The big issue for me is the content to ad ratio is completely out of whack.

Fuck youtube and fuck their ads, this shit is getting out of hand

Call me lumberjack cause I wish a nigga wood pay for YouTube premium. With how many times YT tells me I’m not connected to the internet while my phone has a 3 bars of 5G (for whatever that’s worth) connection, hell naw I’m not paying for youtube premium. They move the goalpost way too often for what counts as “monetizable content” to the point that it’s neutering my favorite content creators to keep the lights on. TBH I’d rather pay Nebula

While we are saying "fuck reddit", let's say "fuck you too YT". Fucking malware machine.

Translation: YT tests randomly pissing off users until they get fed up and leave for another site. if a site tells me I can't partake of their content with my adblocker engaged, I simply find my fix elsewhere.

So soon we will need an adblocker blocker blocker to use YouTube?

Yet another platform to boycott? Excellent!

Oh, cool; more reason to use Piped and Invidious lmao

For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.

I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don't miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It's a pretty decent deal tbh.

Honestly if I worked at YouTube and they asked me to implement this I'd quit.

I understand why they're doing this, but if you make a service that was once free, paid (whether with your time, or money), it's not a good look.

Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).

If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.

I took the L and started paying for YT Premium since you can't really get rid of ads on LG TV otherwise

Did it with a bit of malicious compliance and opted for Family plan using argentinian VPN, totaling at less than $3 a month (and constantly dropping) for 5 people.

I use ytdl-sub to downloadt the newest videos from the channels I like and import into Jellyfin. No ads, nothing, just videos. Even thumbnails.

I'm in the camp that says you should really pay for premium. It's so worth the money. For every premium user that watches a video the creator gets a pretty good cut. Something like 55%. Blocking ads doesn't really hurt the creator too much. Your mainly just sticking it to Google. But if your someone who watches alot of YouTube consider premium, to help your favorite creators more. Especially you get Music included.

Honestly, I pay for YouTube Premium because I find value in it. The price is reasonable for where I live, and it's my main source of entertainment. I don't like watching movies/TV shows that much so YouTube is my jam. So the convenience of being able to download videos, ad-free viewing, picture-in-picture, background playback etc. is totally worth it for me. I know if I dig hard enough and use an Android phone/tablet I can get those features without having to pay, but I don't like Android and again, the features are worth the small price.

For me, YouTube Premium and Spotify broke piracy because they're more convenient than pirating.

If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I'd just get cable. I'm happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That's it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.