Is paying to remove the ads a big deal? Presumably the content creator wants to earn something for putting the effort into creating something. Ads are one way to support content creation. Directly paying is another. Many advocates to remove ads say they want a direct pay model.
You mean like cable TV, where you paid for premium, commercial free content for years until they realized that they could charge you AND put ads in? Or Twitch Prime? Or any of the dozen other paid services that have done this..
Twitch prime doesn't affect the content at all anymore. It gets you a monthly channel subscription and a bunch of video games. Also I'd guess that the vast majority of people with twitch prime didn't go out and buy it either, Amazon just gave it to them.
The thing you can buy a la carte is twitch turbo, and that still removes all ads.
Netflix has TONS of ads in the form of product placement.
HBO does product placement too, though they sometimes pretend they don't or pretend it doesn't count when they do it because they do it "pro bono" (The Pope only drinks Coca Cola™ brand Coca Cola Zero™ for purely narrative reasons, and we're going to mention the brand Coca Cola™ explicitly several times by name to drive home the point that the character you enjoy watching enjoys the cool refreshing taste of Coca Cola™ brand Coca Cola Zero™. Don't worry Coca Cola™ hasn't paid us to shill their sugar water, we do it for free! Drink Coca Cola Zero™!)
Then the solution is to stop consuming things with unacceptable levels of advertisements. Unfortunately, given what the situation is on television channels, movies, and social media these days, that level is extremely high for most people.
The thing is, that solution will only work if enough people do it, and apparently as it stands not very many people are willing to give up their favorite content to avoid ads.
I can only control what I do, and if I must give up consuming media that will give me a temporary high (but it won't since I'll be annoyed by the ads), then so be it.
We have fire tv and Amazon has added more and more advertising to the point it’s nauseating (an ad for Shameless in the middle of a bunch of baby pictures is jarring).
I’d be happy to pay an extra dollar / month to amazon to not see ads there. Actively looking at htpcs that I can put Adblockers on (pihole doesn’t work since ads and content come from same places, I think)
Pihole helps with native ads and ads in apps, though. Not as much as a real blocker, but you can't really use one of those in native apps with webviews (if you use bromite webview on android, it might be possible, not sure, but that still doesn't help with true native trackers or with your tv)
It is not only about the adds. Even if you pay, they will still spy on you and sell/use this data to show you adds somewhere else on the internet. I will start paying only if they treat me as customer and not as product.
The original content creators made their content for the love of whatever they're making content about. Giving CCs an easy avenue to getting paid is what got us into this whole mess in the first place.
I don't totally follow what you're saying. Are you suggesting content creators should have no expectation of ever earning anything, let alone a living, from creating content?
I agree, as long as no ads means really no ads I think premium is something they are doing correctly. If the take downs, demonitizing, and political deplatforming weren't an issue they would be all set. Also, the horrible compression. I takes the same data to binge wath a series on Netflix as to watch a few short computer security or safe firearm maintenance videos, er well it did until those videos all disappeared.
