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YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
(www.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Poor YouTube only brought in 29 billion dollars in revenue for 2022. They are 11% of Googles revenue.
Now granted they are seeing some slowdown in revenue growth, you know shareholders hate that. So maybe they are trying to create some revenue growth again by making more users pay.
Let's not forget the unmentioned income thanks to gathering all that user data.
The real value of Youtube (and social medias in general) is not the raw revenue they generate.
It's being able to be able to predict what will trend in advance to sell ads to anyone, anywhere. Which is proven by their 200+ billions in revenue from ads from all services.
It's extremely likely that in an alternate universe where Google doesn't own YouTube, their profit today is lower than what they currently have.
But like you said, poor YouTube is not making money explicitly on its own so they'll use it to justify any cost increase attempt when they already know what the real money maker is.