Popular opinion: Youtube premium is laughably overpriced (in the UK anyway) due to bundling with the totally unrelated youtube music service.
The premium cost of 11.99 GBP per month gets you:
* No ads.
* Additional music service I don't want.
* No additional made-for-youtube video content that I'm aware of.
* The app removes one user-hostile non-feature: it no longer refuses to play audio while in the background (iOS).
* The app gains no new features, The iOS system wide Picture-in-picture that every other video service supports is still blocked, including from the Safari browser.
Considering that I get the only features I want in desktop Firefox for free, it's incredibly poor value and badly marketed. They could get perhaps 2 GBP a month for no ads, but their other user hostile behaviour on iOS and that price makes it a joke.
The ads are so intrusive, frequent and low quality that I just stopped using youtube on iOS completely. Good job.
I set Insight [0] browser as the default browser on my iPhone and iPad just so that I can click links to YouTube that I get sent without having to watch some of the worst advertising ever produced. I still actually _use_ Safari as my main browser though.
I did yet I still get the embedded ads (lots of VPNs,“brilliant“ subscriptions) YouTubers rely on to make a living because while YouTube shares Premium revenues with Creators it doesn’t allow them to enable a version of their Videos without „sponsored content“ for subscribers.
And whats more, because the YouTube Algorithm is totally broken with regards to recency bias, if friends send me links to YouTube Videos that are even slightly political, or related to covid, or any more popular category than what I like to watch, then I have to open them in an incognito tab and get all the ads because I don’t want to have my feed filled with that kind of content for weeks.
When I use the App it even features it’s own incognito mode but even though I’m logged in the app, when I switch to incognito it shows me ads. So yea ad blocking is the best option as long as it remains feasible.