The endgame here is adblockers that spoof ad views and even sometimes clicks rather than just blocking them. This is very very bad for google if they force adblockers to work like that. People will do it.
In that world, the best an adblocker would be able to do is show a blank screen for 30s while it waits for the real video's frames to resume.
Youtube will never monetise tech savvy users and should just stop trying. We only need to be slipperier than the average gazelle and the lions will never catch us.
To achieve this, you’ll need computation, storage, and bandwidth on the scale of YouTube. Do you think whoever offers that service will do so without ads or payment?
Your whole scheme is based on hoping “kind” and knowledgeable volunteers do free labor for you. Good luck.
I for one am tech savvy and am happy to pay $20 for the ad free service. Pretty reasonable trade if you ask me.
Personally I would not pay any amount to Google, as I believe it is unethical to support such a company. Google has a monopoly in several markets, to the point of being an unavoidable part of our lives.
No single company should have that much power. Especially since due to its nature as a for-profit corporation, Google's interests are at odds with yours.
As for myself - most of my subscription price goes to the creators and I'm happy with that.
So we really are back to reinventing cable TV
And, coming up in foundation models right now, it can remake videos to remove ads entirely, making a new video with just the content. Perhaps it'll be a feature of the RTX 6090. I bet the hallucinations will be hilarious.