If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.
No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.
If hosting content online for free isn't working for you, maybe that's not a commercial space worth occupying. Not everything deserves to be paid for, "selfish" or not. Users, aka "the market," will decide if your product is usable despite the income generating parts.
Marginally related, if your business isn't profitable enough to pay your employees a livable wage, then maybe your business isn't actually profitable enough to, well, be "in business."
We haven't even reached the real arms race yet, and people are already talking like adblockers won.
Let's pick this convo back up at least when ad networks like Adsense let you proxy through your server, ending an entire class of adblocking at once. And that's not the end of the low-hanging fruit.
Perhaps I don't do it personally because I'm a Communist.
Are they giving out free videos? The content creator gets to choose how to monetize, right? The platform does allow for free, and the creator chose to get paid.
Clearly your time isn't valuable, as you spend it watching content you value at $0.
If the content you watched and hence the time you spent watching it actually held value to you, you would be happy to pay the meagre $10/mo subscription fee.
Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
Water is a commodity, it doesn't require you to contribute for it to be available, it's ubiquitous and cheap. I pay less than I value it at, yes, as a price has been set and there's no method or reason to pay more for it.
YouTube content however is not a commodity and the amount of money that goes into it affects the quality and quantity of content available. Throw $10m at water, you get nothing meaningfully better. Throw $10m at YouTube creators, you get a new major original series or a few small ones.
> Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
And they can pay for it with ads.
The price for the content has been set. You can choose to pay for it or you can choose to essentially steal it.