They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service.
What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?
On a separate note, there are reports of people getting their whole google account locked for payment issues, expired cards and such. There is no way to reach a human there, and I really do not want to risk loosing my account I use on my phone as well (android :/) just because some bot decides it does not like me.
Would be fine if I could just have a separate youtube account, but no, that would make tracking harder...
Aaaand there still will be ads inside the videos (sponsored segments), and product placement.
Both you and the parent simply come up with reasons to avoid paying, getting the service for free.
No matter how you look at it, what you're doing is immoral, because if everyone did it, YouTube would be permanently paywalled and placed under DRM. You're a privileged individual that prefers to be subsidized by those that pay or that watch ads.
Expensive coffee at Starbucks which I would never buy. With $10 I can buy coffee for 3 months. It’s way too expensive for me.
I also consider every form of advertising to be brainwashing. Last but not least, I watch 1 YouTube video per month, so you would have to adapt your scenario for me to be interested in a subscription.
If there's a reasonably priced subscription available (or another business model), and if the publisher doesn't want your eyeballs while you have an adblocker active, there's no argument you can make for the morality of adblocking. It's your computer, you can be selective about what you execute on it, but the publisher should also be free to reject your visit.
Blocking YouTube's adblock detection legitimizes all the changes that Google is making in Chrome, being why we can't have nice things. And it's similar to extensions designed to workaround paywalls, or software piracy. Sooner or later adblocking will become illegal.
If you gave a shit, you wouldn't use YouTube.
I use uBlock Origin on YouTube specifically to work around many UI issues related to their recommendations and player. I will not turn it off. One example is that they will not honor my closed-caption settings on all videos so I have a filter rule to remove the call to the captions URL to eliminate them. That's one of countless issues.
They are now denying me access to a service for which I do actually pay for. I consider that to be illegal.
My proposal is simple:
* Give me an option to pay for what I use. I do not want music, 99.9% of live streams, news, or tons of the other content they try to force on me for money-making purposes.
* Make the price reasonable. The videos I watch are primarily educational lectures. This really shouldn't cost much more than the price of disk storage and network egress (both of which are cheap at scale).
* Give me a recommendations and preference system that actually work. I spend more time curating my list of videos than watching anything meaningful to my interests. At one point I was watching 2 luthiery channels and "guitar necks" came up as a category. What the ever living fuck? Related yes, but not quite the topic I really want to focus on. I would remind people that this is a multi-billion dollar company with PhDs that has changed the face of AI and hyper-scale computing as we know it.
* In general, operate like a long-running business... offer good value to your paying customers. Now that the customers are not advertisers, Google will need to rethink their sales strategies. They have not yet convinced me.I have no sympathy for the service. If it's not profitable, Google can cover it from their other revenue streams with ease.
Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? I'm all for big companies paying their fair share, but I'm not blaming the company, I'm blaming the people in charge who don't close these loopholes. Same issue as with Ireland in the EU, undercutting all the other EU countries with tax rates.
One option if you want to fight back in the exact same way: Sign up for YouTube Premium through a cheaper country and pay $2/month instead of 15.
Umm, where possible why wouldn't one choose to avoid giving your money to companies that behave in ways you object to?
Not every company feels the need to set up their corporate structures to revolve around Luxembourg (or whatever the regional equivalent is in your part of the globe).
Somehow it seems really hard for people here to be honest with themselves and admit that they really just want YT for free and someone else (Google) to shoulder the cost. And they also whant to rant at Google while they pay for their services. :)
I am under ZERO obligation to watch advertising, that is the risk the industry takes. The ad industry has long ago tipped the scales in the trade of attention for content and now they resort to shaming the viewers into compliance.
Everyone supporting the adblock countermeasures are hypocrites; as if they never went to the bathroom during a TV show commercial break.
Get rid of _some_ of them
It only has to be relatively less ad laden than the free version. Whenever ads get cranked up on the “free” normal person YouTube, they’ll get cranked up on sucker pay-pig YouTube in direct proportion. If anything, they have less concern about the small fraction who (amazingly) pay them for what they’re doing.
The proposed alternative is Google can continue to bankroll it. They are not hurting for money.
Ha! Try getting 10 minutes into this example and not bring surprised by a fucking pasta ad. https://