I don’t think this is as simple as “they’re too young to know”! I’m a 30+ year old man, and I was around 15 when YouTube first came out. I was a huge fan of the early days, when YouTube was free!

I am absolutely fine with paying a monthly/annual fee for ad-free access to perhaps the best compilation of human knowledge and entertainment which has ever been compiled in one place. One reason I’m cool with it is that premium views pay the content creator more than the equivalent ad view.

Sure, YouTube “created the issue” of ads. But if it means supporting the creators and removing a barrier to videos, I’m fine with the price.

The people saying “just pay for premium” ~~don’t seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads~~ were born after the 2008 housing crash

Ftfy.

The cost of hosting YouTube itself doesn't pay for itself unfortunately. They could get away with it back then because the internet itself wasn't that big. Therefore, we need to KICK THE NORMIES OUT OF OUR INTERNET. WE WERE HERE FIRST, REEEEEE

ReVanced and Grayjay do the same thing but for free and are open source so long as Google keeps trying to engineer enshitification the proud people of the open source community will engineer a solution.

I would totally pay for youtube if it was even remotely decently priced.

You can get multiple concurrents on disney+, Hulu or Netflix with blockbuster content for the same price as youtube's slop filled premium family.

Seriously, the service is worth maybe $9 a month. I don't want their music, i won't use it, the quality is crap.

I doubt they’ll ever actually do it, just threaten it constantly.

They’d rather have people without accounts, and/or using adblockers keep using the site. If they started actually cracking down, then it would create a significant pool of users who would use some other platform. They’d rather eat the losses of some people not viewing ads then push a significant amount of users to a potential competitor.

Much like how Microsoft hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed windows installs because it would push a significant amount of people to look for an alternative OS.

This used to be the case, but it's a different equation now. Ads used to be one or two per video. Fine, I get there are bills to pay.

Now it's pure greed and pushing us to a subscription for a service they purposely made shitty so we would think exactly what you are. 4-5 ads, with forced ads interrupting the videos, and auto redirects to more ads after the video fonishes. Unskippable multi-minute ads.

And if you're thinking "well then just pay for it", tell that to Netflix, Hulu, and all of the streaming services that were "ad-free" until they decided that actually, pay twice as much or watch ads (even though your paying).

So while I understand you're saying, you're assuming Google will play fair. They won't. They will up the price, they will still force ads, and it will get worse. I'm taking a stand now saying enough is enough. I'm not rewarding them for enshittifying the service.

Love how you get downvoted for your own personal preference. This place is wild.