The price of an individual YouTube Premium subscription is increasing by $2 to $13.99 per month in the US for new and current customers.
This price increase is live for new subscribers as seen on youtube.com/premium. Instead of $11.99, YouTube Premium now costs $13.99/month. Meanwhile, it’s $18.99 if you’re subscribing from the iOS YouTube app.
Inflation sky high, interest rates sky high, salaries stagnant, hey let’s fucking raise subscription rates!
I just checked my subscriptions and my YouTube Premium is still grandfathered in at $9.99/mo from my Google Play Music subscription that included Google Red.
Myself and family listen to music all the time, and YouTube without ads has paid for itself with dev tutorials, DIY videos and other educational stuff; I can’t run aBO on my TV. As soon as they find a way to kick me off my current rate, I’ll bail, but until then I can’t find a cheaper fit for my needs.
Same, that’s pretty much my break point for something like this. I use youtube a lot so I don’t mind paying a small amount to remove ads and still have creators get a cut, though I understand why others hate the system.
Hate to break it to you, but grandfathered accounts are all getting hit with the price increase emails now as well. I just got mine an hour ago. Thought I was safe since they promised back in the day to honor the 9.99 price… nope, they expect 13.99 soon, but are giving grandfathered accounts a 3 month extension as a “thank you” for their loyalty.
Whelp, here’s a toast to the future where the creators we enjoy can be supported through a more federated system.
I don’t think there’s any way to beat YouTube’s infrastructure right now, and you can’t even replicate it without a steady supply of blank checks.
Any geniuses out there know how to think of a system design that’s FOSS, competes with YT’s pay structure, and who knows what’s the best supply for that pay? I hate advertisements.
How do we take the money that we already spend for subscription services and funnel that into some kind of pool to be equitably distributed to content creators?
“Thank you for believing in us. We’re now going to betray you.”
The funny thing is that I used to have YouTube premium bundled with Google play music, but I had to cancel after they killed it. YouTube music was just a terrible experience coming after GPM (lost a lot of songs in transfer, unable to play only liked songs by certain artists, uploaded music locked in jail and unable to be mixed into playlists, etc…). I felt like I had to voice my complaint by canceling YouTube music, which I could only do by getting rid of YouTube premium as well. How else do you protest a product that got bundled onto something else you already used? Anyway, I would buy a cheaper premium tier if it didn’t include useless YouTube music.
Same. I used GPM, then when they added YouTube Premium, I used that too. When they killed GPM in favor of YTM, I dropped the entire service.
Same here.
Between GPM shutdown, Crunchyroll’s terrible forced UIX change, and Netflix doing a complete 180 on all of their pro-consumer stances, I decided to say fuck it to all of them and spin up my own home media server.
Very thankful I was grandfathered in with my the original promo price for google play music.
Existing subscribers will start to see the new pricing with their next billing cycle. An upcoming email will explain the changes. Those who were grandfathered in five years ago (with Google Play Music and/or YouTube Red) will get three additional months at their current rate.
Yep, you are correct and it sucks.
Wow that’s a huge bummer.
9 to 5 google is the only publication with this information. I mean I use it, but I can live without YouTube.
It’s been forever since I’ve used a paid YouTube subscription. I didn’t realize how much it has increased.
YouTube Red – Family membership
Billed Monthly starting Oct 21, 2017 $14.99Oh no they remembered that us grandfathered in google music subscribers exist, so we’re getting a $4/mo price increase
damn, i’ve been coasting on that for ages
Damn, even $11.99 sounds like a lot - I only pay 12.99€ for a family plan in Europe.
in the uk it used to be £18 now £20 … that’s about €23 or $25
why is it so expensive here specifically?? christ, i’m so mad about inflation
NewPipe still works like a dream. No accounts though.
Oh yeah I use revanced so no worries for me. I tried NewPipe but the lack of accounts did annoy me
I’ll continue to pay for it… it’s the only streaming service that I consider essential to pay for. I’ll dump everything else before I dump this.
I am very selective with what I watch but even so the amount of good content on youtube exceeds my available time while other services have a couple of shows a year to binge and then they can be dropped. With writers and actors striking conventional content is only going to get thinner for the other streaming services. There is a limit to what I will pay for a painless ad free experience for the whole family on all their devices and Youtube is rapidly approaching it.
Worst thing to do if they’re also trying to block adblockers.
