I doubt it, unfortunately.

Like many other online services they've saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.

They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.

Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don't see anyone being able to do that for free for long.

Unfortunately, if anyone is going to "disrupt" youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they'll have to monetize as well.

My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.

By what metric will they lose miserably? They do not care about you if you block their shit. This policy will do 3 things:

• Make a miniscule amount of people who generate no revenue stop using the platform (basically noone).
• Make existing adblockers slightly inconvenienced for a little bit (again, google doesnt actually give a shit)
• Make some of the less tech savy people who block ads either whitelist or premium up (this will happen and is the intended outcome).

Google only gains from this.

It absolutely is not worth £17 a month simply for no ads.

No, steal from them as much as possible. Stealing from corporations is morally good.

Sure, just throw money at the corpos, but please don't act surprised when they suddenly double the premium fee, or when they start sneaking in ads for premium users. That's the problem with corpo greed, it just never ends, and the moment you give in to it, you lose.

I will never ever pay for youtube and I'll never stop blocking ads. Theres always a way, and if the day comes where ad blockers actually become iniffective then thats it for me, I'll find somewhere else. I'm already a reddit refugee since they blocked 3rd party aps and charge a subscription fee, I can't figure out a workaround yet so I dropped reddit altogether.

Remember when streaming services boasted about ad free viewing, only to then Continue to charge you AND serve ads to you WHILE collecting and selling your personal information? These companies can smd.