Paying them not to stuff annoying bullshit into your content still doesn't stop them from slorping up every possible facet of your personal data. So long as they're double dipping, I'm not giving them a dime.

15 years ago I would have agreed with you, but it’s not just ads any more.

These companies track everything you do, share data with eachother, and create profiles on everybody.

If I were to follow you around keeping track of everything you do and share that info with my buddy who does the same thing, you would probably feel unsafe, and it’s illegal. It’s called stalking.

So why is ok for a corporation to do these things?

You already pay for it in more ways than one. Who pays for the data centers? You do, the increased water and electrical bills. The increased property taxes.

Those mutually shared power pylons didn't get built for free, you paid for them. You pay for the internet service. What else do you want to pay for? Just line right up. These companies aren't paying you for the fuel to deliver their vomit yet you line right up and eat it all and say it's not that bad. Get bent. oh wait spit roasted? sorry don't mean to kink shame.

I paid for it for a while, but the price kept going up way faster than inflation (and even faster than my salary). I just pay for Nebula and Dropout instead.

I paid for a while but got sick of getting shorts and playable pushed into my feed every other day. I’m using Viddle now which is great, I might go back to paying if that stops working as I don’t mind supporting creators, just don’t like the stuff YouTube is pushing.

Some people don't really watch it as much to justify a subscription. I watch it everyday and listen to yt music daily as well, so my sub is pretty worth it. Otherwise i'd just get Nebula

Ads require streaming. I prefer watching already downloaded videos so I don't need to worry about having a stable internet connection.

But I'm watching through RSS feeds, yt-dlp + VLC player, so browser adblockers aren't really relevant to my use-case.

And a lot of people already pay for spotify, so they could switch to YouTube premium and have music and ad free videos