How To Get Your Money’s Worth From YouTube Premium

YouTube Premium has been a topic of fierce debate over the years, with some users baffled that anybody would pay to avoid ads on the video platform while others insist it’s worth every penny. That debate was re-roiled in April, when YouTube once again raised the price of Premium. In addition to its main selling point of doing away with pre- and mid-roll advertisements, Premium also grants access to YouTube Music, allows in-app video downloads for offline viewing and lets mobile users keep videos playing in the background while using other apps.

Whether you’re likely to find a YouTube Premium subscription valuable depends largely on whether you’re taking full advantage of its benefits. The bundled perks range from a slightly improved video viewing experience to the aforementioned main draws. It can also depend on how much you’re paying, since it’s often possible to find discounts bundled with other goods and services. YouTube has also rolled out a Premium Lite tier which does away with some features in exchange for a reduced price of $9 a month, but we’re strictly looking at the full-fat version of the service here. That’s the tier that starts at about $16 a month. 

With all that in mind, here are just a few ways to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth from YouTube Premium.

If you’re already in the process of buying a new smartphone or tablet, keep an eye out for bundled YouTube Premium credit. The same goes when shopping at certain stores, signing up for service with certain wireless carriers and more. Many products and services come packaged with an offer for multiple free months of YouTube Premium. Depending on how you shop, you can end up going a long time without paying a subscription fee.

At the more generous end of the spectrum, you can get six months of free Google Premium if you sign up for Google Fi. As of this writing, that deal is being offered with new subscriptions to the Unlimited Premium tier of Google’s mobile virtual network operator. The company is also currently offering three free months with a new Pixel 10a smartphone. In some cases, you can stack deals. However, read the fine print. While I was able to activate the Google Fi offer on top of my existing subscription when I was purchasing a line for a recent phone review, the details of the Pixel offer stipulate that it is only valid for new YouTube Premium subscribers. A couple of years back, I ended up with an entire free year of YouTube Premium after buying a new Samsung Galaxy phone and tablet (Samsung has no existing YouTube Premium offers as of this writing).

YouTube is of course hoping you’ll keep your subscription going after these freebies expire, but there’s no penalty for cancellations. Even if you stay aboard, you’re reducing the overall cost of the service  — if six months of a year-long subscription are free, that’s equivalent to paying half-price for the whole year.

If you have an active YouTube Premium subscription, you automatically have access to YouTube Music. If you’re paying for a separate service such as Spotify or Apple Music, it’s worth giving YouTube Music a shot (and canceling the other subs) to save some coin — especially if you don’t care about enthusiast features like lossless audio, or if you already use YouTube to listen to your favorite music. That listening history means you can hit the ground running, with YouTube Music already keyed into your tastes. In my testing, I’ve found its automatic playlists and mixes to be great at dredging up songs I’d forgotten about, and reasonably good when it comes to new music discovery.

If you’ve got a large library of local music files, YouTube Music is a great way to listen on the go. From your computer, you can drag tracks directly into the browser-based app. Once uploaded and processed, they will show up in your library on any device. Unlike other services that allow local uploads, such as Apple Music, YouTube Music has a handy Uploads tab in its mobile apps, allowing you to keep your streaming library separate from your personal one.

Because it’s a Google product, YouTube Music is also well integrated with Google Home, Android Auto, Google TV and Gemini. It also includes podcasts, since YouTube itself is home to a vast number of audio-first shows. Whether you find YouTube Music fit to purpose for your musical needs will depend on whether you can accept the YouTube way of doing things. But if you’re considering a paid YouTube subscription, the odds are greater that you’ll appreciate it.

Another benefit of YouTube Premium is the ability to cache videos for local playback in the mobile app for iOS and Android, as well as in the browser-based desktop version of YouTube. If you have unlimited wireless data and live in an area with good coverage, this may not matter much to you. But if you’re a frequent flier, commute on the subway, have spotty coverage where you live, or have limited data on your wireless plan, it’s worth taking advantage of.

While connected to Wi-Fi or wireless 4G and 5G, you can download videos from the three-dot context menu alongside each video listing. You can then access them by tapping the You tab in the bottom right of the app and selecting Downloads. If there’s a particularly long video you’d like to enjoy during a flight, or without interruption while riding your city’s metro train, downloads are a great way to avoid dealing with fiddly and expensive airplane Wi-Fi or spotty underground connections.

Smart Downloads is a related feature. When you connect to Wi-Fi, it automatically downloads the videos YouTube’s algorithm thinks you’ll be the most likely to watch. When you’ve finished watching a downloaded video, the app can clear it out of your device’s memory to free up space. Smart Downloads is on by default for Premium members, which can be frustrating for some users (it me). Not only does Smart Downloads chew through your battery at inopportune times, but downloads are capped at 1080p resolution, making them frustrating for those with 1440p or 4K displays. Thankfully, it can be disabled from the Downloads section of the app’s settings menu.

One of the most useful perks included with a YouTube Premium subscription is background play. By default, the YouTube apps for iOS and Android will pause a video when you exit them, but if you have YouTube Premium, videos will continue to play as you do other things on your phone or tablet. Until recently, the clever workaround was to load YouTube up in a browser like Chrome, but Google put the kibosh on that earlier this year. This is blatant rent-seeking from Google — it’s not as though there’s a cost to such a bog-standard feature which might justify paywalling it — but even so, it’s a valuable part of the YouTube subscription package.

Background play is especially handy for podcast addicts, especially if you tend to ignore the video elements and leave your favorite microphone-toting yappers on in the background while washing the dishes. It’s also great for joggers, cyclists and other outdoorspeople. Android users should be aware of one issue, though. Due to the operating system’s often aggressive battery management, the notoriously power-hungry YouTube app is one of the first background processes to be killed. This can result in a background video stopping abruptly, forcing you to open the app and press play.

There is one workaround left for free users. Picture-in-picture mode lets your video keep playing in a small window in the corner of your screen while you use your device outside the YouTube app. YouTube rolled out picture-in-picture to all users earlier this year. Even so, playback will still stop when you turn your screen off.

Lastly, those willing to pony up for YouTube Premium gain access to experimental features and features in beta. Nowadays, these are more often than not AI-related. As of this writing, the only available opt-in feature is an “Ask YouTube” search mode based on Google’s Gemini AI model. Such are the times. But in other cases, you’ll get more useful changes to your YouTube experience.

In April, YouTube rolled out the Auto Speed feature to Premium users. If you’re the kind of person who boosts the playback speed of lengthy videos, this feature is a game changer. Instead of uniformly adjusting speed at a fixed rate, it will adjust the speed intelligently based on what’s happening in the video. For instance, it will speed up when someone is talking slowly, or slow down when complex information is being discussed. (Aside, Premium users also get access to faster playback speeds up to 3.0x for the brainiacs who can process a million words a minute, and can use a more granular slider to control the speed.)

Another useful feature exclusive to Premium has been the Jump Ahead button. When you double tap your screen to skip ten seconds, the button surfaces in the bottom right of the player. Tapping it scrubs you to the place most viewers skip to, allowing you to easily evade sponsored segments and rendering your experience truly ad-free.

It’s these little touches that make YouTube Premium more than the pay-to-escape scheme for ad-averse users its detractors paint it as. Other quality of life improvements like higher bitrate and higher-fidelity audio are hard to give up once you’ve accustomed yourself to them.