> A more ethical approach IMO (and ethics are both personal and subjective) is to pay for YT Premium if you'd prefer to suppress ads.

Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.

The supremely unethical behavior is coming from companies who decide to use advertising as their business model, and the entire adtech industry that powers it. They lie, cheat, steal, and exploit user data in perpetuity, yet users are supposed to feel guilty for trying to block all of this hostility? Give me a break.

> consumers watch for free

They don't watch for "free". They pay with their data and attention, which is worth much more than any reasonable price Google could charge for the service. This discrepancy is so large, in fact, that all ad-supported web platforms should be paying users for using their service.

Choosing to pay for YT Premium simply makes the experience more bearable by removing the annoyance of being constantly bombarded with ads, but all the shady data extraction, profiling, tracking, and manipulation still happens behind the scenes, across all Google products, and beyond.

The fact society has accepted a business model that introduces a hostile middleman in all of their business transactions, and that we've been brainwashed into calling this "free", is deeply disturbing. Not least because the same machinery is also used to serve us propaganda and manipulate us not just into buying things, but into thinking and acting in ways that benefit the agenda of whoever has the will and a negligible amount of resources to run an ad campaign. And yet we wonder why society is crumbling around us. It's some perverse version of Stockholm syndrome.

So, no, I will never feel guilty for using ad blockers, and no sane person should. If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.

>> Labeling people who use ad blockers as unethical is hypocritical, to say the least.

If I used an ad blocker you could say I was hypocritical. Since I don't, you can't. You're welcome to disagree on ethics of course, but its not hypocrisy.

>> If content creators want my money, they can choose more ethical business models, which are also likely to be less profitable and more difficult to manage. But, hey, that is the price to pay if you care about ethics, and not participating in machinery that exploits your viewers.

So you want creators to be more ethical, bypassing YT, but in the meantime you'll support Google by watch YT? Which as you point out is tracking you? I'm not sure I follow your argument here...