This makes a lot of assumptions in the same way that "pirating loses game companies money" - yes but its not always clear cut or an exact science. Pirating was also a big factor of Minecraft's initial popularity.
What if adblockers contribute to a video going viral? Or even sharing a video with family/friends who may not have an adblocker installed? What if I'm a content creator who uses adblock and now I share my content elsewhere? What if I'm a content creator primarily funded by Patreon and many of my viewers were adblock users and I move to another platform to retain my patrons and now YouTube loses money on all my subscribers who weren't adblockers? What if enough people are exiled that the go to place to watch new videos is no longer YouTube but Vimeo or another competitor? Social media sites rely pretty heavily on network effects and if enough users leave (Myspace, Digg) a competitor will fill the space (Facebook, Reddit).
The gamble here is that more people will subscribe than people who will leave. Which is likely true but it could have knock on effects.
There's a pretty big difference in that analogy, in that video game pirates literally cost companies nothing, as the data is served by pirates. Whereas Google directly loses money serving data for each "pirated" view of a video.
If you downloaded the videos and torrented/streamed them to other users, then the analogy would be more comparable.
I also share a video link with many, many, many more people than I ever could convince to buy a game. I might convince 2 or 3 friends to buy a game but I can incidently get 30,000 people to watch a video with a single tweet.
Think of it more like a loss leader. Costco sells hotdogs at a loss because it brings in more than what it costs them.
I'm sure Google/YouTube has crunched the data and came to the conclusion that it isn't worth it anymore but I also don't think data can even give a complete picture. Data can't predict how many people will leave vs subscribe when all is said and done. Results from limited rollouts are not guaranteed to follow in a full rollout.
If you block ads, there's a high likelihood that many of the people who are following you also block ads.
So not only are you directly costing YouTube money, but by tweeting it, you getting thousands of people to also cost YouTube money, thus magnifying your negative impact by many orders of magnitude.
It can certainly swing both ways but I don't follow the logic that if I block ads that people follow me block ads. It varies largely from audience to audience. If my followers are mostly young, tech-savvy individuals then sure many of them are also likely blocking ads. If I'm a big Minecraft content creator and most of my audience is 9-13 year old though? It becomes much less likely.
Given how few people continue to use Bittorrent these days, I'd say media companies have demonstrated an ability to do pretty well at customer capture and enforcement. Similarly, they don't have to completely eradicate adblockers, just reduce their usage into the noise.
I would assume that network traffic and server costs are negligible to Google.
In my opinion, what they are looking for is not to cut down the costs but to increase the revenue. Either by more people watching ads or by more people using their paid service.
... which also means that the Youtube subscription is at best a temporary escape from ads. It's rapidly going to become worse than adblockers. It's already started. With Youtube premium you still see "promoted" videos, ie. paid ads, in the feed. So in a way it already doesn't deliver.
Plus hosting your own videos is pretty cheap nowadays.
> which also means that the Youtube subscription is at best a temporary escape from ads.
Exactly. Decades ago, I remember *paying* for my first cable subscription. I was shocked at the number of commercials (ads) I was bombarded with. It only got worse... higher cable fees, more ads.
They can't have it both ways. I cut the cord many years ago (pre-streaming), never looked back.
What if adblockers contribute to a video going viral? Or even sharing a video with family/friends who may not have an adblocker installed? What if I'm a content creator who uses adblock and now I share my content elsewhere? What if I'm a content creator primarily funded by Patreon and many of my viewers were adblock users and I move to another platform to retain my patrons and now YouTube loses money on all my subscribers who weren't adblockers? What if enough people are exiled that the go to place to watch new videos is no longer YouTube but Vimeo or another competitor? Social media sites rely pretty heavily on network effects and if enough users leave (Myspace, Digg) a competitor will fill the space (Facebook, Reddit).
The gamble here is that more people will subscribe than people who will leave. Which is likely true but it could have knock on effects.