I tried Youtube Premium

In November of last year, my friends and I decided to subscribe to YouTube premium family plan. We split the cost of Rs. 189 per month and each of us had to pay Rs. 30 each. (This is clearly against YouTube’s terms of service, but who cares)

But a few weeks ago, I went ahead and left the family group and stopped paying for it.

My friends and I subscribed to premium because of its benefits and I really wanted to try premium out. Having a subscription, allows you to pause a video on a device and resume the video from another device, no ads, background play, smart downloads and my favorite perk - full access to YT Music. YouTube also claims that by using Premium, you also support the content creators on ther platform(I have my doubts regarding that). Still, for 30 rupees a month, it is actually a really good deal.

You might wonder “Why I didn’t use Invidious or Newpipe?” or “Why not use Ublock origin?”. Yes, I had used all of these before subscribing to YT premium. Ublock does a great job in blocking ads in the browser. However, on my phone, NewPipe and LibreTube just wouldn’t work that well. Sometimes a video would not load or the app would crash. This really annoyed me!

Once I signed up for premium, my daily watch time increased.

So why did I cancel my subscription?

The thing I hate most about YouTube is ‘Shorts’. I wish it was a seperate app or there was a way to turn it off without having to pause my watch history. I ended up wasting a good chunk of time watching shorts and normal videos. I just couldn’t control myself.

So I went ahead and uninstalled the app from my phone. As a result, my video consumption reduced drastically. If I want to watch something now, I either use youtube in my browser or use NewPipe and LibreTube. (these apps still have some problems.) Since I didn’t watch a ton of videos anymore, I saw no real value in paying money to YouTube.

For listening to music, I use RiMusic from F-Droid. It is a fork of the awesome ViMusic app and I am really happy with using it.

TLDR, I cancelled my subcription because I uninstalled the app from my phone to control my watch time. As a result, it wasn’t worth it to continue paying for the subscription.

This is day 18 of #100DaystoOffload