But you can always use a prepaid debit card.
But even if you do pay, you still see (often longer!) ads because people put sponsor segments in their videos. As far as I can tell, there's no way to skip those, paying or otherwise, except resorting to something like sponsorblock, right?
They also support the creators, surely, since there's a whole bunch of people I've watched who have no sponsored segments but are making a decent amount of money from the ads.
The way to prevent these ads from being blocked is to include them in the video stream itself, possibly by the original author. This has the good side effects of making them easy to skip and, more importantly, unable track users by themselves. The publishing platform can say things like "xx% of users matching rule yyyy fully watched it", but only if watching is non anonymous.
I hate ads with a passion [1]. I pay for the ad free tier of every streaming service I subscribe to. I find YouTube a wasteland of shitty content.
[1] For some reason tech podcasts ads don’t bother me and many of the ones I listen to have chapter markers for their ads.
I use adblockers and alternative YouTube clients wherever I can and I don’t care, because I have no choice.
I can buy YT Premium.
Or I can run adblockers. What portion of video I decide to skip watching on my device and which HTTP calls I make and which I don't is something I can decide and it has nothing to do with ethics or morality IMHO.
Watching a free YouTube video is something like getting a magazine copy for free. There is no moral obligation to look at the ads there, I can just skip those pages and pick and choose articles I want to read, even though I got the copy for free.
If the creators are giving away too many copies for free, they can start selling them instead. Or giving them and asking for voluntary donation. Or they can find another business.
It's not my responsibility to make sure the creator is profitable running their business. That's entirely on them.
