YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise.

Why should I reward that by paying them?

If I can actually pay someone for content, then, if I don't pay, I should expect not to be granted access to content.

But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)

I block ads, everywhere, because I keep getting epilepsy-inducing ones.

The browser is my agent, just like my screenreader is.

Google is to blame here - and I'm saying that as an author who does advertise there because of marketshare.

My major problem with ads is the disrespect of my privacy. People deserve to get paid for the hard work they put. I have immense respect for creators .

But at the same time, these yt creators are relying on google ads . Which are intrusive, doesn't acknowledge and care about privacy. If you turn on ad privacy, you see gambling, scams ,crypto ads. How is that responsible? You as a creator is ok with getting money and ok with indirectly making people addicted, fall for scams? That's not right.

I am ok with sponser ads and am against sponsorblock. They are not tracking me, violating my privacy and telling me about new products .

youtube subscription doesn't stop youtube for collecting you data and use it for ads during other google service .

Those are two different problems. Paying creators and requiring online platforms to follow laws and not participate in crime like fraud are not the same issue.

If they want to sell a service in exchange for payment, then they are free to do so. For legal reasons they are not doing that. The explicit legal definition used by lawyers and politicians is that advertisement supported services are not a payment, but an optional content that the viewer might or might not look at. This optional aspect of advertisement is how laws distinguish between it and a sale. From a legal perspective there is a difference between selling a sample product for 1 cent, compared to giving it away for free. One is a sale, and the other is a free giveaway, and thus they are under different legal definitions.

There are similar legal theory for when a platform should be held legal responsible their products, for their advertisement, and when local laws applies and how. News papers, radio, and TV has each been forced to handle local advertisement laws and regulation, and there is a reason why most had departments to curate which advertisement they could publish. They also get held responsible if they break local law.

no. maybe you can get funding through some sort of patronage, but I'm not going to watch ads.

even if I did pay for a subscription, they would find a way to jack up the price or insert new ads while collecting my data. The landscape isn't competitive enough. People like this idea that "if you don't pay for the product, you are the product" but it's not complete. Just because you pay for a product doesn't mean you're not the product. We used to pay for cable TV, only to still get ads. We used to pay for windows licenses, now with ads!

I will continue to waste their bandwidth while blocking ads until they hopefully go bankrupt and get replaced by some bittorrent-like p2p solution.

You're right, someone has to pay to make these AI generated ads for fake boner pills in the middle of my documentary. Won't someone think of the poor ad creators?