You guys pay youtube?

Never given YouTube a dime and never will

Every single youtube channel needs to start seeding torrents of their videos, and posting those links to other platforms (here, mastodon, etc).

Youtube / google could be defeated collectively if creators were to consistently do this, and interested people had the ability to help seed videos.

I'm gonna pay you $0 to fuck off (with ublock)

They call it a double-sided economy.

I call it “let’s fuck everyone.”

"Perpetrators offer a service that will not be put into effect, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket."

The very definition of racketeering.

That's basically google's main business. Their business is not in web search, video platform, mobile OS, email or AI, it's ad. People forget Google is an ad company, that uses any tool available to give you ad. If it's free and not open source, you are the product. Either to sell your attention and availability to companies through ads, or to use your data to do profiling, build a more vicious ad platform and sell your data on the side.

Its much better to pay YouTube so the YouTubers get money based on what the audience wants, and not what the Advertisers want from Youtube.

Why is it a random picture of Will Ferrell though? Why are recent memes like this?

I don't pay anything. Just use newpipe/ublock/smarttube

Storing and serving videos is expensive, they have to pay for it somehow. Either you pay directly or someone else pays for you (through an Ad). I don't see why this is inherently a problem.

I can see arguments on if the specifics are a problem with how they're going about it, but the fundamentals make sense.

I've said this a few times in various places, but I'm really surprised we aren't allowed to bid for ad space for ourselves to not show an ad the way advertisers do for ads. Obviously a flat monthly rate is simpler, nobody is denying that, but just from a purely "free market" perspective (which shareholders love to say they want while using the government to crush opposition) why can't I pay slightly more than whatever small amount of money someone is paying to show me an ad to not see the ad?

Realistically I don't think we'll ever see that because it's a fairly complicated. I don't have any hard data, but I can't imagine that the majority of users using something like YouTube Premium are getting a "good deal." Sure, some folks probably watch all day every day and they get the better end of the deal, but I'd bet for a lot of folks YouTube makes more money off charging the subscription than they would showing the ads. Which is sort of an odd scenario we've gotten ourselves into (but amazing if you're a company that serves ads).

Why the fuck am I looking at a picture of Will Ferrell and not Ricky?

Some of us pay ourselves to install an ad blocker and then we keep our money and we don't get any ads.

The perfect crime.

What’s that have to do with Ricky Bobby?

Grayjay is great for YouTube too

Yes.
I signed up with Google Play Music All Access in its two month intro way back when. At the time it was $7.99mo for life. They included YouTube Red when that launched. Now after all the name changes and price hikes, I'm still locked in at $7.99. I'll keep it as long as that lasts.

Add to this that companies would prefer showing their ads to paying customers (who have some money to spend), not the free tier plebs

You all deserve this and worse. No reason to complain about it. This is what everybody wanted.

I'd have paid the fee for ad-free YouTube if it didn't also come with an (expensive) subscription to YouTube music.

Nowadays though I don't want to give Google money for anything, even incidentally. I just use Ublock Origin.