this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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The people saying "just pay for premium" don't seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads. When google purchased it they promised to keep it that way. Then they slowly started with ads. At first they were pretty unobtrusive banners, then a short skippable preroll then multiple preroll then unskippable preroll. The reason I refuse to pay for premium is because Google created this issue and is now selling the solution. I refuse to be a part of that. It has nothing to do with the creators.
The cost of hosting YouTube itself doesn't pay for itself unfortunately. They could get away with it back then because the internet itself wasn't that big. Therefore, we need to KICK THE NORMIES OUT OF OUR INTERNET. WE WERE HERE FIRST, REEEEEE
Google reported an annual gross profit of $240.3 billion last year.
They can fucking pay for YouTube
It's even worse, their net was $132 billion
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/net-income
So even after expenses, the profit of alphabet group was obscene.
It's even worse, they laid off approximately 12,000 employees in 2024 alone.
So even after everything, the profit of alphabet group was obscene.
ReVanced and Grayjay do the same thing but for free and are open source so long as Google keeps trying to engineer enshitification the proud people of the open source community will engineer a solution.
The new Revanced is Morphe. 👍
Hmm weird take. Yes these are solutions to the Ad's problem from the user side but they are just UI Wrapper for Youtube so they don't have any costs for hosting & providing all the content. So yea they don't need to monetize. This doesn't however fix the problem for Youtube itself. How are they supposed to pay for cost & make a profit?
I totally agree that Youtube with all the Ad's is unusable (I'm using an AdBlocker) but Youtube is still a Profit orientated company so how do we fix this dilemma. Youtube Premium feels not worth it to most people because Youtube was always "free" so paying for it now makes people go like "WTF?". So Ad's & enshitification was/is the only way to make a profit for Youtube. I don't like it either but this is reality.
If you have a solution for them I'm sure they would pay you handsomely for it.
Peertube is a solution, it is an open source peet to peer video hosting platform. But in truth having good competition is a way to force better practices, and if open source is the best option people will go for it if they know about it. linux, thanks to valve and Microslop's poor idea of what people want (and governments leery of Microsoft and Trump's close association decoding to have their own OS for internal use at least), have gotten a small influx of users as a whole, but with more users the more open source solutions to compatibility will be produced, and hopefully if you are looking for the YouTube equivalent you'll try peertube.
I would totally pay for youtube if it was even remotely decently priced.
You can get multiple concurrents on disney+, Hulu or Netflix with blockbuster content for the same price as youtube's slop filled premium family.
Seriously, the service is worth maybe $9 a month. I don't want their music, i won't use it, the quality is crap.
I mean, as it grew the hosting/staffing costs went up as well. There's no way it could have continued to be completely free.
That's still a bait and switch though.
No, it isn't.
Yes, it is. Start by offering unsustainable ad-free video. Drive competitors out and monopolize the market. Start turning the screws. Classic tech bro bait and switch.
That's really not what happened. YouTube wasn't created to drive out competitors and monopolize the market.
It may have ended up doing that, but a bait and switch is an intentional action.
But you yourself literally just argued the impossibility of it running ad free indefinitely. If you attract customers by knowingly offering a level of service at a cost you know with absolute certainty that you can't maintain, then yes, it's a bait and switch. It's deception and manipulation. Classic bait and switch. Youtube isn't special. They're just Walmart.
And you're just wrong. There's no other reason to offer a service temporarily for free than to use it to drive out competitors. That strategy only has any value as a means of driving out competition.
But, sure, keep simping for the evil megacorp.