No ads and background play are great though. YouTube music also means you don't need a Spotify subscription which is $10 by itself. Altogether it is worth it to me

No ads is worth quite a bit to me. I wish more platforms had this option to opt out of them legitimately. I would gladly pay another 25% on top of my YouTube Premium subscription if they would also enforce no in-content/native ads from the creators (just ask them to tag the beginning and end of the sponsored section, and auto-skip for premium subscribers). I basically lose my shit every time I have to hear "this episode brought to you by square space" lol.

This is yet another instance where piracy provides the better product.

Installing uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock makes Youtube a much better product than simply paying for premium. If you haven't used it, SponsorBlock is a crowd sourced browser extension that identifies and skips sections of videos like "This content is brought to you by..."

I used to pay for premium and use YT Music, but after getting fed up with YTM I cancelled. I'm noticing a much MUCH better experience using UBO and SponsorBlock. Unfortunately, this setup means the creators don't get any revenue from me.

If only YouTube offered such an experience at a reasonable cost.

I do rock ubo but hadn’t heard of sponsoreblock. Problem is 50%+ of my YouTube consumption is on a tv where extensions can’t help

I watch YouTube more than all other streaming services combined. The ad-free experience is absolute bliss. Most of my music listening these days is DJ mixes on YouTube and having ads in the middle of those would drive me insane. I also watch a ton of hobby YouTube with the kids and I love not having ads in the middle of all that. (Of course, the videos themselves often have product placement and other stuff, but at least that feels more essential and organic.)

You're forgetting the music streaming service that's a part of it. Spotify is $9.99 so how is this not comparably worth it?

There's more entertaining, educational, and just plain useful content on YouTube than cable ever offered. The value proposition is certainly there. I don't consider Premium to be a bad deal at all.

If there's a threat to the value proposition, it's increasingly-intrusive sponsorship messaging. But that's outside Google's ability to control.

And those "real" streaming services have much lower quality and diversity of content.

There's no match for YouTube, as long as you are not after movies, but very broad "video" content. Nothing even close to it. 4 coffees per month so my whole family can enjoy it without ads? It's a bargain for me.

That, and to support their favorite Youtube creators. LTT has said the watchtime payouts from Premium are worth more than ads.

3 coffees a month to never be interrupted by an advert on Youtube again is a bargain. I think you need to try it to understand what a relief it is.

It is quite punchy for an online service, but you would have to prise YouTube Premium from my cold dead hands. I visit YouTube multiple times per day for work, entertainment, research etc. Without Premiun there are so many ad units it’s painful.