Pay them for no ads? Nope, that's why I have Disconnect, Ghostery, uBlock Origin, and some userscripts enabled along with a fairly extensive HOSTS file.
If users refuse to pay for subscriptions and keep blocking ads for reasons that have nothing to do with privacy or security, pretty soon as-blockers will become illegal.
It happened before with DRM, it can always happen again. At which point people will cry out in support of privacy or security, but it will be too late, because the truth is the vast majority don’t care about privacy or security.
So yeah, keep sticking it to the man.
> If users refuse to pay for subscriptions and keep blocking ads for reasons that have nothing to do with privacy or security, pretty soon as-blockers will become illegal.
We Ad-Blocking software users laughed about that already in the 90s. Think about it. Same goes for DRM. A giant waste of money.
The net grew from then on and it still is while computing power, web design, etc. got cheaper. So how do you explain it to yourself? Just think about it for a moment.
There is no other justification then the need to generate MORE revenue. This is why you get less for more.
The more google rapes here those who make the content for them, the essence of their existence, the more they threaten this part of their business because with every step away from centralized businesses like YouTube, they'll lose revenue or good. It won't come back. Nobody is coming back to Myspace or Facebook. In the end they just need to not be popular anymore and that doesn't take much or long those days.
When an embattled government tries to kill a single insurgent sniper by leveling an entire city block using artillery, which side gains from that? Provoking responses that are perceived as wildly disproportionate is an intermediate objective of insurgents.
Out of all possibilities, not paying for a subscription while at the same time blocking their ads, is the worst path you can take.
Teach the general public to use adblockers, mpv/vlc, etc to encourage increasingly desperate responses from Alphabet. Teach people to use youtube-dl to exfiltrate data they care about, to eliminate leverage the corporation has over them. As Alphabet responds with increasing harshness, use that as further justification to get more people on your side. Every time their hand is forced and they screw over content creators even more, they lose that much more control over the situation. This form of accelerationism is a standard modern guerilla warfare tactic with proven effectiveness. This is how you fight them. Not by signing up to give them more money. No matter how much money you give them, you will never be friends with them.