There's an "if a tree falls in the forest" version of "if the viewer leaves the room" at which point has a theft still been visited upon the broadcaster? The business that paid for the ad?

In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser, knowing full well the limitations of the access mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.

It's not piracy. You might have a problem with it ethically. But you're not breaking copyright laws by blocking ads.

Another way to look at it is additive rather than subtractive. If I visit a site with a text only browser that cannot display ads, what is your position then? And if I then implement the ability for my browser to play only the main video on any page, what then?

When it comes down to it, we have no obligation to view the content on a webpage the way the publisher of said webpage wants us to. You can think of plenty of other examples that make "adblocking is piracy" ridiculous - I invert the colors but the publisher doesn't want me to see it with inverted colors. I wear sunglasses while looking at it, which changes the way it looks. Maybe the site I use always puts an ad in the same place so I stick a bit of tape on my monitor in that location, is that bad?

Ok, let’s switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it become piracy? How little of an ad should someone see/understand before it counts as a “valid” ad view? A few words? A full sentence? Etc.

I’m totally cool with “screwing over” people who make their income screwing gullible people into falling for scams or buying useless, overpriced junk they don’t need. I don’t need to rationalize it for myself, I’m just trying to show some people the error in their ways, but maybe their portfolio of ad-related stocks is clouding their vision?

The choice of an individual to skip an advertisement has minimal impact on the content creator or the platform. This person isn't accountable for the decisions of others regarding whether they watch the ad or not. Ultimately, their actions only affect themselves and do not influence anyone involved in the advertisement process.

You're not replying directly to the last comment because it posed a hard question, and you've resorted to an emotional appeal.

The Youtubers I like don't make any money from Google ads, because Google's draconian content policies and un-auditable "demonitization" system prevents them from making any money on such objectionable content as "Literally talking about how bad slavery was" or "Showing pictures of people who died in the Holocaust" or "mummifying a store bought chicken carcass"

Are you watching creators who don't share such sentiments? You should consider that the creators who make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute worst quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage every single day and literally hurting people for money, because that's what google's algorithm optimizes for. Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite the fact that youtube is already significantly overfilled.

Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago? Youtube killed their business by fiat because different content was more profitable for them. Multiple very prominent and influential animators who go all the way back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of their job by that change.

The entire reason Youtube creators started taking sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced their advertising payouts, by staggering amounts. Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller content industry simply because they felt like taking more of the money. They can do this because there are no alternatives.

The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much money you get per hour of watched content, with no warning or justification even offered.

The creators I watch do not want me to watch them on youtube. They want me to watch them on Nebula, Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing on the service at all.

Several of these creators, especially the animators, were prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music.

Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube, without any warning or checking with creators or asking opinions started forcing those videos in front of users who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds and making it harder to select the next video you want to watch and creators, including LTT, are adamantly against this and do not want it

Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and is almost always a hostile and adversarial entity in the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to take more profit from those ads.