How much time does YouTube Premium save you?

You can focus on features when considering an upgrade to YouTube Premium. But if you are a frequent YouTube viewer, you should focus on the time saved.

What are the benefits of YouTube Premium?

There are more than a few benefits to moving from YouTube’s ad-supported free tier to YouTube Premium, so before we focus exclusively on what we consider to be the best feature, let’s take a look at them all.

YouTube Premium benefits include:

• Ad-free videos: Content creators can still incorporate branding and promotions into their actual videos, but you won’t see ads delivered by YouTube.
• Offline viewing: You can download video content to watch when you are somewhere without internet access.
• Continue Watching: In your web browser and on your mobile devices, YouTube will keep track of where you were in a video so you can resume it later.
• Picture-in-Picture: In the YouTube mobile app, you can watch videos while doing other things on your mobile device using the PiP feature.
• Background playback: You can minimize YouTube mobile apps and audio will continue to play in the background, so you can listen to music, lectures, and other content without keeping the app open.
• Playback Controls: You can adjust the playback speed to enjoy videos at a faster pace (like speeding up in a podcast app), and you can easily skip forward and backward through videos.
• YouTube Music Premium: Included with the YouTube Premium upgrade, you get access to YouTube Music with all of the above updates.

The most relevant feature to our discussion today, and certainly one of the main reasons someone gets YouTube Premium, is the first item on our list about: ad-free viewing.

How long do YouTube ads take up?

Ads are never fun, but when you’re a YouTube power user who watches videos every day, the sheer number of ads on YouTube gets pretty frustrating pretty quickly.

Although most ads are skippable, that requires you to pay close attention to the ad windows and select skip after 5 seconds. Otherwise, if you’re not paying close attention, you’ll easily see 15-30 seconds or more of ads. On top of that, YouTube’s ad structures and policies are constantly changing.

Tracking exactly how much time those ads take up is a bit more complicated than tracking advertising on traditional TV or even streaming services with more standardized viewing structures. Because ad content is based on what you’re watching, as well as how often you jump to new videos, the only way to estimate how much time YouTube ads are consuming is to monitor them in real-world conditions.

We monitor videos of various lengths while watching YouTube without YouTube Premium. There are two conclusions from our experience. First, the shorter the videos you watch, the more ad exposure you’ll get. Second, the variability between shorter and longer videos in terms of ad time was not as extreme as one might think, even with a larger number of videos.

If you watch a lot of short videos, you’ll find that you see around 90 seconds of ads per hour of content, assuming, of course, that you’re very vigilant about breaking that skip button.

If you watch longer videos, you’ll see around 35 seconds of ads, again, if you hit that skip button whenever you can.

For viewers hyperfocused on always skipping ads, you end up seeing significantly less ad time than if you were watching ad-supported streaming media (about 4 minutes per hour) or broadcast and cable media (about 20 minutes of ads per hour). . But again, if you’re not watching closely, you can easily get several minutes of ads during the same period.

You can check your average YouTube usage by opening the YouTube app, tapping on your profile icon, selecting “Watched Time” and reviewing the graph there. Or you can guess how much YouTube you watch based on your regular viewing habits.

Let’s say, for example, that you watch YouTube content for 2 hours a day. With 60 hours of YouTube content per month, it’s reasonable to estimate that you see at least 90 minutes of advertising.

Is it worth upgrading to YouTube Premium?

We can’t tell you how to value your time. But we can tell you that YouTube Premium costs $11.99 per month. And if you value your time at or above the US federal minimum, 90 minutes of time is $10.88. If you value your time at anything higher than that, perhaps at least the $15 minimum wage increase that many people have been advocating for years, then your 90 minutes is worth $22.50.

And if you’re considering YouTube Premium Family ($22.99 per month), you can add up to 5 family members besides yourself, bringing your cost per user down to just $3.83 per month if you fully utilize the plan.

Despite hating the subscription service trailer, I’m actually a (reluctant) fan of YouTube Premium. Ads in all their forms are unwanted, but the short, frequent, and irregular ads on YouTube are far more annoying than the traditional ads that are part of the regular TV experience.

Especially since a lot of the videos I watch are either exercise videos or DIY videos. The last thing I want is an ad in the middle of a yoga video or when I’m stuck behind my washing machine with a wrench trying to track me. And when I’m not doing those things, I just want to enjoy the video without making sure to hit the skip button.