Sharing My Experience with YouTube Premium — Paying for a Subscription to Watch Ad-Free Videos

In the article “Cutting Off Cable TV: Canceling the Lease and Switching to MOD 🎉,” this author mentioned the process of my old home terminating its cable TV contract and switching to Chunghwa Telecom MOD to watch shows. Then within a year I successively added paid subscriptions to the playback services of several media streaming providers.

Now that I’ve been a paid YouTube Premium subscriber for over a year, let me share my personal experience after using the service.

First, the conclusion: is ad-free playback good? Is it worth paying to subscribe? The answer to both questions is “YES” — that is, I’d be willing to recommend it.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example, my nephew, who is currently in the second year of junior high (abbreviated as “chuunibyou”), says he really likes watching those crappy game ads (looking into the distance).

A Brief Introduction to YouTube Ads

In fact, in the early days of watching YouTube, their ad delivery technology was limited — they simply confined the ad media to a block size and, like website blogs, placed it in some text block at the corner of the screen. At that time there wasn’t anything particularly uncomfortable.

But in recent years, after parent company Alphabet began to strengthen its efforts in video ad revenue, engineers have used almost every kind of ad insertion technology, causing very frequent full-screen interstitial ads that have also begun to draw heavy criticism.

In traditional TV program production, most are in units of half an hour or one hour. After decades of empirical research in TV history, they gradually formulated internally an ad-time delivery ratio that lets viewers feel more comfortable, and formed similar standards that competing TV stations all share a consensus on.

However, whether it’s YouTube or Facebook and other new media, because their ad insertion arrangements adopt conditional automatic delivery that mutually restrains each other based on advertisers’ condition settings and bid priority, the concept of an appropriate playback ratio seems to have completely disappeared.

Especially since YouTube itself is a media platform aggregating a large number of short videos, the ad delivery ratio for each short video appears relatively abnormally high, seriously affecting users’ viewing experience, even reaching an annoying level.

But as the world’s largest media playback platform, YouTube’s already-huge and habituated customer base can only be forced to accept this near-abnormal ad playback frequency. Even if someone wants to call the programming department to complain, they can’t find anyone — because there is no programming department at all.

How to Watch YouTube Videos Without Ads

There are two solutions online for this kind of streaming media overlay advertising. One is to find cracking software to block ads directly on the client side (such as a phone or personal computer).

But this author believes that any normal adult over 18 should try not to use this kind of method that breaks the rules of the game and harms creators — this is also an indicator of whether we can become a developed country.

The other is to pay for the YT membership plan “YouTube Premium,” where the system itself stops ad playback — this is also the only formal way to stop seeing ads.

What the YouTube Premium Plan Includes

Although buying a single-account membership costs as much as NT$230 per month, buying a family membership account share costs only NT$269 and can be used by 6 people.

These six people don’t need to actually live together, and there’s no limit on the number of devices. As long as you find friends and family to split the payment evenly, each person pays about NT$44 to easily and conveniently enjoy all kinds of funny, humorous, or educational streaming videos.

What subscribers can enjoy includes the original YouTube video playback, plus the YouTube Music music playback platform service, and the two useful features of background playback and download-then-play.

Speaking of the background playback feature, it’s actually a very big selling point, because it’s really convenient and useful.

You can keep playing sound while the phone screen is off, suitable for listening to music and learning knowledge when out on the bus, traveling by train, or taking a shower. This saves the phone a lot of power, so the battery lasts longer.

And the video and music download feature lets us download the videos or playlists we want to watch before going out, saving a lot of mobile data download traffic. Especially for users without unlimited data, this feature lets you enjoy media entertainment even while out and about.

YouTube Premium Creates a New Dilemma

Here’s a joke: when a bunch of people are shopping at the supermarket with Jennifer Lopez, we YouTube Premium members have no idea what this meme is.

A friend of this author said: “Oh, because it’s a poor-people-only meme.”

Although YouTube’s membership subscription system lets people freely choose whether they’re willing to pay to watch ads, this has always troubled this author, because under the current mechanism, I’m curious which normal companies are willing to place ads on YouTube?

Like the earlier joke, anyone with slightly more financial comfort may be willing to pay two hundred-odd dollars a month to let the whole family enjoy a smooth ad-free viewing experience (as for whether the super-rich are willing to let their children immerse themselves in the large amount of vulgar, cheap content online, that’s another topic).

Therefore, when commercial companies place ads, they first consider who the current viewing audience roughly is, and whether this audience group is worth spending money to advertise to.

Is it worth it to place professional, high-quality ad content that requires a large budget and a lot of time to produce on a media platform like YouTube, competing with cheap ads?

Or, under even harsher consideration, does placing ads on YT alongside a bunch of mobile game ads and even scam ads actually harm a company’s reputation and image?

Also, as more and more people subscribe to YouTube Premium, although it lets Google’s parent company Alphabet and influencers with large subscriber counts earn more direct income.

But it also means fewer and fewer people will watch ads, causing the willingness of advertisers of quality products to place ads to become lower and lower. In such an endless cycle, only more and more cheap, low-cost ad content will appear before people, making YT users even more disgusted by those vulgar ads that are still placed in large, dense quantities.

This constantly mutually-entangled phenomenon may have already formed a negative cycle created by new media.