The best part is that Youtube ad revenue is low enough that everyone who can is doing their own sponsor segments, so paying for Youtube to remove their ads doesn't remove a lot of the ads. The only way to an ad-free experience is adblock+sponsorblock.

I was happy to pay for YT Premium when there was a loophole so you could sign up from a far cheaper country. I paid about £6 a month for the family plan, purely so I could watch on Apple TV without having to tolerate adverts.

Then they closed the loophole, shitcanned our premium, and demanded £20 for the same experience. We had Netflix at the time, which was cheaper. So I made a little app as a frontend for yt-dlp, and downloaded what I wanted to watch into my Jellyfin server.

Fuck Google.