I know this is a silly meme but my issue with not wanting to pay for youtube is 3 fold.

1.Theyre a monopoly. Google bought out the plucky streaming service on the rise(and honestly if it wasnt google it would have been someone else) and then continued to build up momentum and squash the competition. There is no competition. Daily motion and vimeo and peertube exist, but they dont really compete with youtube anymore.

Google can complain all they want about how it's expensive to host 4k videos from anyone who wants to upload and how all the global traffic makes their service unprofitable but given theyre a giant corporation, if it didnt bring them value they wouldnt be doing it and if it is a hole theyre putting money into then it's an hole they dug for themselves.

2.Google sucks at dealing with their creators. The lifeblood of the site is that it is the default platform for video content creators because its so big. Unjustified DCMA takedowns which ruin a persons livelihood and are difficult to appeal, their demonetization and essentially delisting from the algorithm of nsfw videos(which can happen if a key word is detected or a specific type of image, that recent issue with the big youtuber doxing another and getting a slap on the wrist, and the changes made to algorithms that hurt creators and shape content.

Like how the comedy sketches and animators that were prevalent in the early days got squeezed out because the algorithm favored longer videos and a steadier stream of content. Or a case where a youtuber got his own song DCMA'd because another artist remixed his music. And thats not even getting into the poor compensation from ads that means creators need to use sites like patreon to get by. "Oh but if you pay premium your views count more" wow how nice of one of the biggest most valuable companies on earth.

They also have no easy way for even decent sized creators with millions of subs to appeal or get a hold of them, let alone one in the 100s of thousdands or tens of thousands mark. All ai reviewed and ai resolved.

3. The algorithm debacle. Its fickle tweaks have indirect impacts on creators and at worst it has been known to feed into conspiracy theories and red pill people into extremist pipelines and it took google way too long to address it. Even when it works well it can still push a lot of the same content. But its arbitrary nature an be a windfall on some seasons for one type of creator and tank another.

4. Honestly even if all else failed and adblock stopped working I would probably just watch the ads. It's like a 15 second clip in the beginning if you skip and a minute worth of ad 10 or 15 minutes later. Im not gunna say I love it but do you people not remember what watching tv was like or reading magazines, or have you ever had a bus drive by you? I can live with the minor amount of mostly skipable ads I'd get an hour especially if it means Im not paying.