We all need YouTube, and Google definitely knows this. Where else are you going to find a DIY guide or a frame-by-frame breakdown of the newest Marvel Spider-Man trailer to find Easter eggs?
But lately it has gone from something I delightfully use to something I have to put up with.
It used to be a few seconds of ads in return for useful information. Now, the skip button might as well not exist. It’s just unskippable ads and mid-roll cuts one after another.
To understand what the platform has turned into, I sat through an hour of free YouTube, and I have never felt more disrespected.
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YouTube’s early 2026 crackdown shows just how far it will go
It has not been a good start to 2026 for free YouTube users. 2025 was already bad, Q1 made it worse.
In late January 2026, YouTube began shutting popular loopholes for background playback on mobile via third-party browsers like Brave and Samsung Internet. Although some, like Brave, are resisting.
People who used to bypass the Premium fee with browsers like Brave or Samsung Internet can no longer do it.
The app now detects background playback and kills the stream if the tab is not active. YouTube pulled in over $60 billion in revenue in 2025. This isn’t a company fighting to survive.
YouTube has already won the streaming wars, but clearly believes there’s no such thing as enough revenue. Come on, Google. It’s so petty to lock multitasking behind a paywall.
Premium Lite proves how much the free version has regressed
Google has rolled out its Premium Lite tier in more countries, including the US, for about $8 a month. On the surface, it seems like a good deal for viewers watching their wallets.
Dig a little deeper, and you see the irony. Premium Lite is Google asking you to pay for what free users enjoyed ten years ago. The Lite tier only removes ads from “most” videos.
Try to play a DJ set in the background or download a dance video, and the app will quickly remind you that you’re not paying enough.
The ad-blocker fight is over and YouTube has won
The battle between YouTube and ad-blockers was always a game of cat and mouse.
YouTube would send a video file and an ad file separately, and your blocker would tell the browser to ignore the ad file. But Google has recently changed the rules, and old blockers are now useless.
Google used Server-Side Ad Injection. Instead of sending the video and ad separately, the ad is baked right into the video.
February brought another hit. Reddit users started seeing missing comments and video descriptions when using content blockers.
The usual defense is that YouTube has always had ads. People bring up the early 2010s and insist we should just be thankful for free content.
We indeed should be grateful. YouTube is a business with servers and creators who need to be paid. But a 5-second skippable ad is nothing like the 30-second unskippable ads that YouTube is serving now.
This hostile strategy is what forces users to find workarounds to make YouTube tolerable.
The VPN loophole is gone, and so is the cheap Premium
Lucas Gouveia / Android Police
Power users used a simple trick to beat YouTube’s regional pricing. They’d connect through a VPN in countries with weaker currencies like Argentina or Turkey, paying the equivalent of $1 or $2 a month.
Google closed this loophole too in 2024. YouTube started aggressively detecting and canceling subscriptions bought via VPNs, and in some cases even threatened account suspensions.
Google is locking users into their regional pricing zones, forcing people in the US, UK, and Australia to pay top dollar. One by one, the loopholes are gone, leaving you with a single costly way out.
The free experience is worse, so Premium feels necessary
This brings us to the core issue. YouTube Premium has become a ransom you pay because the free experience has become unbearable.
Google has purposefully worsened the free version to make a $14 per month subscription feel like a sweet relief rather than an upsell.
The pricing has become predatory, especially internationally. In Australia, where I reside, the Family plan recently rose from $33 AUD to $40 AUD.
If you subscribe on iOS, the fee could be more, thanks to Apple’s tax and Google’s unwillingness to cover it.
Unfortunately, there is no real alternative. Google has a monopoly on the world’s video archives, and it’s pushing to meet our tolerance limit.
