Giving into the wishes of tyrants (pay us or else we're going to saddle you with ads) never weakens the power of the tyrants, it only strengthens and encourages them.
Tell us your suggestions. Exposure bucks?
Also, they did provide free content produced by others without compensation. They have for many years, long before ads showed up.
Now, it is true they don't finance the production of that content up front, but then again they also don't get any rights to the works either. The original creators retain full ownership, unlike in traditional media production.
But you're no better than Google, in this case, taking the free content produced by others without compensation.
Except you're also acting self-righteous and superior about doing so.
They're worse than Google in this exchange.
I'm worse than them for the grave, unforgivable sin of... viewing videos that other people put on the internet (without compensation) for the sole purpose of enabling other people to view the video... while I had the "wrong" browser extension installed?
Am I getting all this correctly?
Literacy is dead.
It's worth noting that sponsorship segments are supplemental income. The more they're skipped, the less they're paid out in the future. Some creators rely on that when their partnership money on the platform can't cover expenses on its own.
It sucks, but those are not priced into the payment for the platform to remove their ads. So this devaluation of sponsored segments can be seen in an increasingly large number of content creators having member-only videos that require a Patron subscription.
I'm not defending them or saying you should or should not watch the ads (I don't). But just explaining the reality and that there's not currently a great alternative.
I'm nominally a premium member (at least it's on trial) but I've not seen that button.
I'm about to ditch the trial but I might change my mind if the sponsorship stuff is automatically skippable.
For some videos that aren't marked by the creator, I think it's heuristics based, so more niche videos it doesn't always appear.
Perhaps I’m too “niche” :(