And it's just a convenient consequence of doing the "morally right" thing, that you happen to get your content for free? And content creators be damned?
No, I just happened to always have it for free. They are the ones that decided that it was a good deal in exchange for tracking me throughout the internet, stalking me. They are the ones that decided to make my watching experience miserable by putting unskippable ads. They are the ones that decided to make the videos I watch crap, because if they're not 10 minutes long with a perfectly engineered cover image, they won't pay out the creators and they won't show their content. They are the ones allowing literal hour-long ads. They are the ones that decided to make my home page """algorithmic""", which is really "oh you watched a video game ? Others like <literal nazi>, you should watch it". They are the ones hiding, destroying, trying to piss me off by removing features one by one and putting them into Youtube Premium. Play in background ? High quality videos ? Not stopping autoplay every 30 minutes to ask me if I'm still here ? Picture-in-picture ? Adding to queue ? These are all features that they proudly displayed in blog posts saying how awesome they are, and that it'll always be free. Now, they blast me with popups telling me to get Youtube Premium. One per person in my household by the way, account sharing is bad and they must extract as much money as possible.
The content creators I support get their money on Patreon or whatever fundraising platforms they use. Same things for my favorite journals. The others ? Well, I don't care enough about them to think that I would pay for them. Maybe others will. And if they don't, well, they'll stop.
It would be, if Google didn't have a chokehold on most of the internet. Sure, Nebula exists, I can watch three creators there, woohoo. Let me go on Dailymotion too for those sweet 2005 videos.
Google did everything in their power to force themselves into every aspect of our lives and leaving no alternatives, or destroying them, or buying them. Now they get to deal with the consequences
The content creators could post anywhere, there is no reason they can't cross-post their videos to other platforms. Most publishers who are on Patreon post all their videos ad-free on there so you don't even need to go to YouTube.
The reason most publishers post on YouTube is because they depend on the revenue from the YouTube network.
If you don't want to watch ads, fine, but you are expressly violating the wishes of the people who are creating the content and then rationalizing it to yourself. The fact that you still rationalize not buying the ad-free premium offering is the kicker.
