Chances are it's just to install a BETTER adblocker...but even if not, YouTube is being greedy here. They could still make a fairly profitable site and compete based on features and usability, but instead they are maximizing their revenue at the cost of all else. They are greedy, and instead of having a thriving business, they are making the exact same mistake as cable TV providers: choking th life out of viewers wit…
I see what you mean about Google's greed. But to be perfectly honoust there is some greed on our behalf as well. The "contract" with YouTube being: don't pay us in $$$, give us your privacy — by attempting to use without revealing our privacy gold we're somewhat free loading, being greedy. It would be better to reject the "contract" and find different ways to access the content without relying on Google's "free" dist…
It would be a site that is like YouTube but only allows 1080P video (to save on hosting). It would take a few minutes, maybe 5 to load a video, to save on bandwidth. It would have a limit on video length as well maybe,
It would also not have any analytics or recommendation algorithm, and it would have a modest paid tier (2$ a month for some additional features). It might have a Patreon-like feature from which I would take a modest percentage, just to pay for hosting.
Instead of a recommendation algorithm, it would have some basic categories and new videos would just appear in the categories that you subscribe to, but only sorted by date.
It would be a slower, simpler site for genuine video sharing, but with some limitations to keep things realistic. I am being 100% serious: I do think a slower, more modest site with less features would be quite nice, sort of like Medium but for video.