alt Hacker NewsPeople won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.
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No I won't pay for premium because even if I pay for it I still get ads in the content itself.
Fix that and then I'll pay.
Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.
There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.
This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any money on them?
They will actually. Youtube premium has had explosive growth after YT started pushing more ads and blocking ad blockers. People pay for streaming services quite regularly. And youtube has one of the strongest platforms/content bases to sell a subscription.