Between rising prices and music disappearing from various services I canceled all my music streaming services and use Plexamp. Rip your own music and stream for free, all you need is a computer that stays on at home
It’s just like the old adage that history repeats itself. All the streaming companies are starting to do the exact same damn thing cable did. They’re starting to bloat their own products and expense them completely out of normal working schmoes price bracket.
The early 2000s was Paradise for cord cutters. The whole purpose of moving away from cable was the smaller individualized payments. Now if I want to watch all my shows legally I’m approaching cable tv package prices again. I’ll be damned if I ever get trapped into that cycle again. Now the streaming networks are bombarding us with advertisements that compare the cable was when I cut cord 20 years ago. And they’re slowly getting worse.
Still better than cable ever was. No long term contracts, extra fees on bills, tons of useless channels and tons of ads.
I think people forget how bad cable TV actually is if they haven’t used it for a while.
The month to month contracts for streaming content will go away soon.
I don’t see the value in complaining about things that haven’t happened yet.
The general direction that streaming services have been taking in recent times is clear, though: Raising prices, locking down account sharing, splitting up the content across too many different providers and introducing advertisement in cheaper plans. Sounds pretty cable-y to me.
They’ll probably go the way other big subscription services like MS and Adobe are. Annual commitment with monthly payments of x.99 or no commitment with monthly pricing of y + x.99
I dislike that even more.
The early 2000s was before streaming was ever a thing. Netflix was still sending DVDs in the mail en masse.
I just canceled the Netflix account I have had since 2002.
They were great once…
I was paying for it at a legacy price still but that gets wiped out with this I guess. Canceled.
Or…you can use a VPN and change your location to Turkey and see the price that you get after.
youll have to pay with a cc based in, say the UK, so they’ll automatically change your location back to the UK. doesn’t work anymore.
I need to have a serious talk about this with my girlfriend. I didn’t realize she was paying so much for our YT Premium plan.
These prices are getting ridiculous.
What are you guys getting for that money? I honestly don’t know. I just use either an ad blocker or the newpipe app.
It’s a global solution, not just localized to specific areas. No ads on my account on my Xbox, PS5, Switch, Google Home speakers (YouTube Music), Fire TV Stick, Android TV, Roku, my roommate’s Roku, or anyone else’s devices anywhere else, in addition to places like my phone and PC where I just use uBlock Origin.
In addition, I’m actually just splitting the family plan across three people, so it’s like $7.64/mo, which isn’t bad.
Yeah with that many devices that’s worth the ease of use for the price. I’m surprised they don’t block more than one device.
Does your ad blocker block ads for YouTube and YouTube Music apps on iOS?
I use safari with adguard + sponsor block which lets me airplay videos to the TV. I don’t even have the YouTube app installed. No need to try and set up smarttubenext or whatever on the TV.
I guess you need an Apple TV for that as well?
Airplay seems pretty useless to me overall as I don’t have anything it seems to want to connect with. Sadly.
My TV has airplay support built into it so I haven’t needed to get an Apple TV. But you do need an Apple device to use Airplay.
Yeah have lots of apple devices but never a TV with airplay. They all seem to have Chromecast where I live.
Guess I’m buying the wrong TVs :)
What brand do you have? If they have Android TV they seem to usually have airplay support too, but you need to go into settings and then get your Apple device paired with the TV to get airplay to start working.
Are you able to cast at 4k or 1080p? I used to have youtube premium but moved to the same setup on my phone; ad blocker, sponsor block, youtube mobile, cast to tv. My one issue is that the youtube player only lets me select up to 720p for stream quality, and that doesn’t look fantastic on a tv.
Looks like it is up to only 720p. Never been bothered by it myself for the type of content I’ve air played. Not ideal for movies or TV shows though.
For YouTube, uYou+ blocks ads and sponsors.
For YouTube Music, YouTubeMusicUltimate blocks ads and sponsors, too.
Anyone can sideload those relatively easily. Still, if you don’t want to bother with this, you can find apps on the AppStore that do pretty much the same thing, like Yattee or Video Lite (there’s a paid subscription for this one but if you block ads at the DNS level you won’t see anything.)
The big part for us is the multiple users, and not under a single home location.
My girlfriend, myself, her kid, adult daughter. That ends up being a fairly decent value proposition considering we’re pretty invested in Apple devices. There aren’t a lot of solutions to remove ads, and we take advantage of both the music and video sides of things.
I never even considered using for a family account. That’s smart.
