I’m very sympathetic to this viewpoint. If anything, I actually think adblocking is worse than conventional piracy (though nowhere near as bad as actual theft), because with piracy you’re costing the creator nothing and getting their stuff for free. With adblocking you’re getting it free and costing them the fees for bandwidth. It’s a tiny fee on a per-user basis, but it’s real. Not as bad as actual theft though because you’re not depriving them of the ability to sell what they created to someone else.
My problem with YouTube in particular is that they’re just so damn shitty to the people that provide them value. Like Reddit, but not quite as extreme. For years YouTube has been slow to act to demonetise actual bad actors, while good actors constantly get caught up with bullshit abuses of their Content ID (with public domain content being detected, and fair use exemptions to use of copyrighted material being ignored). And more recently, with their demonetisation of marginalised creators simply for talking about their own lived experience.
I used to pay for YouTube Red back when it existed, happily. But for me the last straw came in 2018 when they started screwing over small-time creators by removing longstanding small creators from the partner programme as a lazy overreaction to a few not-longstanding bad actors.
These days, I watch as many creators as I can on Nebula, which I happily pay for, and would have happily paid for a lifetime membership of, if that offer had been available for just 1 week longer than it actually was, despite objectively the lifetime membership probably not being a good deal for the individual user. I’m happy to pay for a good experience, but not for a company that screws over its suppliers so badly.
I’m very sympathetic to this viewpoint. If anything, I actually think adblocking is worse than conventional piracy (though nowhere near as bad as actual theft), because with piracy you’re costing the creator nothing and getting their stuff for free. With adblocking you’re getting it free and costing them the fees for bandwidth. It’s a tiny fee on a per-user basis, but it’s real. Not as bad as actual theft though because you’re not depriving them of the ability to sell what they created to someone else.
My problem with YouTube in particular is that they’re just so damn shitty to the people that provide them value. Like Reddit, but not quite as extreme. For years YouTube has been slow to act to demonetise actual bad actors, while good actors constantly get caught up with bullshit abuses of their Content ID (with public domain content being detected, and fair use exemptions to use of copyrighted material being ignored). And more recently, with their demonetisation of marginalised creators simply for talking about their own lived experience.
I used to pay for YouTube Red back when it existed, happily. But for me the last straw came in 2018 when they started screwing over small-time creators by removing longstanding small creators from the partner programme as a lazy overreaction to a few not-longstanding bad actors.
These days, I watch as many creators as I can on Nebula, which I happily pay for, and would have happily paid for a lifetime membership of, if that offer had been available for just 1 week longer than it actually was, despite objectively the lifetime membership probably not being a good deal for the individual user. I’m happy to pay for a good experience, but not for a company that screws over its suppliers so badly.