There are billions of absolutely fantastic videos that took exactly zero in production cost, nobody's forcing anyone to invest more than that.

If people want to base their main income on making free online videos than that's their problem. Some will then try to disingenuously guilt trip people on patreon and similar, and there are those who go get themselves some sponsors like a proper advertising business does. Do these creators classify themselves as a non-profit org? Because that's who runs on donations.

Big assumption that ad provider is acting ethically; almost never the case.

I hope all YouTube creators go out of business. That way - no more YouTube addiction.

Ignore the dissenters, I agree. people will pay $15 for Netflix and use it once a month but won't pay $11 for YouTube that they use every day. the insistence that YouTube should be a service that just houses all of our videos for free in perpetuaty never made sense to me.

Depending on what type of video you're watching (pay depend on variables), your one view is probably worth a whopping $0.01. At that point you might be better off asking nicely for Patreon subs, considering about 0.5-2% of your followers convert to Patreon subs (and tiers usually start at or above $2), instead of annoying your viewers with horrible ads. Even creator-made shoutouts to products are more pleasant than the jarring built-in YouTube adverts, and that's before you consider that they're immediately skippable. And when you consider all the awful things advertisers are forcing YouTube to do in order to make the platform better for themselves and worse for users, it gets even more spicy.

That deal is mostly forced by google, not the will of the creator.

And that's a great model. Ask for support, enough people offer it. Don't add paywall, the extra exposure will attract more people and statistically more payments. The whole ad driven model only works for the 'growth at all costs', VC financed platforms. To buy into their narrative whole sale is just naive. It's arguably quite detrimental because it incentivizes a race to the bottom with dark patterns fostering addiction (the very subject of this whole discussion). There are entire networks of content producers making millions by creating purposefully stupid and misleading videos on TikTok and YouTube, infuriating people driving engagement.

It does work in Firefox for Android (my go-to), and you fan also cast using it

On mobile there's still unmaintained Vanced until Youtube breaks it by changing the API, and also Blokada 5 and a few others for general app/web ad blocking.

If you are on android, use Libretube or newpipe

There is this on iOS haven't tried it though

https://github.com/yattee/yattee

Lol no. Don't equate avoiding ads online with stealing.

Pro tip: instead of going to your favourite shop by car paying lots of gas, get in there free on feet.

If you actually believe that's a great analogy/comeback, I'm sorry for all the precious hours of your life you choose to - falsely thinking your are somehow norally obliged to - lose to a ridiculous amount of soul-sucking advertisements instead of simply directly donating to your favorite content creators to satisfy your feeling of debt.