There's a new service looking to do something similar to payments on videos.

Like a pay-as-much-as-you-like subscription https://subbable.com/

If we all refused to watch ads, they'd have to find alternative solutions; we might already have micropayments by now if it weren't for the people who watch ads.

You might have a point if you'd said you refused to watch the content and told them it was because of ads.

How so? You think Google isn't measuring how many people block ads?

Enough people apparently already refuse to watch ads that it would be against Youtube's interest to block people who block the ads. Other sites notice a lot of people block ads too, and put up banners begging for a whitelist. (Does that constitute a type of click fraud when you ask adblock users to enable ads [and click them]?)

Here are some interesting percentages: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user... I think with these numbers websites like Youtube suspect that if they piss off those of us who block their ads (by blocking our access or degrading the experience in other ways), we'll migrate to a competitor, and the masses will follow.

One idea I had that is on my list of things I'll probably never get around to doing is an ad blocker that pays the ad companies for adverts you don't see on a page.

The thought behind this is that the ad companies already handle micropayments to websites, and there's only a few ad companies - 'all' you need to do is set up an arrangement with them where you take fees from users and distribute to the companies when their ads are blocked (as detected by the tracker). Website owner still gets paid, and ad provider effectively gets paid for being your microtransaction provider. You only have to set up relationships with a few companies, rather than practically every website in the world.

For people like myself who would like to block ads but feel ethically bound not to, this would be a great way around the inflexibility of current models, where I subscribe to a single website or whatever.

As I said, I'll probably never get round to it, but if someone feels like it they're welcome to use the idea.

The ads beside the videos would be OK for me but the pre-roll ads are annoying especially when they change the behavior of the player: I'm used to click on the player to pause the video, but when it's playing an ad then the click opens a webpage instead of pausing the video and sometimes it even freezes Firefox for several seconds. This is what reminds me to turn on AdBlock.

Oh I must have missed that in those T&Cs I signed when I visited their publicly available website...

It's nothing to do with T&Cs, it's to do with not being a leeching asshole.

Pay for the content you want. Don't pay for the content you don't want. Don't take without paying the content you do want.

Why does anyone think doing content creation over youtube entitles them to money? It's an end in itself; to entertain others.

Save the 'don't be an asshole' moral shaming: ads are not guaranteed income on any medium where people have control, it's as simple as that.

If you're so uncomfortable with people being able to control what their computer or device does, make everyone use a black box to view your content. Or just paywall it.

They spam me. Their links pop up whenever I google something. People direct me to view their videos on youtube.

You expect me to care about and support their business model? I don't give a shit. If someone posts a link to a cat video I'm going to click on it - if the company doesn't want me on their site don't let me on the bloody site.

Don't be a patronising, sanctimonious "asshole".

Relying on your customers's benevolence is not a business model. If Youtube sees a lot of ad blocking, that should be an incentive for them to improve their ad delivery or come up with alternative solutions like micropayments.

The company that I work for suffers from a lot of people adblocking (due to the market we're in) so we offer an exceptionally high value subscription service, for a few dollars a month (between $2 and $5 depending on the payment period) any user can get an advertisement free experience across almost every website that we operate (over 100 websites) and there's a bunch more extra features that premium users gain access to... However I know of so many many users that visit our websites frequently (some that use our websites for hours every day) who use adblock and flat out refuse to pay the few dollars to view our websites without adverts legitimately.

There really is no magic solution, the sort of people that are happy to adblock websites are the sort of people that just don't care. Why aren't adverts a good business model? People get the content with no direct financial cost (that's what they want) and the companies operating the websites get the revenue they need to exist. A lot of people are happy to view adverts if it pays for the content that they consume: I am! I don't block adverts. If a website has advertisements that I don't like I find another website to use, or just go without.

Are shops relying on their customer's benevolence because people pay for the things that they want? There's a direct cost associated with delivering content to users on a website (which is incurred regardless of the advertisements viewed), there's a direct cost associated with delivering a loaf of bread to a customer of a shop, why is it completely unacceptable for someone to steal bread from a shop but the same is okay online? This isn't like media piracy, there is a direct cost associated with delivering content online.

Why should we pay for content? Surely, there's some other model.

One is advertising!

I agree and I bet this website will be shut down soon. YouTube has to make revenue and personally I have no problem "suffering" those ads as long as they're short.