I think that's an inaccurate assessment of 'people who don't want to see ads', given that statistics put internet wide usage of ad-blockers at around 42%.[0].
Maybe it's just that no one wants to pay their captors for golden ear-muffs and blinders when they themselves are the ones responsible for the poor user experience.
I vehemently refuse to pay for YouTube Premium for that exact reason. I get ads that amount to something like "You know how we just stuff ads down your eyeballs constantly? You know how it's really annoying? For just X.99 a month, we'll no longer do that!"
These enrage me to the core. Now that I have NewPipe and other methods of watching YouTube without ads and artificially freezing the stream when I switch away from the app, the official app is useless.
This is a really stupid oversight.. Twitch did subscriptions first and there they do disable ads on the channel you subscribe to (if it has them).
No one's forcing YouTube to send me the videos either. If it gives me ads, they will be deleted before they even make it to my screen. If they don't like that, they are free to return 402 Payment Required instead of giving me stuff for free.
My touchstone for excessive advertising is a Polish TV station called Polsat, which often had very good programming but also lots and lots of ads. We often joked that Polsat programming was "all ads, sometimes broken up by a few minutes of actual TV". It wasn't quite that bad, but it was true that you would get just under ~10 minutes of adverts per every 15-25 minutes of programming.
YouTube exceeds that ratio, these days. And when that happens, I'm almost positive it's time to start packing your toys and looking for a different source of entertainment.
They made a statement about people who are willing to PAY not to see ads. People don't want to pay for anything. Give me free content! And then when they don't like the ads - give me a free ad-blocker!
For me, I'm happy to pay a reasonable price for most things as long as I'm convinced I'll like it. But that's a problem with most content - uncertainty.
No, everyone agrees that ads are annoying. I install uBlock Origin on every single browser I come across. Every single time, people take notice almost immediately. They always tell me the internet just feels so much nicer. Many times they can't explain why, they just know.
Ads are a blight on the modern web. Everyone prefers the low-noise version.
With uBlock Origin we can show them a better world.
People's behavior depends on the circumstances they are given, and if "free (with ads)" is one choice, then indeed a lot of people will choose it over paying. However, if option is not given, it doesn't mean everyone who would've picked free are not going to pay at all.
There are some highly popular freemium/ad supported games but also lots of very popular games that you simply must pay for. Applying the 1% number from products where the choice is ad-free-or-paid to must-pay-for games and assuming they'd get 99x more users if given for free with ads is just completely wrong.
In general, people seem quite willing to pay for games (this may be less true in mobile, that's a rather different market). The challenge isn't that people don't want to pay, it's that the market is extremely saturated and it's hard to stand out from the crowd & produce a game that everyone wants to play over all the other choices.
I constantly find that youtube's algorithm just recommends me less interesting stuff over time. If I could have some decent controls on it, paying for an ad free experience would be worthwhile.
For me, I'd rather not watch Youtube at all if I have to pay to use it. I have found that it is an incredible time-waster and really adds very little value to my life. If I had the self control I would stop using it on my own.
I would only get the first by paying, and I have found videos without ads so more more relaxing.
Apple is still not supporting any free codecs on the web. Apparently they actually do have a hardware VP9 decoder in the newest chips but it's only exposed to the YouTube app?? https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-m1-vp9-av1-decodi...