1. No ads 2. Free YouTube Music subscription (cancel your Spotify subscription) 3. Download videos and playlists to your device before a flight or other no-service scenario 4. Every time you watch a video, a proportional percentage of your subscription fee goes to that creator, no matter whether they are in a lucrative (i.e., ad-friendly) niche or not. 5. One less browser extension (or mobile app) I need to give permission to track my activity and worry it will be hacked or sold without me realizing it.

1. Vanced does it, and so does uBlock.

2. So I can have access to a worse player ? Which is already impressive given how bad Spotify is.

3. youtube-dl.

4. Giving 0.000005$ to a creator for me watching 20 minutes of video is still Google rent-seeking

5. Fair enough. But then I'm trading one browser extensions that might track me (but that doesn't) for the certainty that Google will absolutely track me to vomit out more shitty AI recommended playlists. Not sure it's worth the tradeoff.

I'm a youtube-dl[p] user, but pretending that is equivalent to the few taps it take to sync in the background in the official app is silly.

For someone savvy enough it may as well be

In addition to incognito, also Chromecast. A Chromecast will insert ads before videos added to the queue by non-premium accounts. As a result I got a family account so I wouldn't have to watch ads before videos my wife enqueued.

Wait, Chromecast is injecting ads?? I use casting weekly. Can you elaborate?

If a person with a non-premium Youtube account enqueues a Youtube video into a Chromecast queue, that video might play with ads when the Chromecast is playing it.

I should note that I've had Youtube premium on all the accounts in my household for a few years now, so it's possible things have changed since. My guess is that it would have only changed in the direction of "more ads" though, not less.

Same. I was recently chastised (lightly) by a friend for sending a YouTube video link. They asked why I sat through so many ads. I've been using YouTube premium for years and had no idea how bad the ad situation is for non-premium users.