This is a lie. The slow-down of YouTube page loads was done on purpose. YouTube worked perfect with ad-blockers for a decade. It only started now.
Youtube is go-to platform for video publishing because it started as free platform. When they captured this segment of web, they have overloaded it with ads.
I do not expect anyone serving me for free. But it is not bearable when everything and everyone expects you to use these walled gardens.
YouTube is not losing money, it's a significant contributor to Alphabet's overall revenue.
They are not struggling to maintain it, they're trying to milk the cash cow...
There's no contradiction between those two ideas. Something that loses a lot of money is more likely to be a significant contributor to revenue, because you can't lose a lot of money without seeing a lot of use.
But why would anyone care about revenue? Is it a significant contributor to profit? Last I heard, Alphabet doesn't even provide a breakdown of how much of its money comes from YouTube.
Many sites that are not behind the wall are providing part of their content through embedded Youtube videos. In order to see that content you need to agree with tracking. Those sites use Youtube just because it is often considered as standard.
If you think there can be a free platform (truly free) I highly encourage you to look up the fate of youtubes biggest competitive threat of the last decade: Vid.me, an actually whole hearted VC funded attempt to dethrone youtube. And it worked great for a bit..
I mean they aren't paying for the content — that's on the backs of the content creators, most of which I suspect see no positive cash-flow for their time and effort.
I'd also like to see 70% of the subscriber money go to the content creators (which appears to be the new standard royalty cut) and do away with the ads, ad revenue.
Wanting both ad revenue and subscriber money is a bit like the bait-and-switch we saw from cable television when it debuted.
Edit: Just saw this post "In June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin will be disabled in Chrome 127". So there's an incentive either way.
The late comer executives to Google seem content with burning it all to the ground and pursuing "be evil" at all cost. I think Google is too big at this point to ever disappear, but it seems like it's ripe for a reset for their business model. They do have products that are actually good, but there's a disease in the company that if it doesn't help ads it's a problem. It would be nice if all this anti ad blocker bull shit ends up with another IE moment with people switching back to Firefox to bring Chrome in line.
I'm not super hopeful because there are so many shitty boot camp JS devs now that would rather advocate for blocking non Chromium browsers over adhering to standards and figuring out why their bad code isn't working, but one can hope.