As I’m sure many who are reading this can agree, I love saving money wherever I can. Mostly this means that I get my groceries at Sobeys on a Tuesday for that sweet 10% student discount, but that’s just scratching the surface of savings. Food, flight, and entertainment all offer themselves at a discounted price to assist the struggling student. Joining the fight is YouTube with their Premium subscription service.
YouTube premium offers patrons a seamless video service, giving their supporters ad-free videos, the ability to download certain videos for whenever you want to watch them, and access to Youtube Music Premium, their own music app. Membership also allows you to enable background play, where the YouTube video will continue to play uninterrupted if you open up a new app on your device. The service has a special offer for students, with a verification of enrolment they can access Youtube Premium for $6.99 with the first month being free.
But even at this low subscription fee, is YouTube Premium really worth it?
In my opinion, even the 40% price drop from the base Youtube Premium fee to the student discounted fee doesn’t make up for the lack of content presented by YouTube Premium. Some people may find ads to be incredibly annoying and ruin the experience of their videos, but as a guy who grew up with television have three-minute breaks right in the middle of an episode, a maximum 30-second wait is not worth the fuss the pay money just to skip them. The other features do not help much. Having downloadable videos may sound nice, but most videos are barely 15 minutes long, and the videos that may take several hours to watch often offer podcasts or other services that don’t require people to people to pay to watch their videos when they don’t have access to the internet.
Even the special YouTube Music Premium pales in comparison to other services such as Spotify, and websites like flvto.biz also people to convert YouTube videos into mp3 files.
Even the exclusive shows are not worth $6.99 a month. I can’t speak for the quality of programming as I haven’t seen much of it, but many of the series are focused on specific YouTube personalities, so unless you’re a fan of people such as Jake Paul and Pewdiepie, you likely won’t get much out of it. The majority of their original shows last for only one short season, and the shows that do get praise and attention tend to be shipped off to other platforms that offer more entertainment for their price, such as Cobra Kai on Netflix or Step Up: High Water on Starz.
Overall, Youtube Premium is a subscription service that honestly does not deserve your well-earned coins. Some may find the lack of ads and collection of original content a godsend, but it seems like YouTube trying to squeeze every last cent from their users by offering useless services instead of trying to improve the website for non-Premium users.
