[chii]

Your individual willingness is irrelevant.

There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.

So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.

[notpushkin]

If it’s not my choice, then there’s no problem if I block the ads, right?

[efdee]

Weird. I'm pretty sure that deciding whether or not to watch ads is entirely my choice.

[lxgr]

You can pay for Youtube Premium right now and the ads go away.

For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly.

Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.