If Youtube makes it impossible to watch videos without ads, I will quit Youtube, not my adblocker.
I will not watch ads.
That sort of asymmetry is why giant companies can't stamp out piracy as well.
In my opinion, what they are looking for is not to cut down the costs but to increase the revenue. Either by more people watching ads or by more people using their paid service.
Plus hosting your own videos is pretty cheap nowadays.
Exactly. Decades ago, I remember *paying* for my first cable subscription. I was shocked at the number of commercials (ads) I was bombarded with. It only got worse... higher cable fees, more ads.
They can't have it both ways. I cut the cord many years ago (pre-streaming), never looked back.
There are other costs such as music licensing, moderation and paying content creators.
What if adblockers contribute to a video going viral? Or even sharing a video with family/friends who may not have an adblocker installed? What if I'm a content creator who uses adblock and now I share my content elsewhere? What if I'm a content creator primarily funded by Patreon and many of my viewers were adblock users and I move to another platform to retain my patrons and now YouTube loses money on all my subscribers who weren't adblockers? What if enough people are exiled that the go to place to watch new videos is no longer YouTube but Vimeo or another competitor? Social media sites rely pretty heavily on network effects and if enough users leave (Myspace, Digg) a competitor will fill the space (Facebook, Reddit).
The gamble here is that more people will subscribe than people who will leave. Which is likely true but it could have knock on effects.
If you downloaded the videos and torrented/streamed them to other users, then the analogy would be more comparable.
Think of it more like a loss leader. Costco sells hotdogs at a loss because it brings in more than what it costs them.
I'm sure Google/YouTube has crunched the data and came to the conclusion that it isn't worth it anymore but I also don't think data can even give a complete picture. Data can't predict how many people will leave vs subscribe when all is said and done. Results from limited rollouts are not guaranteed to follow in a full rollout.
So not only are you directly costing YouTube money, but by tweeting it, you getting thousands of people to also cost YouTube money, thus magnifying your negative impact by many orders of magnitude.
I am not trying to be combative, it is a question in my mind, Why serve anything to users not participating in the economics that keeps the servers on?
For what it's worth, I know of only one creator that actually uses that over Patreon.