Pay ad company with my personal data and money, while they still will display ads?! What kind of argument it is?
(Of course it's true you'll still see shill review videos, and video creators doing ad reads for shitty VPNs - but those ads don't come from google)
> What kind of argument it is?
Back in the 2000s, on tech forums whenever someone would say "ad blocking is theft, server costs have to be paid somehow" someone would respond "I'd pay to remove ads if they'd let me" - well, now's our chance to do exactly that.
I adblock everything myself - but I earn a mid-career adult's salary now, and I get more value from Youtube than I do from Netflix so I don't mind paying for it. I also use gmail, google search and google maps with ads blocked, so I don't mind giving google a few bucks a month.
For now.... Until they decide to increase the price of ad free premium and introduce a new tier at the original price that includes ads.
It's the same argument people made about how if you get free stuff you should expect ads and if you don't like things then pay for them. It turns out the things we paid for just started including ads as well.
Sure, but if that happens you cancel then. Not paying now because it might get worse in the future seems a bit backward.
Unfortunately the enshittification of the whole experience is almost guaranteed, I agree with you there. But for now Youtube Premium is very much worth it when watching a lot. I have watched >160 hours since January [0] and am super happy with it. I always use an ad blocker so my experience hasn't changed. But it feels like the right thing to do. Also because content creators get more money per view from premium users. And because I pay for the family plan I don't have to be subjected to overhearing ads played by my immediate family either.
[0] Youtube shows stats on the account page on how much the premium features were used since going premium.
They promised the same thing with cable TV when it was new.
But you still have to sit through the sponsor segments, right? Which are getting increasingly egregious - I've seen 12 minute videos with almost 3 minutes of sponsor fluff in the middle.
(Although if YouTube Premium has a better recommendation algorithm, I'd definitely pay for that given the current one is garbage.)
If you don't like this, I suppose you can block the channels that do this and only watch amateur channels that aren't in it for the money. Or they make their money from Patreon or other sources.
You'll be paying, and _still_ be the product all around the web.