You might focus on the features when considering a YouTube Premium upgrade. But if you’re a frequent YouTube viewer, you should be focused on the time saved instead.

What Are the Benefits of YouTube Premium?

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

Thebenefits of YouTube Premiuminclude:

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

How Much Time Do YouTube Ads Take Up?

Ads are never fun, but when you’re a YouTube power user watching 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 sit through 15 to 30 seconds or more of ads. On top of that,YouTube ad structures and policiesare constantly changing.

Tracking exactly how much time those ads take up is a bit trickier than tracking advertising on traditional broadcast TV or even streaming services with more standardized viewing structures. Because ad content is based on what you’re watching as well as the frequency with which you jump to new videos, the only way to estimate how much time is getting chewed up by YouTube ads is to monitor it under real-world conditions.

For viewers hyperfocused on always skipping ads, you end up seeing significantly less ad time than you would if you were watching ad-supported streaming media (around 4 minutes per hour) or broadcast and cable media (about 20 minutes of ads per hour). But again, if you aren’t watching closely, you may easily get multiple minutes of ads over the same period.

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

Let’s say, for the sake of example, that you watch YouTube content for 2 hours per day. At 60 hours of YouTube content per month, it is 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 U.S. federal minimum, 90 minutes of time is $10.88. If you value your time at anything higher than that, perhaps at least at the $15 minimum wage increase many people have been championing for years, then your 90 minutes are worth $22.50.

And if you’re considering YouTube Premium Family ($22.99 per month), you’re able to add up to 5 family members in addition to yourself which brings your cost per user down to only $3.83 per month if you fully utilize the plan.

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