Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

MUST APPEASE THE GOD OF CAPITALISM AND THE ALMIGHTY SHAREHOLDERS!

There isn't a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.

It's funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they've been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).

True but data collection is still done and generates $$$

Think about gmail & Google docs

But... But... What If I want a large cat and a tiny car?

I want my leopard riding shotgun in my smart car.

Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.

So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.

You're right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn't math.

They simultaneously introduced this ad blocker change and took away the $5 no-ads package.

This is a shakedown and it's been happening across many streaming platforms for a while now.

I don't mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they've become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I'm trying to watch and I'll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.

I'm not against using ads to support websites but it's the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.

"I'm sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable."

Who is going to tell him?