Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other people I can convince to vote for someone.
Youtube is one of the few platforms where people making content can actually survive off of it. It's not everything but it's more than ~anything else.
It would be nice for there to be more platforms but personally I'm exhausted of platforms trying to race to the bottom and ultimiately squeezing people who are actually doing the "hard work".
(My one big complaint is that youtube doesn't charge people for bandwidth, meaning that services like Vimeo are ... kind of DOA. I don't know how you do that and have viral stuff for normal people, but it does feel like something should be in place)
But at some point it got into the ballpark of two 10-15 second ads every 5 minutes even on the channels of people who explicitly asked not to turn on monetization because they're making educational content, often for kids and schools. The mobile app nags me with a "try premium" / "skip trial" popup 5 times per week. There are consistently small bugs in the user experience of the app.
Oh, and they're rich as God because they're also the people who own the operating system, browser, app store, and search engine I used to find all this stuff -- plus my email and my productivity software, all of which they will leverage to _squeeze_ every last bit the juice out of me as a user. They own all my data already. They own everything.
So, what is the "principled stand"? Enough is a goddamned enough! If they were just going to show some ads, it would be fine, but like every single parasitic horror show out there, they promised they'd be good and they cannot stop getting worse.
At the very least, I can choose not to pay them $12/month for the privilege.
Pay money, get no ads. It's not that complicated. It's totally reasonable to whine about the increased ads and not wanting to pay ofc. But at least we can pay to not have ads!
I understand that YouTube costs money to run, but the monetization situation does not reflect that, and is thus totally backwards. The current model is that users pay for a “service” (YouTube) which has an expense for “content” (video creators). The content is what the users actually want; the situation should be that users pay the content creators, who pay YouTube something akin to rent. It is not fair that YouTube profits off of the value that content creators bring rather than just their infrastructure. It is akin to paying the owner of a building for access to the store.
I bet the economics don't add up for running a video hosting site, yet only getting revenue from audio ads.
Even spotify hasn't managed to survive on audio-only with ads - they have to put in other arbitrary restrictions like 'you can't play the song you want to play' to dissuade people from using the lossmaking plan.
