Canceling YouTube Premium Made Me Feel More in Control

I canceled YouTube Premium after about ten years, and somehow ended up feeling more in control of YouTube, not less. I had been using it since the very beginning, back when it was still called YouTube Red.

Then there was another price increase. I canceled my subscription. My mother canceled hers too.

My mother and I live alone in different houses, so we had been paying separately even though she is basically my only family. In a strange way, I am now glad YouTube did not make it easy for us to just stay together on a family plan. Canceling made me realize something I had suspected for a long time: no YouTube Premium may actually be better.

I have always thought Google cares more about free users than paid users.

The first thing I expected to hate was ads.

Before canceling, I had seen a lot of complaints from free users about how annoying the ads had become. To be honest, my reaction was not that sympathetic. If they did not like the ads, they could pay for Premium. Or they could stop watching YouTube. YouTube is useful, but it is not essential for life.

But somehow, they were not that annoying.

Shorts did not show any ads. Even if YouTube adds ads to Shorts later, it would not bother me much as long as I can swipe up right away to skip them. If YouTube makes Shorts too annoying, there are too many alternatives now.

Normal videos were also not as painful as I expected. Maybe YouTube is still learning what ads to show me because I had not watched ads for so long. Or maybe I am already used to the crazy ads in some mobile games, so YouTube ads feel normal by comparison.

Either way, I really did not feel the pain from YouTube ads as much as I expected.

Offline Downloads

Offline downloads used to be useful.

I used them mostly for flights. I kept some videos downloaded, and smart downloads would automatically load some videos for me. That was convenient.

But now I realize I do not need it that much.

On recent flights, I could just use the Wi-Fi. It was enough to stream YouTube videos. I already have a Wi-Fi plan. And even if the Wi-Fi is not good enough, there are many other things I can do.

Maybe I simply do not need to watch YouTube on an airplane.

That sounds obvious, but subscriptions are good at making conveniences feel like necessities.

YouTube Music

I also expected to miss YouTube Music.

Then I realized I do not listen to music as often as I thought.

I used to expect YouTube Music to have a great magical algorithm. Google has YouTube. It knows so much about what people listen to. When YouTube Music first came out, I thought it would keep improving and eventually become great.

But it is still not that great for me.

It either plays music too repetitive to what I already listened to, or the new music it adds is bad. When I actually want to find new music, I often use other music services or even FM radio.

So after canceling, I did not feel a big loss there either.

Being a Free User Feels Better

This is the part that surprised me.

I am happier being a free user.

I have always believed Google has a strong culture where many employees think free users are more important than paid users. That makes sense from their point of view. More revenue comes from free users. The company was built around ads. The default user, culturally and economically, is the free user.

Because of that, I do not think paid users are always taken as seriously as they should be.

Sometimes it feels like the company thinks it is doing paid users a favor, instead of treating paid users as the people who should get priority when they have problems. The paid user is not really the center of the system. The ad-supported free user is.

That sounds strange, but I think YouTube makes it true.

The Power Dynamics

The real question is: who is in control?

For many subscription products, paid users are in control. If paid users leave, the company loses money directly. So the company has to care about what those users think.

But YouTube Premium is different.

With YouTube Premium, YouTube is in control. Paid users have already shown that they care enough about YouTube to pay for it. They have sunk cost. They are dependent on the product. And if they become unhappy, there is not a very organic way to express that dissatisfaction other than canceling.

But canceling Premium does not mean YouTube loses you completely.

If I cancel Premium and keep watching YouTube, YouTube can still make money from ads. So from their perspective, losing me as a Premium user is not the same as losing me as a YouTube user.

That changes the incentives.

With YouTube Free, I think the user has more control. If there are too many ads, or if the ads are too long, or if there is no quick skip button, I can stop watching immediately. I can close the app. I can go somewhere else.

Then YouTube actually loses my attention.

Their algorithm has to care about that. It has to avoid making the experience too bad, at least for me, because the business depends on keeping free users watching.

Why Premium Prices Can Keep Going Up

This is why I think YouTube Premium prices can go up almost unboundedly.

Of course there is some limit. But compared to ads, the limit is much looser.

YouTube is not as afraid of losing paid users as it is of losing free users. They may say they care about Premium churn, and I am sure they do care at some level. But if users like me leave Premium, we may still watch YouTube with ads.

So the revenue does not necessarily disappear. It just changes form.

Ads are different. They cannot increase ads blindly forever. There is an upper bound. If ads become too annoying, free users leave the platform, or at least watch less. That is much more dangerous.

So when YouTube has pressure to increase revenue, the easier solution is to raise the subscription price, not increase the ad load too much.

The Premium user is easier to squeeze.

Freedom

I did not expect canceling YouTube Premium to feel like freedom, but it does.

I am less dependent on YouTube now. If an ad is annoying, I close the app. If the experience gets worse, I will visit less. I no longer feel like I need to justify a subscription by using the product more.

That is a better relationship.

It is funny that becoming a free user can make me feel more in control. But on an ad-driven platform, that may be exactly how the incentives work: a paid user is valuable, but a free user can leave at any moment.