[afiori]

Personally I don't feel a moral dilemma about not giving revenue to YouTube.

That said, if Person A buys an LTT water bottle and block all ads and Person B watches all ads and never buys anything, then Person B needs to watch thousands of ads to make up the same revenue from that single merchandise purchase.

I agree with Linus that skipping ads is piracy, but if you finance it in better ways should you care?

For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jUxOnoWsFU

[esyir]

That was basically his stance. It's piracy, and I see no issues with it.

I'm not sure why people got absolutely butthurt about that.

[afiori]

Linus point has a slightly different nuance: adblocking is theft. Similarly to how Taylor Swift was against Spotify because (IIRC) people should buy albums.

My version was that adblocking damages revenue in very quantifiable ways* and you can work around that.

* I am almost sure that YouTube's recommendation algorithm does not counts watched ads as a metric, that is maybe watching ads increases the total watch-time of the video but otherwise an ad-full view is counted the same as a ad-free view. But this belief is not based on anything.

If this happened to be wrong then an adblocker could exponentially hurt a channel growth and that might equal quite a few water bottles.