At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.
And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.
With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don’t think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
They had me as a paying customer when the Premium Light tier was a thing and just offered ad free viewing at a reasonable price. Then they got rid of that plan at the very same time they rolled out this mission to beat ad blocking plugins. That’s bad faith right there. My choice now is to get a plan at at least 50% more a month with added extra crap I didn’t ask for and would never use (music, etc).
So I’m not their customer anymore.
These companies clearly won’t be satisfied and I’m sure a ton of their customers will just keep forking over more and more money for worse and worse service, but I’m done. I’m pulling up stakes on all streaming video platforms. Good luck to them I guess.
I was about to buy premium when the upped their prices. I would have paid for it if my wallet wasn’t downstairs. The next day the jacked the prices or announced it(can’t remember). It turned me off of paying for it.
I watch a lot of YouTube. But it’s not worth $14+/mo and who knows if they’ll increase it on a whim.
I installed ublockorigin and haven’t looked back.
I’d pay $5/mo for ad free YouTube at this point. No more. Adblocking is more convenient. I have no problem watching the sponsor blocks for the channels I watch. I typically enjoy them because they are relevant to my interests.