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So as long as you make out your flavor of the month business as "greedy and evil" you can paint yourself a moral crusader by going there and taking things for free. How convenient, eh?
"This coffee shop is a terrible place, therefore I will eat there for free everyday in protest!"
(The content is on YouTube and nowhere else)
Until this changes and one can choose to go somewhere else, I wouldn't worry too much about the terrible cafe's income, because it is one of the richest entities in the world, it already shouldn't be that rich and powerful, and if it disappeared, it would finally let one go find coffee somewhere else.
The other possibility is to stop drinking coffee, of course. Though you can't really do this with everything.
Indeed, but it's the video hosting platform. Initiatives like PeerTube try to fix this, but most videos can be only found on YouTube.
> So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?
Mostly yes. Creators today rely on:
- sponsors
- youtube ads
- donations
- merch
- other revenues, for instance if they have a business and their videos bring customers
At least you can often donate if you skip the ads and the sponsors, so there is a way to pay the metaphorical coffee.
Of course, better yet is to take it up a notch and advocate for other people to also use ad blockers and to help install and configure them. Thankfully, with how invasive ads are, the advertisers are basically doing all the agitprop; all you need to convince someone to use an adblocker today is to show them how websites look with and without it.
Your analogy was shallow from the start. Continuing it makes little sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
where you have no "Voice".
At home we were talking about food ads on Youtube. Sure, once in a while you see an ad for a meal box that is actual food but I see a lot of ads for things like Huel which float in this strange space where it's not "I used to eat bread and meat and vegetables and now I drink all my meals" but where it's normal to drink your meals (they pose as if they were trying to persuade you to switch from some other meal replacement), where you have to work just as hard taking supplements every day as you would work lifting weights or not eating junk food -- there's McDonald's and there are ultra-processed foods, but this is ridiculous.
(A friend of mine received a huge quantity of 4Patriots dried food from his mom who was sucked in by some ad that claimed it was on sale because they made too much. We got some and the smell when my son made it turned my stomach.)
In terms of sponsorships there was the "Established Titles" scandal; I am a big fan of Ryan Szymanski who's a world authority on battleships. One day he got bribed to make a video about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapa_Flow
which was a good reason to talk about battleships and Scotland. Pretty soon he's adding a cringy pitch to all his videos and unfortunately it is so hard to give somebody like the right kind of "tough love" which will set him straight, although after the scandal popped most of the people involved went back to remove the junk.
This quickly led to a revolt from ABP users, and the ultimate collapse of the plugin. That is when uBlock was born and become the king.
What we have is a positive feedback cycle where creators are forced to resort to worse and worse ads to cover the cost of the ever increasing number of ad-block users. It's just plainly true that every revenue generating ad you block (not necessarily profit generating ad) is an ad that must be fed to someone else to view for you.
I've had a longtime gym habit which sometimes has me in front of the TV around noon where the ads are all for products for people who don't have any money. I remember seeing a series of ads where my first thought was "anybody except a TV executive or a politician would look at that and say it it's a medicare scam" and watching the ads for a decade before it got in the news that it really was a scam and people are going to jail.
Those ads win an auction to get there, they might be the optimal ads for that slot, but if you want to know why people have low trust in the media and low trust in the government, start there.
I watched Tubi a lot last summer, which is in a wonderful honeymoon period, and was watching saturation advertising for P&G products that featured upbeat black people cleaning up (their own messes) with Dawn and Tide. Great, I say. They've got some awareness that they shouldn't run ads that drive viewers away. Maybe targeted ads will be good for television but the specter of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
haunts the industry.
"I don't know how to explain that ads (and the "suckers" who view them) are what keep the internet running"