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YOUTUBE PREMIUM LITE
YouTube is trialing "Premium Lite," a cheaper version of its subscription service that offers ad-free viewing. The trial is being conducted in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. It will cost €6.99/month instead of €11.99.
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Premium Lite includes ad-free viewing across the YouTube ecosystem — web app, iOS, Android, smart TVs, games consoles, and Kids app. The services won't remove ads in YouTube Music and don't include background playback or offline downloads.
YouTube reported $7B in ad revenue in Q2, up 83% YoY from $3.8B in 2020. Netflix reported $7.3B in ad revenue in Q2, up 19.4% YoY from $5.9B in 2020. According to Nielsen Research, YouTube and Netflix each account for 6% of the time people spend watching TV.
“In Nordics and Benelux (except for Iceland), we’re testing a new offering to give users even more choice: Premium Lite costs €6.99/month (or local equivalent per month) and it includes ad-free videos on YouTube,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement.
In comparison, YouTube’s existing Premium plan costs around €11.99 a month in Europe. Premium Lite includes ad-free viewing across YouTube’s main app on web, iOS, Android, smart TVs, and games consoles, as well as in the YouTube Kids app.
However, it doesn’t include any YouTube Music benefits like ad-free listening, and it doesn’t include Premium’s other features like background playback (for when you want to switch to another app while continuing to listen to audio from a YouTube video), or offline downloads.
Speaking as someone who hates the amount of ads on YouTube, but isn’t too interested in Premium’s other features like offline downloads, Premium Lite sounds like a tempting proposition. But at its current pricing, it costs around 60 percent of the price of a regular Premium subscription, while only offering around a quarter of its benefits.
YouTube says that the current subscription is in an experimental phase, however, and that it’s considering rolling out more plans based on audience feedback.
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