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It looks like the yearly plan went up $20 as well. Of course, the yearly plan doesn’t auto-renew for whatever reason, so at least people can’t forget and unknowingly get a higher charge.

I’ll have to debate between now and October when my Premium service runs out if I want to renew. I tried to go without it last time and made it all of 18 hours before giving in and signing back up.

I’m still rather frustrated that YouTube Music is bundled. I pay for Apple Music and hate YouTube Music a lot. The Lite membership feels like a non-starter, because it not only cuts access to YouTube Music (which is fine), it doesn’t serve up music related content on YouTube ad free. It seems like a flip of a coin whether or not a music related video is categorized as “music” or not. I often watch these videos sitting in the living room, as I would any other video, and it’s not a replacement for a music service or used in the same way at all.

With the influx of AI content across the internet as a whole, I’ve found myself reading more. Maybe this trend will continue and I can simply discontinue use of YouTube.

It’s a form of ransom at this point. Pay it or watch 90 seconds unskippable ads.
Cancelled my YT Premium and just installed SmartTube on my TV instead.

My previous blocker was that there was no (easy) way to bypass ads when I was using an AppleTV, so I just started using the Android side of my TV.

Pro-tip use the brave browser and you won’t see ads. Straight out of the box on any platform I’ve ever used it on (Mac, iOS). $0.
Not trying to gloat but damn am I glad I'm grandfathered in at the old "Google Play Music" $8/mo price.

Even so, if and when Google decides to not honor that contract anymore, I'd still happily pay for YT Premium.

YouTube is rapidly approaching the point at which I'll go back to other means to watch YouTube to avoid paying this ridiculous price. I refuse to watch ads and I'm willing to pay but $16/mo for ~4-8hrs of content that I watch at most is absurd.

I need to look more into their Lite plan since I don't care about music on YouTube at all but I worry they will start slide (more/some?) ads into that over time.

Yes, I know about ad blockers and the like, it's just really sucky for things like Apple TV or iOS. Maybe AdGuard/PiHole/etc can block these ads, I've avoided that in the past just because I've run into odd/annoying routing/dns issues due to those things but maybe it's time for another look.