This ad just popped up and it should be more infuriating than just mildly, But it’s more of Google being Google. How many different tiers of YouTube are there now so Alphabet can skim off slightly higher margins from each user possible? Premium LITE? Really? And I am just tickled by the fact that the main perk is not that it removes ads but that there will be slightly less of them. “Pay us to watch ads” Is the new corporate standard.
The tier makes sense, if not the name. Google insists on including music streaming in Youtube Premium, and Premium Lite is a cheaper tier that doesn’t include music streaming. It’s missing some other features too, but it beats Premium for people who just want to not have ads and for some reason won’t use an ad blocker.
This support page about Premium Lite says it has no ads on “most non-music content, excluding Shorts. Ads may appear when you search or browse”. Still having ads on music content makes sense given that Premium Lite doesn’t include music streaming.
But… Youtube is a bunch of audio-only, video-only and <resolution>-with-audio streams either way. So it’s just an app thing?
Premium includes Google’s equivalent of paid Spotify. Premium Lite and free users get something closer to Spotify’s free tier.
You forgot to mention that it doesn’t allow for mobile queuing either. That was what made me drop my sub as a whole instead of just downgrading. I would rather just use ad block style services such as gray-jay than experience mobile youtube without the ability to queue videos. I use it heavily for going to sleep, and with how finicky the auto play system is for choosing what video it should play next, there’s no way I trust it to not absolutely screw my suggested videos.
Spotify has a lot of content that’s great for falling a sleep, tons of curated playlists and you can queue audio (i’m assuming your not actually watching videos anyway). O and also, if you let Spotify auto-play it never effects your suggested content on YouTube.