YouTube Is Raising Prices for Premium Subscribers
When it first launched back in 2007, it would have seemed laughable to suggest paying a monthly subscription for YouTube. But fast forward nearly two decades, and YouTube Premium is actually a solid deal. With it, you get a mostly ad-free experience, with exclusive features and perks like YouTube Music. Of course, those benefits may only be worth it for the right price.
On Friday, YouTube started informing subscribers that it will be raising Premium prices for all account types. Going forward, individual YouTube Premium plans will go from $13.99 to $15.99 per month; annual plans will rise from $139.99 to $159.99 per year; family plans will go from $22.99 to $26.99 per month; and student plans will increase from $7.99 to $8.99 per month. That's only taking into account YouTube's pricing itself. If you subscribe to Premium through the YouTube app on iOS, YouTube applies an extra fee to compensate for Apple's 30% cut. That's why this Redditor's individual plan is going to $20.99 per month. For its part, YouTube does inform the user that they can sign up directly through YouTube for the new $15.99 per month price.
Interestingly, YouTube hasn't actually made an official announcement regarding the press increase. Instead, this change has been spread entirely word of mouth, as users shared their emails from the company in frustration. Users are already on edge this week, accusing the company of rolling out unskippable 90-second long ad breaks. YouTube is adamant that it does not have unskippable ad breaks this long, and says that the examples of it in the wild are actually bugs. But whether or not that's the case, the situation isn't really selling the company's price increase announcement.
To that point, users are not happy with this news. Scrolling through Reddit threads, I see nothing but frustration and dissatisfaction, with many threatening to cancel, or confirming they've ended their subscriptions then and there. One user called YouTube "greedy [bastards]," while others extol the virtues of ad blockers—which defeats one of the main perks of the subscription. As such, in recent years, Google started a war against ad blockers, making it much more difficult to use them with YouTube.
$15.99 isn't the most expensive streaming subscription out there, and YouTube Premium still comes with all the same benefits as before. But I'm not convinced YouTube can continue squeezing subscribers for more and more money before they start to see a subscriber exodus.