Basically every tech company “operates at a loss” because of overzealous growth and money going to their investors/parent company/shareholders. I’ve never seen a detailed breakdown of any tech company’s financials released publicly, so I doubt there’s any way to prove this one way or another.
They make less money off of you when they can’t serve you ads
Genuinely I’d be interested in seeing a source for this since every metric I’ve seen from third parties is that ad free purchases gives them waaaaaay more money per user compared to the tiny RPU from ads. But maybe Google being its own ad provider changes that
But practically, I don’t really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return.
Never said I was owed anything by them, just that I have no moral or ethical qualms continuing to use adblock on a giant corporation