Yeah - YouTube is one of the few services that actually allows you to pay to escape the ads. If you value that, pay for it (I do). This doesn't free you from "sponsored content" from the creators themselves, but that's generally easier to bypass.
I wish it also allowed you to escape the incentives that cause them to design the app to be crappy (default to 'home' instead of subscriptions), but at least they also let you turn all of that tracking/history off.
If only the other ad-driven services allowed such an escape hatch.
When I realized that Facebook would not let me pay $5 / mo to opt out of ads on their platform, subscribing to YouTube was a no-brainer.
Our family uses YouTube for so much education and entertainment, paying $16/mo or whatever it costs for a family plan is a no-brainer. YouTube is one of my favorite parts about the modern Internet, and I want to directly pay to support it and its content creators.
Both are easy to bypass with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock. Not all videos are indexed by SponsorBlock but between helping out on my own marking the ad timestamps and the huge amount of people already doing so, I barely ever see an ad on YouTube. And that goes for both mobile (polymorphicshade's fork of NewPipe) and Android TV (SmartTube Next) as well.
I agree. Of all the "premium" services from any company, I find TY Premium to be near or at the top as far as cost/benefit.
My main complaint is that I cannot sign up for YT Premium Family on my Google Workspace account where my family members have lots of YT history under their emails.
I wish it also allowed you to escape the incentives that cause them to design the app to be crappy (default to 'home' instead of subscriptions), but at least they also let you turn all of that tracking/history off.
If only the other ad-driven services allowed such an escape hatch.