Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

When I can set that up for my AppleTV to block ads on YouTube, I’ll be happy to use it.

I barely ever use PC for browsing web anymore.

Not a premium user but Youtube has poisoned its own waters with its algorithm. You can see the "top" content basically gaming that algorithm as well as it can. Literally every part of it from the title to the thumbnail to the content itself is hollow except for the skinner box.

It's funny, because sponsorblock and vanced only exist because of youtube's greed. And now I can't imagine using their service without them, even if they rollback the annoying ads. And they can't implement them. It's really the problem they made for themselves.

unpopular opinion: you can pay for premium and use Vanced/ReVanced because you value hosting infrastructure provided, and you understand that most of your money goes to the creators not google. And yet you still want control over the UI.

And you know what. If everyone actually did that instead of using Vanced for adblocking, it maybe still would've been alive.

It's more so that you are allowed to try to block ads. If YouTube adds DRM or otherwise manages to stop usage of ad blocking, they are completely in their right to do so.

IIRC if something runs on your system, you have the right to mess with it, however you want — e.g. block specific parts of the site, or use reader mode etc.

As I said in a previous post, people are afraid of pirating, so they prefer higher prices if it is a "safe" method.

I pay for that, because YouTube and YouTube Music is the main source of media for me And my family and I have no issue with paying for a service that I use a lot. And paying for that is so much easier then investing huge amounts of time into searching for and maintaining alternative Players and Tools for all the different devices where I (and my family) consume YouTube and YouTube Music. My limited time is more valuable for me then the price for the service.

A LOT of people pay for that. I was flabbergasted as well. Why would you pay for a free service? This feels like buying premium bottled tap water and they don't even bother to filter out the chlorine and the heavy metals.

I pay for YouTube premium because I like the idea of content creators getting paid when I watch their videos. I don't want to manually send each of them money or sign up for their channel memberships or anything. But if they make videos that I watch and they get a kickback? I'm fine with that.

I also have a YouTube channel that bring in a bit of beer money, so I use that to justify the cost.

There is always money in the banana stand.

I personally would read this as a sign that more people are turning to ad blocking or straight up leaving. Not enough money coming in so they have to jack prices up way faster than they'd likely do otherwise.

I'd rather just spend a fraction of the money on a Nebula subscription.

So this has been true of YouTube Red since the beginning. It's one if the reasons I got it. But they use watch time as the way to divide your money out. It actually makes it extremely unfair split for people that make great but short content. It's also why longer content became more popular around that time and those 24/7 streams run like that.

Also why creators started doing channels of just padded run time content of like building legos and eating things. It's to secure better and funding.

The current setup is pretty busted and feels like the wheels are coming off again.