What you need to know
- A new YouTube Premium Lite plan will be announced for users in the U.S., Australia, Germany, and Thailand "soon."
- Unlike YouTube Premium, which bundles YouTube Music with ad-free videos and other perks, Premium Lite will only remove ads from non-music videos.
- This tier likely won't include other premium perks like offline downloads.
- The article doesn't discuss Premium Lite pricing, but half the current cost ($13.99) is probable.
Google is allegedly planning to bring back its Premium Lite subscription after axing it in 2023. You'll no longer have to pay full price for both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music to avoid ads while binging YouTube playlists and podcasts.
According to a source "familiar with the plans" at Bloomberg, the YouTube Premium Lite package "will be announced soon in the U.S., Australia, Germany, and Thailand."
"As part of our commitment to provide our users with more choice and flexibility, we've been testing a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free in several of our markets," a YouTube spokesperson told the site. "We're hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future."
Google began testing Premium Lite late last year in Australia, Germany, and Thailand, though not the United States. Users would see "limited ads" — meaning ads before music videos and ad banners on the website — and they'd no longer have access to certain YouTube Premium perks like background play and offline downloads.
The vast majority of YouTube content would be ad-free, however. And the dip in cost from €12.99 to €5.99 — or from A$23 to A$12 — made these trade-offs very tempting for users who already pay for another expensive music service, such as Spotify or Apple Music, or who don't watch many music videos.
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Now, based on this breaking report, it appears that U.S.-based YouTube power users will have the choice to spend about half as much as before for ad-free content. Bloomberg's source didn't share a price, but the $6–8 range seems likely given its test price in other countries last year.
"This new tier, if widely adopted, could make subscription revenue a larger and more significant part" of YouTube content creators' revenue than ads, Bloomberg suggests.
Google has pleasantly surprised me with this move
Last year, I wrote a controversial post claiming that Google made a mistake with YouTube Premium by coupling it with YouTube Music with no alternative, noting that paying to remove ads is, by itself, not something that should cost $14/month and that bringing back a Premium Lite plan would solve this problem.
The comment section was less than kind to my argument, calling it ridiculous, half-baked, and so on. It didn't matter that most other streaming services only charged about $6 to remove ads because they weren't free like YouTube. YouTube Premium was worth the value to them, content needs to cost money, and I was cheap and whiny for arguing otherwise.
A less hostile response came from a YouTube rep at the time, who contacted me to clarify that Google wasn't done with Premium Lite, even though they'd shut down this price tier almost a year prior and had no public plans about it. That sounded promising.
Now, almost a year later, it appears that I'm getting exactly what I wanted: ad-free YouTube for about half the price it costs now, even if it means missing out on offline downloads and other experimental, Premium-only features like 4X-speed videos and higher-quality audio.
Assuming Bloomberg's report is accurate, and YouTube Premium Lite really does launch soon in the U.S. for about half the price of YouTube Premium, I'll be a day-one subscriber. It'll no longer feel like an irresponsible subscription, given that I already pay for a family music bundle on another platform.
More generally, by making this choice, Google will increase its total number of subscribers, even if its YouTube Music subscriber count decreases. It'll be interesting to see whether YouTube Premium Lite expands to more countries or remains limited to the current four. And hopefully, unlike the last time, Premium Lite will stick around for a while.
