"McDonalds cracks down on people taking ketchup without ordering anything"
"Then I'll stop taking ketchup from McDonalds, that will show em!"
It is only paying/ad viewers that matters, until they start to lose those they wont care.
They prefer you use youtube ad-free than go take the crowd to another platform.
Microsoft famously said that they prefer people to pirate Windows than to use Linux/Mac.
This leads to an Apple situation where Apple doesn't have the most users but most of the money goes to them since they can extract much more money per user. It isn't a bad situation to be in.
Of course Vimeo would have to fight off adblockers too to compete in money extraction with YouTube but that's not my point, my point is that YouTube now has a monopoly and any actions that threaten that, such as strongarming people into watching 3 preroll unskippable ads, are in my opinion silly and self-defeating.
They're just too greedy. If they made the price of YouTube Premium something reasonable ($1 or $2 a month instead of $14 or whatever it is) they would get a lot more subscribers and probably even get more revenue. $1 or $2 is not worth spending even 10 minutes digging in obfuscated JavaScript to fix an adblocker, so this whole thing would go a lot smoother for them if they charged that. Even if $14 is not a lot people just don't want to pay that much.
Thing is, I'm not going to pay their excessive and ongoing subscription fee under any circumstances. I watch maybe an hour of videos a week, but all of them are just to kill time, and they're not worth double digits a month to me. I was happy to have a transactional relationship with them for paid content, and they likely made a net profit from me even with an ad blocker, but if I can't trust them to provide ongoing access to the content I bought then I won't buy any more.
Instead, they've grown too big, they've grown too frail, they've grown too meaningless. So, time to move on.
I choose to not take the ketchup and not go in McDonald’s. And my life is better for it.
Actually I like a McPlant and an apple pie occasionally but that’s another story…
What?
The analogy is more accurately this: McDonalds giving away ketchup--instead of selling it or providing with the order--but making you watch an ad first.
But you are using an ad-blocker, you don't see google ads. If you aren't using an ad-blocker then this topic isn't about you.