YouTube dominates online video, but it’s absolutely crammed full of ads these days. A YouTube Premium subscription takes care of that, but ad blockers do exist. Google seems to have gotten the message—a cheaper streaming subscription is on the way that drops YouTube Music from the plan. You may have to give up more than music to get the cheaper rate, though.
Google started testing cheaper YouTube subscriptions in a few international markets, including Germany and Australia, over the past year. Those users have been offered the option of subscribing to the YouTube Premium plan, which runs $13.99 in the US, or a new plan that costs about half as much. For example, in Australia, the options are AU$23 for YouTube Premium or AU$12 for “YouTube Premium Lite.”
The Lite plan drops YouTube Music but keeps ad-free YouTube, which is all most people want anyway. Based on the early tests, these plans will probably drop a few other features that you’d miss, including background playback and offline downloads. However, this plan could cost as little as $7–$8 in the US.
Perhaps at this point, you think you’ve outsmarted Google—you can just watch ad-free music videos with the Lite plan, right? Wrong. Users who have tried the Lite plan in other markets report that it doesn’t actually remove all the ads on the site. You may still see banner ads around videos, as well as pre-roll ads before music videos specifically. If you want access to Google’s substantial music catalog without ads, you’ll still need to pay for the full plan.
Bloomberg reports that YouTube Premium Lite is on the verge of launching in the US, 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,” Google said in a statement. “We’re hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future with our partners’ support.”
The spice ads must flow
Anyone who has used YouTube without a subscription over the past few years will no doubt have noticed Google’s increasing ad density. The company has also embarked on a campaign to discourage the use of ad blockers, primarily by nagging users and blocking the blockers right back. As this cat-and-mouse game continues, a cheaper premium offering could attract users who are sick of evading Google’s policies.
The more aggressive advertising is part of Google’s goal of rapidly increasing its streaming revenue. In the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai noted that Cloud and YouTube reached $110 billion in revenue for 2024, which exceeded Google’s expectations by $10 billion. YouTube also continues to be the most popular streaming platform in the US, according to Google. Still, no matter how popular YouTube may be for video, Spotify, Apple Music, and others are even bigger in music. If you want to sell users of those services ad-free YouTube, it’s silly to make them pay for another music streaming platform.
This change is long overdue—Google’s merging of music streaming with YouTube had all the earmarks of ill-conceived corporate synergy. The result was confusing branding, overpriced subscriptions, and a very clunky migration from Play Music. It should not have taken Google five years to do something about it, but here we are.
Google doesn’t have a specific timeline to share for the rollout of Premium Lite subscriptions, but it shouldn’t be long, given the months of testing. There’s no hint of an option to subscribe only to YouTube Music, so that service remains bound to ad-free YouTube, even if the opposite is no longer true.