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Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Not only do people expect free access, they feel entitled to endless free content.
God forbid YouTube charge a subscription fee to help pay creators or show ads. No no, we all gotta jump on whatever app makes it free of ads and denies anyone a single cent for the content consumed.
Even if YouTube is the actual devil, other platforms exist that do a better job of paying creators but we don't talk about Nebula, we just talk about getting around the ads at YouTube without letting YouTube ever see a cent. As if having millions of videos available at the touch of a finger to anyone with an Internet connection is somehow free.
The problem with YouTube is they will keep adding more ads until people stop tolerating it.
It used to be a single ad at the start of the video you could skip after 5 seconds. Now it's multiple unskippable ads before the video starts. Often you don't know if this is the video you want anyway, and if it's not you spent more time on the ads than the video itself.
Once you do find the video you want you get random interruptions mid sentence for more unskippable ads. If people just shrug and say "they have to pay for it somehow" then YouTube rubs their hands together and puts more ads in until they find the point where more ads = less viewership.
If the single "skip after 5s" ad was untenable long term then they shouldn't have started with a service they couldn't actually provide. I'm sick of these companies purposely running an unprofitable business just to get users, and then when they change the model to try to become profitable act like it's the users fault that the company sold them on something they can't maintain.
If you want to support a creator do it through Patreon. The amount they get from YouTube is garbage. If I didn't have a way to block YouTube ads I just wouldn't watch YouTube anymore, so they aren't losing any money from me running an AdBlock.
Nebula is good. Maybe different models besides YouTube are in order.
Some seem to do OK with:
Peertube + LiberaPay