Well, after all this time I finally got hit with my first pop-up on YouTube regarding ad blockers. I've been using Adblock Plus for years and have mercifully not had to deal with ads on YouTube at all.
I personally think our ad-based economy is a scourge on civilization and I'm willing to do almost anything to avoid them. However, I understand that ads are the primary source of revenue for YouTube -- as well as television and radio stations, podcasts, etc. -- and that I'm essentially "freeloading" if I block them. I'd be happy to instead pay for a premium subscription (as I do on TalkBass) to avoid ads, but the current price for that on YouTube -- $13.95/month as of recently -- seems excessive given my frequency of use. Cut that in half and I'll sign up for life, but I don't think I should have to pay that much.
I'm curious how others are dealing with this while we wait for Adblock and others to figure out how to beat the new system.
Before the IT revolution, so many American companies earned treir profits via paid advertising.
Now that sharing information is basically free, these companies have had to find new ways to make money. Many of them changed to a paid prescription format.
But a lot of these companies failed to understand the reality of the new balance of power and believed (falsely) that they could simply charge whatever fee they wanted to and customers would have no choice but to pay it.
Look at Photobucket. They switched to a prescription format with an unreasonably high price tag ($99 per year for basic membership, $399 per year for premium) and there was an instant exodus of nearly all of their users.
We live in the "wild west" of information sharing on the internet. There are multitudes of different types of arms races going on between and among information consumers, providers, distributors, creators, pirates, creators, hackers, copyright holders, and all sorts of middlemen.
This leads to absurdities like an amateur musician uploading a video to YouTube that they recorded at home of them showing how to play the bassline to "Hotel California" and it being instently taken down by YouTube because Don Henley of The Eagles employes a company with hundreds of workers that does nothing but scour YouTube for videos with any trace of content that he has a copyright claim to.
The absurd part about it is that there's no way to differentiate between videos that are illegally sharing copyrighted music, and videos that are clearly covered under "fair use" law.
They all get taken down indiscriminately, and the only recourse is to dispute the action with YouTube and hope they revue your appeal in your favor, which seems to have no sense of reason behind the process.
As a personal anecdote, Every cover band that I've been a part of for the last 25 years, has made a point of playing in venues that pay annual fees to the music publishing companies for the right to cover copyrighted songs when we play gigs there.
Yet, I can't post a video anywhere online of my band playing any of these shows because internet bots are constantly monitoring all social media for any scrap of copyrighted music and immediately shutting it down.
Remember that all of this started out decades ago as record companies selling music in stores that was recorded onto vinyl records and packaged as physical "albums".
Occasionally, music pirates would physically copy these albums (at great effort and expense) and sell the illegal copies out of shady record shops and hope they didn't get raided by the feds.
That evolved into online piracy, which eventually spawned sites like Napster, which essentially made money by providing a host site for tens of millions of music consumers to illegally pirate copyrighted songs without paying for them.
Considering where we are now, I don't think anybody has any idea what's going to happen even five years from now, much less 10 or 20 years in the future.
