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The hope for many, perhaps a vain one, is that negatively impacting technical organizations (open source projects or MIT's ability to host computer science course videos) will have a disproportionate effect on the developers of youtube who on average might care about about these sort of organizations more than others. It could hurt youtube developer morale and/or their ability to recruit.

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More basically, I only see their ads because there are non-ad videos that draw me to the site and give me a reasonable average impression of the combination of content and ads I see. Remove non-ad videos from YouTube and you would need to cut ads down by 50% to retain viewers like me.. the lower split of sharing on all content and/or lower viewer numbers will further dustress people with ads enabled on their content.. pushing them further into a death spiral of low profitability, poor content and inadequate incentives for the commercial content they apparently want.

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