I think YouTube is forcing content creators to be pawns in its war against its users and we should not fall for its tricks.

Note that YouTube is still being paid for these views in spite of this “invalid traffic”. So they can easily solve this problem by altering their payment model. I don’t personally feel the need to take responsibility for their decision of how much to pay their employees.

If I wanted to support a content creator that badly I would just donate to them directly. Ads are the real mind virus.

I would sooner support content creators directly via patreon than sign up for YouTube premium or disable my ad blocker.

I think if you can live off 4 dollars a day you're living in 1983.

Content creators have my respect and sympathy, but it’s not my fault that they use a platform owned by a terrible company. I’m not going to charge my behavior to make YouTube/Google happy.

I'm fine with ads (if they are bearable) or paying for a service. As long I can use the service without running propietary programs.

I don't want to give money for monopolistic video platform, requiring propietary program, runed by unfriendly tech giant that can turn knobs as they like on what big chunk of the world sees.

$13.99 per month US

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=okfSCAJqX6E

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I understand Youtube needs to make money, it's expensive to manage the infrastructure they provide. That being said, faulting content creators for the type of viewers they attract will just drive away content creators with a technical audience who use ad blockers. This will just incentivise creators to make generic content for the masses or leave the platform all together.

The only alternative would be for creators to make their own sponsorship deals, and insert ads in the video, which diminishes the value of Youtube Premium for those who pay. If creators start put messaging in front of all their youtube videos about disabling ad blockers, it could backfire, and be an advertisement that ad blockers work on youtube, and lead to people seeking them out.

Hopefully this is all a temporary measure by Youtube until they can block the use of ad blockers, but the damage might already be done if creators stop making videos or seeking out their own sponsorships because they clearly can't rely on Youtube.