I ended up paying for it because, frankly, expecting Youtube to be completely free and fighting how it could be paid for is kinda crazy. We’re just used to it being free but running Youtube is expensive. I watch hours of Youtube nearly every day and don’t use Crunchyroll nearly as much so why am I ok paying for that but not Youtube?
Yes, if they do actually start pushing ads then I’m going to wonder what the hell I’m paying for but for the time being I’m ok with paying for a service. I only started paying for it recently, to be fair, but I get it.
Give an inch, they take a mile
Instead of trying to make money, they should be looking at how to operate without it
Peertube is an example of figuring this out
How to operate without money? Hosting countless hours of high-quality video on demand and streaming it to your computer at highspeed? Are you high?
I had never heard of Peertube before your comment and it sounds great! It also puts a lot on the content creator, though, and regardless of whether Youtube should follow that model or not how would you expect them to make that change? Just suddenly tell every creator that they must start self-hosting? Genius, that’ll go over so well!
Peertube themselves are saying that they don’t want to replace Youtube, simply to offer alternatives and choice(which I’m cool with).
How to operate without money?
Have the public libraries host the peoples internet. There are options if you can think outside your little Gmail inbox.
I don’t use Gmail, and in fact my email isn’t attached to any big company. I know you couldn’t have known that but still.
So now you want to shift all this content onto poorly funded public libraries? Do you have any idea how difficult all that would be? Do you have any idea how much content is on Youtube? And that’s not to mention how much bandwidth a person would need to be able to send out the content they’re hosting to tens of thousands of people at once.
You’re living in a dreamland. Other options can start these things from scratch but Youtube is not about to make their system infinitely more complex and unreliable just for you and the small handful of other people who are high on their tiny corner of the internet. You’re asking me to think and you haven’t done the bare basics of it yourself.