He had no intention to ever monetise the channel, but with YouTube's ToS update he had to agree that YouTube can monetise his channel even if he doesn't want it to.
Considering he's basically forced to serve ads he has no control over and he does not earn a cent from it, I'd say "lost sovereignty" holds true.
"Sovereignty" is a bizarre word here. It's a business deal. Nobody's ever "sovereign" in any exchange, it's either a good deal or not.
If he wants to pay for hosting himself, then go ahead, but no need to act like it's a question of "sovereignty". Nobody's a king here.
Perhaps the business deal was too good before, and now it's merely good? Previously it was "acceptable" for them to store and host your videos for zero cost and show them without ads, and now you think it's "unrealistic" for them to finally cover those costs with ads?
On what basis? They has an old model, build up the success of the platform, then changed the model. On what basis can we judge the new model successful versus the momentum of the old model?
Literally the line that says "YouTube ads" in their quarterly report?
2020 Q1 was $4 billion, 2021 Q1 was $6 billion. [1]
Seems like wild success to me. But, you know, keep checking for the next few quarters if you're convinced Google is killing their golden goose. They've got some pretty smart business analysts and product people over there though, I wouldn't bet against them.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20210428_alphabet_10Q.pd...
Lets turn that around. YouTube is a huge content provider that has 100 percent of their content provided FOR FREE and they feel that they can "monetize" it any way they see fit. There needs to be some balance. If enough people leave like this, there will be a credible competitor to YouTube and they'll never get those people back. Better yet, self hosting and federated services will start to become a thing and that could be an existential threat to Google itself.
But sure, they are free to do what they like on their platform. Doesn't mean it's always the best thing to do.
Not true. Creators can get paid for their video views and some make a living at it. Some of the content Google doesn't pay anything for, but tons of it (and most of the popular stuff) Google pays for on a per-view basis. It's not free to Google.
> There needs to be some balance.
That already is the balance, Google paying creators for the popular content.
(It's still kind of wierd that YouTube doesn't support simply paying for their hosting.)