They, at least, offer a free hosting service. Not ideal to monetize on the back of the creator's work, but it's not comparable with friendly piracy rationalised through semantics behind what User Agent means (as per parent comment).

Not free anymore - they're now adware that's monetizing your viewers after unilaterally changing terms and cutting you out of the deal. It arguably puts them on equal footing with people who unilaterally change the terms of the site usage deal and block their ads.

Remember, forcing you to watch ads means it's not free - it's you trading irreplaceable moments of your life for something. Unless your time is worth absolutely nothing, ads are extremely expensive to you.

Why are you constantly ignoring the fact that they also keep paying for all the bandwidth, encoder CPU use and development of playback platforms for any device brand capable of showing a video out there?

Try running a hosting platform yourself and you'll quickly see just how crazy expensive bandwidth is. It's just ridiculous to expect that someone will 100% subsidize your video bandwidth for free.

Was YouTube losing money before they made this change? Their monetized content more than covered the bills for the content that wasn't monetized, and that free content their users gave them kept viewers on the site and watching ads. YouTube wasn't running a charity before they made this change, that free content they were given was valuable. They're just hoping that if they squeeze the golden goose harder it will lay more eggs.

They're a for-profit business, so again, why do you expect your content to be hosted at a complete loss while you monetize on external channels? Seems a bit entitled to expect corporations to give you things for free because other people pay for it.

> They're a for-profit business, so again, why do you expect your content to be hosted at a complete loss while you monetize on external channels?

This is begging the question that hosting non-monetized content is actually a net loss for YT. I'm saying it's actually not, instead the aggregate volume of free content keeps viewers on the site longer, and the higher viewership numbers result in a significant net profit.

More likely, YT decided that this arrangement, while profitable, wasn't making enough money for them, and because they must show their investors ever-increasing profit margins they decided to mildly poison their user experience in exchange for higher profits.