Just to be clear, ads free cable TV was a thing on a very small minority of cable channels for less than 10 years (from 81 up until 87 if I recall the research I did on the subject correctly), the only reason people keep talking about it is because they didn’t live it. At first the vast majority of cable channels were just regular channels from regions too far away to get a signal for with antennas and cable only channels mostly had ads as well, there were something like four of them that didn’t.

Maybe we should start mirroring to a federated service

Just some time ago, I was thinking about some P2P Video service, where everyone would provide the data they have - so like a BitTorrent YouTube

But I’m not sure if that would be viable

When they first started ramping up ads and demonetising more videos for being insufficiently advertiser-friendly, they probably still had enough goodwill from users that if they’d immediately launched YouTube Premium and presented it as a way to both remove ads, and support video creators that couldn’t rely on ad revenue, it would have been decently successful. A good number of YouTubers who had to switch to sponsorships and Patreon could have been pushing for people to subscribe to Premium instead of play Raid: Shadow Legends, which presumably would have boosted subscriber counts, and might have been enough to make YouTube profitable and much more pleasant for both free and premium users than it is today. Instead, they burned through a large amount of goodwill before implementing Premium, so people were already more reluctant, and for a long while it only shared revenue with a select few channels who were already raking in ad money, and was unaffected by view counts, so early Premium subscribers were paying Logan Paul even if they never watched that kind of video, but weren’t paying the channels they actually watched.

Probably because shorter videos get more views

But I’m only guessing…

Some of the shorts are ads themselves

I think I heard it put like this once (paraphrasing):

Ads aren’t to make you buy the product. Few people are gonna see a regular commercial about chocolate and go out and buy it. That’s not their intent. They’re meant for brand recognition. They’re about that moment in the supermarket when you have 50 choices of what soda to get. 40 of them are noname and store brands. You’ll almost never try them unless you want to save some money and/or aren’t interested in what you’re buying. But then you have your coke and pepsi. The old reliables - the names that are stuck in your head since forever. And sometimes you’ll want to check out the new mountain dew or dr pepper flavors, cause you’re curious. But when you’re not in the mood for new, when you just want a soda and don’t wanna think about it, you’ll get a coke or a pepsi or one of the few brands whose name you recognize.

After 1000 raid shadow legends ads, guess what you’re gonna feel like trying in 3 months when you get bored of your current mobile game and are scrolling through their top picks for games? “Hmm, Raid shadow legends? I’ve heard about this before, maybe I give it a try”

Sure, it backfires sometimes - for example, I always make it a point to not try out a game if I feel it’s been in too many ads - I don’t wanna waste time in something that blew its entire budget on marketing. But with most people this doesn’t happen. And I’m pretty sure even I tried some item from an ad that I said I’d never get - the name probably just got stuck in my head and I got it without even realizing it.

Marketers make a shit load of money based on human psychology. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.

Yes, otherwise companies would not spend their money on them.

I wouldn’t as that’s just asking to get screwed

Those both require subscriptions for access though instead of offering an ad based tier so that already excludes a majority of viewers from being able to move over from yt and those producers are unlikely to abandon their current audiences for a possibly bigger audience under a different corporation. I think that’s going to be necessary for a majority of viewers and producers to switch to another A/V distribution platform. If Netflix or MTV had an ad-only based tier and released apps for phones, Roku, browser, etc and allowed producer uploads then I suspect they could take a big chunk of Google’s yt viewership and profits.

Executive bonuses, of course. Won’t you think of the poor millionaires?

/s

I guess YouTube music?

Other features I guess. Like the bullcrap “are you still watching” that pops up every three videos, music maybe. I’m thinking of some waiting room TV thing, but then again you don’t want ads in that usecase either.

You get amazing features like: background play (which is more of an annoyance), remember where i left off (which doesnt work whatsoever, even 5 years after it was first released), download video’s to watch offline (you need to remember to download them first or hope that YouTube’s recommendation algoritm didnt pick videos you’ve already wachted) oh, and you can get a slightly higher bitrate for 1080p. So basically it loses all value.

Well, you get to pay for YouTube and see ads!

The other replies are incorrect, the lower tier premium actually has no ads on most videos. When you subscribe, they explicitly let you know music videos will play ads, probably so this plan is not eating away profits of YouTube music.

Counts as two minutes if you start a minute and end it in a few seconds and start another minute later

I can’t wait until computers and compression algorithms advance to the point where YouTube competitors become commercially viable!

Just kidding, YT will probably just blackmail their content creators into only posting on their platform and nowhere else to maintain their monopoly.