Don't want to be the product ? Pay for your services then - the money has to come from somewhere.
I paid for netflix, lastpass and zoom. I still pay for dynalist, audible or for having my own email address.
However, I'm not OK with having a logged in google account that accumulates everything I do into their DB and AI while I use their services.
Even when you pay, they still milk your private life.
And they have proved time after time they cannot be trusted with it.
Netflix business is not to accumulate data on you and resell it, or to display ads.
Netflix was not part of the PRISM program.
Netflix is not Google.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6139018?co=GENIE....
I don't believe one second there is a way to opt out of Google tracking you. At best, you can lower the settings on how much it displays the informations it has on you.
So ad blocking puts the user in a funny position. It let's them continue to look at things they don't value much. And I think content creaters looking for views probably would rather complain about ad blockers than give users an ultimatum that could result in them just going somewhere else.
I must admit I would only subscribe to a written publication if I get a printed copy occasionally, but anyway like youtube I don't find individual peaces of content worth it I might find the publication valuable.
I don't see myself paying for blog article access ever - if you write outside of some publication it should either be self-promotion, exercise, or a labor of love and desire for exposure - attempting to monetise that sucks with advertising or without it - don't write those kinds of things.
I feel the same about OSS projects.
A way to invert this is to do a lot of good content consistently so you become a consistent source of valuable material - then it could fit Patreon model but I must admit I've haven't encountered someone I would sponsor like this yet. I will think about it more in the future.
To be perfectly clear I have no desire to see any ads, and I don't cos I block pretty much every last one (squid) but if there are sites that are worth reading, like from here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157722 well, author's got to make money for the time they put in.
Advertisers can die in rotting heaps, but they exist because people make them exist. They exist because you want free stuff.
And what about OSS devs who have their stuff used by you but you won't pay?
> There is no indication that throwing money at companies decreases ads
Pocket change isn't "throwing money". But the converse is true, you don't pay, ads appear. If not, where - be specific - does the money to run the site come from?
Also as someone pointed out before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179379 "You can pay for YouTube premium and get rid of ads" so it seems paying does indeed decrease ads. There's the evidence.
If ads aren't a perfect fit then they'll still try to add other revenue models to things you've paid for -- smart TVs selling data about what you watch or which products your conversations are about, car diagnostic products shipping a patch to only work if you start shipping them location data, large companies like Garmin buying up smaller companies and cancelling any lifetime accounts in favor of a subscription model (and vehemently denying that it's a money-grab), needing a Facebook account to use your Oculus, and so on.
If they're able to extract more value from you without excessive negative repercussions then they will, independently of what's "right" or legal.
To try to answer you anyway, they've put a fair bit of engineering effort into making YT mildly painful to use without Premium -- things like not allowing sound to play when the screen is off (and covering your screen in ads for Premium if you wake up the phone to a running YT instance). I'm sure some people pay for Premium to improve that experience.