I hadn’t thought of it from a privacy perspective.
I couldn’t imagine using YouTube not signed in because of the dogs**t recommendations you get then. I imagine if you’re signed in the privacy loss is not significantly less than if you paid for Premium too.
I also use GMail so I’m already f***ed from that. I’ve basically given up on privacy at any other time than when I want to do private things, and I use a VPN and private browser.
YouTube are fully within their rights to crack down on adblockers, as they have done in the past. Content delivery is not free, and they are not a charity.
YouTube provides two ways to “pay” for your content: with ads, or by paying for premium.
Tech companies have an unhealthy habit of making things free or cheap to gain a userbase, then increasing the price. The biggest problem with this imo is that it sets expectations with users that these things should be free
I am not going to get into an argument about what price is “fair” or whether Google can “afford it”. All I know is that for now, they continue to run YouTube, but nothing stops them from shutting it all down tomorrow if they decide it’s not profitable enough.
As for myself personally, I watched YouTube with ads for the last 2 or 3 years, and more recently I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium.
YouTube Premium made sense for me because:
I was spending more than 3 hours a day on YouTube (in the background or as the thing I’m actively watching.
I could afford it now that my financial situation had improved
Creators get significantly more money from YouTube Premium watchers (or so I’ve heard)
Before all of that, I used to use YouTube Vanced (RIP) and NewPipe, both great though not entirely legit ways of bypassing ads and downloading videos. I still use the latter to archive the really good content I come across.
If you’re ok to pay for YouTube, but it’s too expensive for the value you get out of it, there are alternative approaches. You can spoof your location and buy YouTube Premium in another country, like Turkey or India, and get it for as low as $2 a month. Google doesn’t crack down on this much at the time of writing.