It doesnt really matter to me how they pay for their expenses. It doesnt change the fact that youtube loses its value as an education/entertainment platform to me if they attempt to enforce their adblock-free policy. My choice to support individual creators is none of their business. If its an unsustainable business model for them its odd that its been around for a decade but its really not my concern. If they are going to shut down because Alphabet just cant afford to host it anymore then I would probably try to scrape as much valuable content as possible but for now Ill continue to block ads and support who I want to outside of googles ecosystem.

With the billions[1] they already make on ad revenue I guess? I don't care. For me it's either ad blockers or I don't use the service.

YouTube is only still viable because the barriers to start a competing service are so high. Just like every other Alphabet-owned service, their single-minded focus on serving the bare minimum content merely as a vehicle for ads has just decimated the quality of their products.

[1] https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/youtube-q3-2023-alphab...

They could offer a p2p layer. The world’s video library shared between humanity. I’d happily seed educational videos.