Will Google One ever include YouTube Premium?

The service people most want from Google One is YouTube Premium. That is the holy grail for a Google subscription and calls for it will only increase now that Nest Aware and Fitbit Premium are coming — starting in the UK — at no extra cost.

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Fitbit Premium did not make sense at $9.99 per month, and was only slightly better at $79.99 annually. Of course, the pricing was carried over from when Fitbit was a standalone company, but $9.99 for Premium versus 2 TB of Google One storage is no contest in terms of value and utility.

I’m very curious to see if the standalone Fitbit Premium offering gets a price cut to make it more attractive. Something like $4.99 per month or $49.99/year feels like it would be more palatable to the average consumer as a splurge.

Its integration into Google One makes a great deal of sense, especially when framed as enhancing your Google hardware. If you have a Pixel phone, Google One gives you additional storage for Photos, as well as Drive and Gmail, a VPN, more features in Google Meet and Calendar, and 10% back from Google Store purchases for accessories or your next device. Google One now extends to Pixel Watch and Nest Cam owners.

Anyways, I personally don’t think Google One with YouTube Premium will ever happen in the way people want. A $9.99/month Google One plan will never include YouTube Premium at no extra cost.

I assume that every penny of YouTube Premium’s $13.99 is accounted for. There is presumably some Google margin in that price, but it might not even be that much given the upkeep involved in maintaining YouTube servers (storage, processing, etc.) and bandwidth. Another tangible cost is paying for music rights and Creators as part of the ad-free experience.

That said, I think it would make a great deal of strategic sense for there to be an all-in-one Google subscription in some form.

The realistic way to implement that would be giving those that subscribe to Google One a slight discount — to the tune of $2-3, realistically speaking — when adding YouTube Premium. It’s not the big deal people expect, but it would look very good tactically and encourage subscriptions to both services.