This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is "buy YouTube premium, so you won't be stuck in our ad supported model" and now we're ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn't YouTube premium exactly that?
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It's not mysterious at all.
There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.
Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.
All those are fine suggestions, but a "free with ads" option isn't that bad either; the real problem isn't the ads themselves. The real problem is how intrusive the ads are, how many of them there are, as well as much information they (and YouTube) collect on you. Plus, in this case, the company in question isn't exactly a small company who is financially struggling. It's the classic capitalist problem of "infinite growth", where your profits have to be constantly increasing.
But there's nothing inherently wrong about the idea of having ads, just like there's nothing inherently wrong about youtubers having sponsors.
You're right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn't math.
I don't mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they've become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I'm trying to watch and I'll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
I'm not against using ads to support websites but it's the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can't ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
I'm sure they can take a page from every online service before we entered the 2020s, where you could pay to enter without ads, like Netflix was. But no, the ad company has to inject ads into everything.
I've been around since YT red, and while Google Play Music was a better app, I am OK with YT music and primarily watch YT over the other sites and yt music is all I listen to in the house or car. So, while not cheap $22/mo for premium family fits my needs.
I'd be OK if yt allowed me to skip/blocked sponsored ads too. At least on PC sponsor block works well. For my TV its a few more hoops to get that there, which I haven't done. Not terrible to ffw across them
I'm not paying them a penny either way, but if you're going to, wouldn't you want more features for your money, even if you don't use them? Or are you suggesting they charge less for a subscription sans music?