And can you prove no one asked for a premium service? I certainly recognize ads are a way to pay content creators and would like an alternative way to pay them in exchange for not seeing ads, so that already disproves your claim.

I said annoying ads and premium service. If ads were not annoying and you still wanted to support your content creators without watching ads; that's fine, premium service sounds a good solution to you. But Google chose the asshole way. They bombarded us with ads if we wanted not to pay. Even though I hate ads I am not against them. They should be short and not annoying.

And what does YouTube being profitable have to do with paying content creators, anyway?

If it's profitable they can pay content creators.

YouTube, who were known for running at a loss for years at the start, needs a way to pay content creators as well as pay for server costs to host YouTube videos.

Google is known for killing their services if they don't bring money. Let's assume what you said is true, so you are telling me that Google paid from their pocket and waited patiently till they became monopoly so they can execute their asshole plan?

Sure, they are also greedy, but watching content without paying the creators is not the actual way to fight that, is it? If you disagree with how Google runs YouTube, just stop watching YouTube instead of punishing the content creators.

Google built an empire by tracking us through the web sites before ad blockers are a thing. I'm punishing Google not content creators. If Google cared about content creators they wouldn't behaved like this in the first place. Why would care about content creators when their employer Google does not give a f**k about them?

Go watch them on alternative platforms where you can directly pay for their content like Patreon or Ko-Fi.

I haven't heard about Ko-Fi before . I'll take a look at that.

And finally I should add that Google is a danger to the internet. With this "pay for premium or you'll watch more ads then the content" bullshit they are becoming a role model to other streaming services.