I’ll have to debate between now and October when my Premium service runs out if I want to renew. I tried to go without it last time and made it all of 18 hours before giving in and signing back up.
I’m still rather frustrated that YouTube Music is bundled. I pay for Apple Music and hate YouTube Music a lot. The Lite membership feels like a non-starter, because it not only cuts access to YouTube Music (which is fine), it doesn’t serve up music related content on YouTube ad free. It seems like a flip of a coin whether or not a music related video is categorized as “music” or not. I often watch these videos sitting in the living room, as I would any other video, and it’s not a replacement for a music service or used in the same way at all.
With the influx of AI content across the internet as a whole, I’ve found myself reading more. Maybe this trend will continue and I can simply discontinue use of YouTube.
I need to look more into their Lite plan since I don't care about music on YouTube at all but I worry they will start slide (more/some?) ads into that over time.
Yes, I know about ad blockers and the like, it's just really sucky for things like Apple TV or iOS. Maybe AdGuard/PiHole/etc can block these ads, I've avoided that in the past just because I've run into odd/annoying routing/dns issues due to those things but maybe it's time for another look.
The truth is that a monthly subscription fee will never be enough compared to potentially unlimited ad revenue, the beast will always hunger for more!
Even so, if and when Google decides to not honor that contract anymore, I'd still happily pay for YT Premium.
My previous blocker was that there was no (easy) way to bypass ads when I was using an AppleTV, so I just started using the Android side of my TV.
Not using regularly Youtube may be a good decision, but actively avoiding any interaction with it regardless of the circumstances is not a good decision.
Even if Youtube is not an Internet resource as important as Wikipedia or Archive.org, it still contains a lot of useful movies recorded and uploaded by random people, not by "influencers".
