YouTube Premium international price increase is starting. The Google video is rolling this out slowly across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America.
This comes after very aggressive changes have happened with the YouTube website with new technology that will detect Adblock addons and will display the image below until the Adblock addons are disabled or removed.
As of November 1, YouTube Premium is seeing an international price increase in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Chile, Germany, Poland, and Turkey. This applies to individual, family, and student plans for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium.
Existing subscribers will start to see the new pricing with their next billing cycle. In an announcement via email this morning, YouTube says it doesn’t “make these decisions lightly” and says the price increase will allow it to “continue to improve Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube.”
Australian subscribers were the first to get the email, seen in the image below, stating the increase with some plans almost doubling in price for higher tiers.
This price increase is happening in a piecemeal fashion across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America rather than the price going up for all countries in a region.
YouTube Premium already had a price increase in the United States back in July, but this doesn’t exempt them from another price increase soon.
YouTube Premium removes ads, adds audio-only playback for videos, and allows offline downloads. Other features include a 1080p Premium streaming quality, co-watching in Google Meet, and the ability to test features ahead of time. As a reminder, it’s cheaper to subscribe to YouTube Premium directly online rather than the iOS App Store.
Those who are trying to continue to use Adblock add-ons are getting met with threatening messages on YouTube videos stating that the player will be completely disabled unless the Adblock add-ons are removed.
In a world where we thought “cutting the cord” was a great money saver, it’s become clear that corporate greed will always win out. Netflix recently blocked account sharing and then raised prices. Today, having the multiple streaming services needed to watch content costs more than what cable does, but licensing has eroded cable to the point that it’s unwatchable, forcing us into expensive streaming services… The customer can never win.