>If I were to allow all ads but make it a rule to never actually watch them or heaven forbid, buy anything in them, would that be ok?

Yes, you would be holding up your end of the agreement.

>If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.

Buy YouTube Premium and you won't get any ads and the content creators you watch will get more money than if an ad had played instead. Win-win.

I don't remember ever seeing an agreement. I'm not a subscriber.

But it's interesting that you'd have no problem with me never buying anything in the ads. What's the purpose of them again?

the purpose of an advertisement is to give advertisement companies something to sell to product makers, and to give product makers something to have media companies put in front of viewers in exchange for money.

it's a whole economy unto itself. money changing hands, jobs, all of it. almost no one buys something because they saw an ad for it.

Your use of the service is governed by the terms[0], which say "You are not allowed to:... alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content...". Even if you've never signed up for a Google account, it's implicit that YouTube doesn't actually serve anything for free, every video view and page load is a transaction for "youtube serves me content and I pay for it by having screen real estate taken up by ads". They do not have to serve the content if they think you aren't upholding your end of the bargain, which is this ad blocker block.

0: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8

I am sorry, but the internet right now is bloated with ads that slow down everything and create an absolute distraction when one tries to browse, I do not care if they have problem modifying the appearance and behaviour of a webpage that I have loaded on my browser, but this goes to anything in the internet basically. I am not gonna compromise myself before they all fix the internet of the mess they have created.

I pay for the content that I think it is worth supporting, and that's it. I do not think youtube is worth supporting, and if quite often the only reason I watch things there instead of somewhere else is due to laziness. Same for many creators I follow probably. If they set adblock restrictions I will just stop watching and that's it.

What about all the YouTube videos where ads are part of the program? If YT Premium could block those too, I might subscribe.

SponsorBlock to the rescue