I’m a YouTube Premium customer. It’s one of those subscriptions I regularly tell myself, and anyone that will listen, is well worth it. As soon as I use any device that isn’t signed in to YouTube Premium and I see an ad, I don’t want to be dramatic but it feels nearly nauseous.A similar feeling of nausea overcomes me when I see their price hikes. Yet another price hike coming in September for Irish customers.
Price increases for YouTube Premium in Ireland
If you are a YouTube Premium individual user, your premium subscription will increase from €13.99 to €15.99 per month. If you are a YouTube Family subscriber, your price will increase from €25.99 to €29.99 per month.
This is the first price hike by YouTube in Ireland since late 2024, which saw pricing jump from €11.99 to €13.99 and the family plan jumped from €17.99 to €25.99. For those of you into maths: YouTube Premium Family has gone from €17.99 to €29.99 since its 2018 launch, a 66.7% increase overall. Just since the last hike in late 2024, it’s up 15.4%, from €25.99 to €29.99.
Unfortunately as a household we struggled to move from Spotify to YouTube Premium’s included music subscription, which means we do still pay two separate subscriptions because Spotify is just a nice UI. Let’s talk about why YouTube Premium, I still think, is worth it.
Is YouTube Premium worth €29.99 per month?
Honestly I have to open by saying no. I don’t think any tech platform is worth €29.99 per month. However I do have a value on my time and what YouTube Premium does is remove ads, which is giving me some of my time back.
However this is absolutely massive. Increasingly creators are finding new ways to inject ads into the content that you watch. Just like Spotify Premium is supposed to be ad-free when listening to a podcast, the creators will typically have sponsors that they need to mention. When watching YouTube creators those videos are often peppered with product placement and native ads to the content the creator makes. Now YouTube Premium does include the Jump Ahead feature, which I use on nearly every single ad, but it still feels like I’m paying for ad-free while getting ads.
The one saving grace is that they’re skippable.
I don’t know how this ends
For years I’ve coined the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” and I’m increasingly confused as to where this all ends. Perhaps it started with everybody having a Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and Disney Plus subscription and now you have to choose between two of those. Maybe next year you’re choosing between one of them but eventually surely this becomes a discussion about not having digital subscriptions at all.
Piracy is almost certainly on the increase again as people learn how to create their own home-hosted services, with those services becoming easier than ever to build in your own home. I find the all likelihood will be that Spotify once thrived because they created a middle ground between piracy and legitimacy. Once again the market is rife for a disruptor to make that middle ground again.
I will say I’m fuming that ever increase passes me by with my not cancelling. And that day surely will come sooner rather than later where I’ve had enough. Perhaps I’m just at the point where I admit, you should quit. Don’t do as I do, do as I say. Save your money.
