Dang it. YouTube Premium Lite is now worth $8/month | usagoldmines.com

I watch a lot of YouTube…. and I block all the ads, refusing to pay for Premium in an instinctual push against deliberate enshittification. But as crusty and ornery as I am, I have to admit that the newest additions to Premium Lite make the $8/month plan far more appealing. With background playback and offline downloads on mobile, the equation for ponying up now makes a lot more sense.

YouTube Premium Lite launched not quite a year ago, offering a considerably cheaper way to get rid of the omnipresent, teeth-grinding advertising that’s become an (almost) inescapable part of the platform. At the time I dismissed it since it didn’t block the ads on music (or in the dedicated YouTube Music app/interface), it didn’t offer downloads, and it didn’t offer background listening on your phone. That last one is a pretty core part of how I use YouTube, listening to deep dives and essays while I walk around and do other stuff.

The new changes are a big upgrade that make the $8 subscription much closer to the (still far overpriced) $14 option. It looks like advertising is still going to be integrated into YouTube Shorts (or as I think of it, TikTok for old people), but with the swiping nature of that system, they’re a lot easier to ignore. So, the plan might just make sense for me now. I imagine that someone who listens to a lot more music probably won’t be swayed, but they also have a lot more options for other services. (And that being the case, I wonder if YouTube is feeling more pressure now that TikTok isn’t under constant threat of banishment in the US.)

I’m still pretty angry with Google and YouTube over the way it’s handling the de facto home of video on the web, making it harder and harder for creators to thrive, censoring content seemingly at random, contributing to the scourge of “AI” slop, and just generally doing a really poor job of being a digital landlord. But $8 a month is a lot more reasonable, at least for the moment. I’ll give it a try… but my AdGuard and Revanced tools aren’t going anywhere, either. I’ll see how big of an asterisk follows on that “Most videos ad-free” claim.