What I learned when I canceled YouTube Premium

Key Takeaways

YouTube Premium’s ad-free experience is a game-changer.
Background audio allows for multitasking with ease.
Offline videos are a lifeline for commuters who use the service.

I’ve been a subscriber to YouTube Premium since 2017, and during that time I didn’t quite appreciate how good I had it. That is, until recently, when I went without YouTube Premium for a month. Readers, it was terrible.

For those who don’t know, YouTube Premium is a subscription service from YouTube that primarily does two things: Give subscribers an ad-free YouTube experience, as well as the ability to listen to YouTube audio in the background or use picture-in-picture on any mobile device. The subscription also gives subscribers access to YouTube Music ad-free, and allows downloading videos for offline viewing.

Those features may not sound like much, especially for a subscription that costs $14 per month for an individual, or $23 for a family of five. In fact, in an effort to cut down on my monthly bills, YouTube Premium was among the first services I cut.

It took dealing with YouTube sans the Premium benefits that actually made me understand just how valuable those features were to me.

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YouTube Premium

What’s included?: YouTube and YouTube Music add-free and in the background
Price: $14 a month

There’s only one reason to keep paying for YouTube Premium

I can never go back to watching YouTube with ads again.

1 Ad-free living

The biggest benefit of all

The marquee feature of YouTube Premium is, without a doubt, its removal of ads entirely from the YouTube experience. This is the main selling point for the service, and it’s a huge deal. For all those years I was subscribed to Premium, I did not encounter ads, and I had simply gotten used to videos starting right away when I hit play, and without ad breaks interrupting longer videos. After canceling my subscription, all of a sudden I was exposed to life with ads again, and it was awful.

I was so accustomed to life without ads, that seeing them again this way was beyond grating.

It got to a point, after just a few days, where I was questioning how anybody could put up with all the ads, with as many as two or three playing before a video barely longer than the ads themselves. Most people, I realized, were simply used to dealing with YouTube that way. Meanwhile, I was so accustomed to life without ads, that seeing them again this way was beyond grating.

YouTube Premium on a landscape and portrait phone.

More people should use this lesser-known YouTube Premium feature

YouTube Premium’s most-loved feature is its ad-free videos, but there’s another feature I find myself using a lot.

2 Background audio

The feature for multitaskers

Sometimes, when I’m watching a YouTube video on my phone, I’ll notice something I want to look up quickly on Google or Wikipedia, or I’ll want to quickly check my Bluesky feed. That was no problem at all when I had YouTube Premium. If I went away from the YouTube app, the audio from the video I was watching would keep playing.

This was especially great for longer videos and podcasts hosted on YouTube. Just as with any audio-centric app, I could easily multitask on my phone while continuing to listen. I could even change my settings to automatically kick videos into picture-in-picture mode while doing other things on my phone, perfect for videos where the visual component is still important.

When I canceled my Premium subscription, I discovered just how annoying it is for the audio to stop playing each time I leave the app

Once again, living with this feature for so long, I started taking it for granted. But when I canceled my Premium subscription, I discovered just how annoying it is for the audio to stop playing each time I leave the app, even just for a moment to reply to a message or check my emails. It took just a few days of dealing with this annoyance before deciding I would need to re-subscribe as soon as possible.

Wait, YouTube Premium does what? 5 features you’re missing out on

YouTube Premium has a good handful of features you might not even know about.

3 Offline videos

Making the commute easier

I’ll admit, saving videos for offline viewing was never one of the features I made heavy use of, but like the bigger features of YouTube Premium, living without it got me to stop taking it for granted.

While I may not have used the feature constantly, I did use it somewhat regularly to download longer videos in order to continue viewing them on the subway, which has spotty cellular connection at best. It took just one commute, where I realized I couldn’t watch a video because I had no signal, that I knew I needed YouTube Premium back.