) How did you deal with that problem?

To get around that go to the artist and start a song from their top playlist or an album and it will just play their songs.

It is great, I just didn’t want it originally, but now that I paying for it I’ve started using it a fair bit.

I do too and pay everywhere I can for the services that I use. The world would be a far better place if it didn’t need ad support, and the only alternative that so far works at all is direct payment.

Along these lines, why doesn't google introduce a paid search service without ads? My hunch is that no matter the price point, it would be a huge revenue hit compared to actual advertising payments.

My other hunch is that it would make the non ad-free experience greatly cheapened in the eyes of the consumer, in the same way youtube with ads feels different after experiencing youtube premium.

Because if you allow a paid option, all the people worth advertising to switch to that, and now the advertising portion of the business is worth a lot less.

They’re betting they can get more out of advertisers than paying subscribers.

They have Google Workspace, which is pretty similar, but more focused on small businesses.