[tomashubelbauer]

If YouTube really minded freeloaders, they would put the whole video catalog behind a paywall.

But, they won't do it, because the 99 % (source: my behind) of people who don't pay for YouTube give it extreme social relevance. If they turned the site into an exclusive, paid club, another tech giant (Amazon? ByteDance?) would roll out a competitor in a week and would take the "biggest free video catalog" spot instead of Google, and they would do it happily. The biggest obstacle to doing that and trying to compete right now, network effects, would be instantly gone.

As such, I believe Google's appetite for jacking up the subscribers' price is much larger than their willingness to gamble the site's social capital. YouTube is massive in terms of its cultural impact over the last two decades and I am not saying Google isn't stupid enough to risk this legacy if they were really hurting financially, but I can't imagine the current circumstances with the current percentage of ad-blocking and the current ratio of subscribers to non-subscribers or the loss Google incurs running YouTube (which I am not even sure there is any anymore) are even in the same numerical system as the values it would take for Google to consider doing anything real with the so called "freeloaders".