The family version is not available for Google Workspace accounts (which was pushed as something useful for families for years when it first came out, and family use remained free when they did away with other free uses so they are very aware it's used that way). So it's $14 per month per person in my US-based family. That's too steep compared to Netflix, Disney+, etc. for us.

If they provided a way to move subscriptions, viewing history, playlists, etc. to a vanilla account, I'd do that. Without that, I've invested too much time in curating things to start over. Especially without knowing what steps in user experience degradation lie ahead.

The only complaint I have is that there's no way to downgrade to YouTube Premium Lite. Lite is going away now, and I can't figure out if it's a deliberately botched launch or just plain incompetence. You couldn't downgrade to lite, it was never really pushed in any way, it was just a stealth product.

YouTube Premium is the subscription I get the most value from, even if I could do without the forced YouTube Music subscription, but my wife likes the music streaming.

I might have considered that for a millisecond, if Google hadn't demonetised a lot of the creators I care about. I'd rather support them directly.

I don't really think youtube has good enough content to justify paying for it, but setting that aside I still think a premium subscription has one major problem. Google has no reliability, so why would I trust that if I subscribe to youtube they won't just replace it with a worse product?

> Google has no reliability, so why would I trust that if I subscribe to youtube they won't just replace it with a worse product?

It's ok it's a 1-month contract, not a lifetime one.

In terms of it being not worth it I agree, but if two people have a music subscription to Spotify for example, you can replace it with YouTube premium for family which includes Youtube music and the ad removal is essentially free.

Youtube: made video quality worse, installed an insane amount of ads, demonetizes a lot of creators, treats them like dust, community strikes get applied for no reason, it's also a profitable company for a few years already. So I don't see why I should pay.

But that supports YouTube itself too, I'd rather it goes bust.

If there were a platform where the creators paid a share of their revenue to the platform operators, not the other way around, I'd pay. This model where the platform operator pays a share of ad revenue to the creators will always allow the platform to take actions I disagree with, since all the power is with them.

Given that the platform operator is _Google_, it's a non-starter for me. They're already performing actions against creators — and other content based actions — I disapprove of.

I kinda thought about this for a few months now. My problem with YouTube these days isn't ads. It's content quality.

It's probably just my personal preference, but what I'm looking for is long form. Lectures, classes, essays, analysis... This sort of stuff.

And it seems that from my viewpoint we're now in some sort of race to the bottom. There seems to be more and more of a push towards short Tiktok style stuff. And I hate that with passion.

My current solution is probably subscribing to Nebula, not YouTube Premium.

It’s quite good for the price if you use the seats, considering you also get YouTube music as well, it’s not a bad deal in my opinion. I ended up liking it over spotify quite a bit.

A true, I did the same and cancelled my spotify

No