While ad blockers are definitely a thing, I’d also like my favorite channels to get paid. And, honestly, it has to make money somehow – it might as well be off my relatively stable back
I’m not so enamored with feeding the bloated behemoth that is Google but I do like the fact the revenue share with creators gets them more per view than they would with ad rolls. It’s a shame you still have to manually skip sponsorship sections on the mobile app.
I agree with you. In an ideal world, I would give 22 dollars to Patreon every month, they would scan my watch history and would distribute 20 dollars proportionally among the channels I watched without Google taking a cut.
Then Google could drop the price of premium instead of raising it and keep that whole fee.
That was the flattr model but it never really took off.
People tell me oh youtube prem is reasonable but I know that yt is just going to raise the price bit by bit and everyone will accept it because they have no other option.
Removed by mod
Don’t forget NewPipe for Android, Yattee for Apple devices, SmartTube for most Android TV boxes, Playlet for Roku, and Invidious for PC (if you don’t like Piped).
The only (usable) platform I can think of without a ad-free YouTube client is maybe webOS for LG TVs.
(some of these clients are also missing some features because they are new, but they should all be better for watching than the official app)
Also don’t forget https://github.com/revanced it even has a manager for updates.
That too! I just don’t use it myself because I find NewPipe works well enough for me. However, I should still try it out eventually to see if I’m missing anything big.
I just tried installing SmartTube on my Chromecast Ultra today and found out it can pair with YouTube revanced. This fixed my number one issue with revanced where the cast button is not working.
Omg really? Does that mean I can finally watch YouTube videos on my Nvidia shield again? I have to try this out now!
You can enable it from settings -> remote control in SmartTube app. Also, if you’re using YouTube revanced, the cast button might be hidden because it was not functional. You can re-enable the cast button on YouTube revanced from revanced settings.
When casting a video, you’ll have to open the SmartTube app in your Android TV first because it’s not automatically launched when you hit the cast button in YouTube revanced. If it’s in the background or not yet running, the video won’t play.
Got it installed and running. So nice to finally be able to watch YouTube on the TV again.
Front ends aren’t really an alternative option. You are still using youtube. Youtube will continue to try and stop ad blockers and shutdown these Frontends. Eventually they will be successful. The more inconvenient they make it to use these technologies the more people will pay for yt prem. The only option is to start making the very painful switch to alternative platforms.
Even twitch has work around so they are welcomed to keep trying until they are successful.
What is the workaround for twitch?
Here’s one https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/apk-mod-5-0-twitchmod-twitch-app-modification.4129481/page-8
I don’t watch twitch so I can’t attest to its effectiveness.
thank you for sharing, also that seems like a helpful site in general!
As with all monopolies/cartels/prohibitions unsatisfied demand always finds alternatives. If the rules get in the way people circumvent them. Youtube premium price increases will create a bigger demand for ad blocking. Just as the balkanisation of streaming services and reduced value will return many people to piracy. The people who run these organisations are idiots who destroy brands and shareholder value to get short term attention and bonuses.
Youtubes changes are successful. Less people use ad blocker and more people are using yt premium.
There’s so many people who dont want to constantly keep looking for work around and having their sites break etc. Once one person in their family buys yt premium then it makes sense for them to get a family plan.
My issue isn’t with youtube running ads or charging for their service. My gripe is that they built their website as a free ad based service and out competed everything else based on that. Then they slowly ramped up ads and monetization once they had a monopoly and they won’t stop squeezing.
In my eyes the only ethical solution is a distributed competitor where users can pay for the service of streaming videos but can’t be forced into a single vendor. For example if one peertube instance started charging to much then you could move to another.
I pay for Nebula but watch nebula creators on Youtube. Watching on Youtube boosts them in the algorithm and gives them a small share of premium and it is more discoverable. The problem with distributed alternatives is that using them would disadvantage creators on youtube which is their primary outlet. We may need to concede that unlike Reddit or Twitter that clearly can and should be replaced by distributed alternatives, Youtube has proven to be a natural monopoly and as such needs to be regulated to protect consumers and creators from monopolistic abuses.
I dont know how people would switch off youtube. Youtube would need to shoot itself in the head or even a chance of people leaving the platform. Maybe creators could unionize or a new form of media could dethrone it.
When I tried Odysee I also did the same. I subscribed and viewed the videos on odysee but would pause and watch on youtube to save odysee bandwith and ensure that the creators I like that are pretty small wouldnt be hurt.
