Honestly if I worked at YouTube and they asked me to implement this I'd quit.

Try YT subscription from Argentina...😎

I understand why they're doing this, but if you make a service that was once free, paid, it's not a good look.

Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).

If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.

If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I'd just get cable. I'm happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That's it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.

I pay for Premium (bc I watch mostly from the TV using a console or AppleTV) but this sucks. Especially because how annoying and long a bunch of these ads are now.

Youtube ads are such garbage. Everyone talks about how google is 'the most advanced advertiser' - well google, you really can't figure out that playing the same ad for me 4 times in a 30 minute period is just going to make me hate both you and the advertiser?

If any state banned advertising entirely, I'd strongly consider moving there.

Well, this certainly explains my difficulty with YouTube over the last few days. Ironically, the piped instances still seem to be fine...

This might just be enough to push me primarily over to Rumble. There are fewer and fewer reasons to use YouTube and more and more reasons not to.

Whats the percentage of YT users who use Adblock tools? i think it's a tiny number, mainly the power users.

Oh gosh, that's unfortunate.

Good thing I've been using NewPipe! I'm reading the post for other alternatives, but feel free to suggest some to me directly, if you'd like.

Honestly, I've always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It's basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping

I wonder if this would affect things like Newpipe (android YouTube client replacement with no ads) or even just playing streams via MPV. I assume that stuff is relatively safe since it's grabbing the actual video streams, but I'm sure there is still a way they could block them.

Yeah please do, I will just stop using YouTube and that would be a good thing.

I'd be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don't get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven't checked yet because I don't use youtube through its main interface much.