There are alternatives, but most people choose to pay with attention, so that's where creators are being pulled to. But that doesn't mean that you're forced to consume it.
When you're manipulating someone to choose against their best interests, it's happening on an unconscious level and freedom of choice is completely removed from the picture. In these types of cases, no I don't believe there is consent involved.
If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 human years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.
In the last 40 years (which equate to 80 billion human years of output) there has been hundreds of thousands if not millions of human years of effort put into tearing down peoples' barriers, implanting ideas, etc. This isn't 1960 madmen advertising, this is something different from all of human history. Never before have hundreds of thousands to millions of human years been dedicated to manipulating humans in such a continuous, scientifically approached way and on such ever present/connected platforms with the synchronization of message/manipulation across contexts/mediums.
Edit: Changed from using 'man years' to 'human years'.
And yet it seems that entirely random ads would have a better chance of catching my interest than whatever super smart master mind strategy they are doing after spending thousands of years on that problem.
Went to an undergraduate library to surf, and low and behold: women's underwear, and I am not a cross dresser. If you do not identify yourself you get the default.
It's almost all "AI" driven. Yes the halcinating kind.
I understand where you're coming from, but psychological manipulation is everywhere and committed by everyone all the time and defining its use as voiding consent seems very problematic.
It's easy to say what your best interests would be if you were in their situation, but they might assign very different values to certain outcomes.
There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
These advertisers could choose to put up paywalls but that would harm their search rankings, so they don't. Instead, they play games with cloaking [1] and other SEO techniques in order to bypass the user's wishes and show them ads (or even ads + cloaked paywalls).
At least YouTube offers a paid premium service which remains ad-free.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place), users with adblock are just trying to minimize their exposure. Totally reasonable (I do it too), but nobody is forcing them.
That may be true for e.g. a malicious software on your computer that force-redirects your regular browsing activity to some evil site, but that's not what we're discussing.
Clicking a link is not consent. I have no idea what I am going to see until I reach the website. My browser has rendered the website and executed their JavaScript long before I've had any chance to even process what I'm seeing, let alone consent to it.
Clicking a link is equivalent to walking into a tattoo parlour. We don't infer that I consent to receiving a tattoo just by walking through the doorway. Stealing my attention with ads is less extreme of an intrusion onto my person than a tattoo, obviously, but it is still an intrusion.
Also: Even alternatives to YouTube will end up in the ad market. Just see the different streaming services where one already pays and who are rolling out ads. And well, YouTube still is the central place with all the videos. The only choice I have is using an ad blocker, which could be seen as amoral.
When you say it is “not practical” to go to the town hall, what you are really saying is “my time is valuable and I want someone else to expend their valuable time recording that information and disseminating it to me at low or no cost to me”. Believe me, I understand the desire. But if we were all honest, someone has to pay for this and capitalism has decided that this is the “best” way to do that.
