so we already know that youtube doesn’t like people freeloading their bandwidth using something like invidious, piped, newpipe etc. why don’t they just close the public web api and require a login or something. by requiring login they can keep track of what users are watching and if a user is watching thousands of videos daily they can rate limit that user.
are they afraid of losing their user if they do so? I personally don’t think it can affect their business or profit. It will cut down their cost of bandwidth and computation costs. so why don’t just cut off users that don’t bring any revenue??
You were ready to leave over a banner ad? What should YouTube do to recoup the cost of running the service? Not even make a profit, just the cost of existing at the scale it exists is expensive. Unobtrusive banner ads seemed like the right “price” for the service. Having ads tell me I’m fat and need whatever they’re hucking or scare monger me to vote a certain way are too much, but banners seemed fair.
I had a very different mindset at the time. Nowadays, I can totally understand the need for subscriptions/ads, but back then I just wanted to get everything for free. LOL. Nowadays though, I care a lot more about privacy so the blocker stays on.
I’m also paying for services that are worth it, but I’m just not convinced that YT is proving enough value to me. Besides, I’m also shifting towards other video platforms, so I’m less of a burden to YT than I used to.