YouTube has declared war on ad blockers and the internet is in an uproar.
On one side, Reddit’s edgelords declare that if you can’t watch YouTube without adverts, they will never use YouTube again.
On the other side are the corporate apologists screaming that nothing is free and if you want to avoid advertising, just pay for a premium plan.
In the middle, I sit anxiously, and only want to watch cat videos without ads that are longer than the clip itself.
I fully understand why people want to use ad blockers to watch YouTube. Have you tried it without? It’s absolutely unbearable. Watching ads before and during clips that are only a few minutes long is terrible.
But I also understand that YouTube cannot be run as a charity organization.
As someone who hates ads, I would happily pay to avoid them. Great, so the solution is to subscribe to YouTube Premium?
No way.
YouTube Premium currently costs $13.99 a month and is a bloated monster of services I DO NOT WANT. YouTube Music is included, for example. Sure, it’s a decent music service, but I’m not going to use it, so why do I have to pay for it?
I already spend enough money each month on streaming services that have content I want to watch (at least until they also start interrupting films with commercials).
What would I pay for? A simple subscription to turn off ads, nothing more, nothing less. I have no idea what YouTube earns per user in ad revenue, but if a subscription comes along that costs around $2 to $5 bucks, I’ll jump on it right away.
We could call it “Premium Lite.” No wait, that already existed (in select European countries), but Google recently decided to kill it. It cost €6.99 per month to avoid ads only. Still too expensive, considering that Google hardly earns $69 per user each year. And the fact that they will still sell my data. But a much better option than the current YouTube Premium offering.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling that Google won’t listen to me, so I’ll probably have to cut back on the cat clips in the future if I don’t want to be completely damaged by advertising.
I don’t think anyone will stop using YouTube. And they are fully aware of that.
This article was translated from Swedish to English and originally appeared on m3.se.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication M3 and was translated and localized from Swedish.
Author: Andreas Thors, Web Editor, Sweden
Andreas has worked as a technology journalist for many years. Andreas's interest in technology started with the Nokia 6110 about a thousand years ago, and today he follows AI development with both delight and horror.