YouTube Premium Lite is coming back, but there’s a problem

YouTube briefly offered a Premium Lite subscription to select EU countries before discontinuing it in October 2023. This tier costs half the price of Premium and offers an ad-free viewing experience without any of the other perks associated with Premium with full price. subscription. Recent reports, along with a confirmation from Android Authority, confirm that Premium Lite is back, but it looks like it will no longer be completely ad-free.

Recently, some screenshots spotted by several users on Reddit and Threads (via Android Authority) started to surface where they spotted a new Premium Lite option when signing up for a paid tier. The Lite was shown to be almost half the regular price of the Premium, with the Premium costing $22.99 and the Lite costing $11.99.

Just a day later, Google confirmed to the site that the Lite tier is back. “We are testing a different version of Premium Lite, and some users in Australia, Germany and Thailand may see the option to sign up,” he said. It’s still unclear exactly how this version will be different and whether or not it will be available in the US.

However, there was something about these images that caught our attention. This time, unlike the first time Premium Lite was available, it does not offer a completely ad-free experience and has quietly switched to “Limited Ads”. I’m not on YouTube Premium yet and I was thinking about subscribing to Lite if I go to the US, but the limited ad feature put me off. This is mainly because an ad-free experience is all the Lite tier offers (and did). The rest of the perks – offline downloads, background playback, and YouTube Music Premium – are YouTube Premium features. So it’s a shame to know that it will no longer do the only job it has: removing ads.

Hopefully things will change when the level is officially released. It’s confusing what Google is trying to do by ending the Lite subscription just two years after introducing it in 2021, limiting availability to specific countries in the EU, suddenly bringing the tier back in such a discreet way, and bringing “limited” ads to this.

With the recent crackdown on one of the world’s most popular ad blockers (and my old favorite), uBlock Origin, I need confirmation on Premium Lite details more than ever. The Verge recently reported that the adblocker is being phased out completely as Chrome has started to automatically disable the extension. uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill has republished a tweet which showed Chrome informing a user that the ad blocker was “no longer supported.”

Google’s war on ad blockers is not new. Just a few months ago, it launched a new defense strategy that automatically skipped videos to the end whenever you tried to watch YouTube with an ad blocker turned on. It also tested showing viewers a painfully long, unskippable loading screen to stop them from using ad-blocking extensions.

Up until now, at least, ad blockers have always reverse-engineered Google’s code fairly quickly and addressed every new strategy incorporated by YouTube. The complete withdrawal of support for uBlock Origin and a more affordable tier for an ad-free (or limited ad) experience makes it clear that Google is tired of this years-long cat and mouse game between its products (YouTube) and ad blockers. It aims to completely eliminate shortcuts that don’t line your pockets and instead introduce more palatable solutions that users are more inclined to embrace.