What you need to know
- Google previously offered a lesser tier of YouTube Premium, called Premium Lite, available at a lower price.
- YouTube Premium Lite offered an ad-free experience to subscribers until the pilot program was canceled in 2023.
- Now, Google is testing a new version of Premium Lite with some ads in three countries.
If you want an ad-free experience on YouTube, Google wants you to pay for YouTube Premium. There’s only one tier, with individual plans costing $13.99 per month. You can get family or student plans, too, but people looking for a cheaper version of YouTube Premium have been left wanting more. Although Google tested a “YouTube Premium Lite” plan for two years, the pilot program was shut down in 2023.
Now, there’s a chance YouTube Premium Lite could be making a comeback — albeit in a different form. Over the last few days, users in select countries have spotted a Premium Lite subscription tier in the YouTube app. One user, Jonah Manzano, on Threads, shared a screenshot of the offering:
Post by @jonahmanzano
View on Threads
Later, a Google spokesperson confirmed to Android Authority that the company was testing “a different version of Premium Lite.” The company added that the test was region-limited, and users in “Australia, Germany and Thailand may see the option to sign up,” per the report. For now, it’s too early to tell whether the YouTube Premium Lite plan will stick around at all, let alone come to other regions.
Since the original Premium Lite experiment was limited to select countries in Europe, North American users haven’t yet had the option to pay for a cheaper YouTube Premium subscription. The original pilot program gave subscribers an ad-free experience while cutting out some of the extras that were included with the full Premium subscription — like background video playback, video downloads, and YouTube Music Premium access. It was priced at roughly €6.99, or around $7.50 in U.S. dollars.
However, the Premium Lite that Google is testing today is far from the bargain the original pilot program was. In exchange for about half the price of a full Premium subscription, users who sign up for the new Premium Lite plan will get a “limited ad experience.” It doesn’t completely remove ads anymore, and all the extras are still missing.
That’s despite the Premium Lite test costing around double the price of the original, which has drawn criticism from users on social media, such as under the Reddit thread below.
It’s no secret that there are plenty of ads on YouTube. For users watching on a smart TV, there are fewer — but much longer — ad breaks. That’s why many YouTube watchers want a way to experience the platform ad-free, and they have fewer options now that Google is amidst an ad-blocker crackdown.
YouTube seems to be following in the footsteps of other streaming services, like Netflix, which have ad-supported subscription tiers. However, YouTube is a free-to-access platform, so it’s fundamentally different. It remains to be seen whether users are ready and willing to pay for a “limited ad experience” on YouTube with the Premium Lite test.