YouTube premium is available in tons of countries and they have family plans. I’ve been using it for years with my wife and it’s best money ever spent.

Just pay for the content. You aren’t forced to watch those ads.

If you give Alphabet money directly, you’re just encouraging them.

To do what? Treat me more as a paying customer, and less as a product they resell to advertisers?

I’ll happily encourage them to do that.

What does that even mean? If you watch YouTube, you're just encouraging them.

Why not just pay for the service?

Because despite the common request to "let me pay a monthly fee to not see ads", the vast majority of people are too cheap to pay up. This is why ads are as prolific as they are.

Okay, but how is that relevant in this case, where you can pay to remove the ads, regardless of whether other people do?

Because people are too cheap to pay. I thought that was clear in my comment.

For me it's a bit of a Catch-22. I don't watch much YouTube content anyways, but I've reduced my consumption over the years because of the ads. From what I can tell, there's nothing I want to watch anymore because I no longer know what's there (and of value to me). So the prospect of paying is absurd for me as I'd be buying something with no real value except to remove an annoyance on the few occasions each month I bother to watch something on YouTube. If I had a clearer reason to increase my YouTube consumption, I'd entertain paying.

Other video services have clearer value to me in the content they provide so I pay for them. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

Yeah, If you are just watching videos rarely it can be tough to justify it.

I still have some channels that I regularly consume plus travel and cooking/baking videos that I watch a lot so it made sense for me to pay for it.