$14 is two days worth of living in my country for your average man on the street, among many other similar places. Imagine if you had to pay $200 to watch YouTube, that's how much these services cost for us.

They refuse to correct for purchasing power parity and are left with nothing in the end. Steam seems to do very well in comparison.

(I don't watch YouTube even for free, but practically everybody I know does without paying anything, and it makes a lot of sense).

When the alternative is the exact same thing you describe but for $0 dollars, then yes.

I am not going to watch billions of Videos.

Its not entirely ad free, just fewer ads, AFAIK sponsored segments remain so there are still ads, sometimes quite lengthy ones.

$14/month is $168 an year, and if you subscribe to multiple other video services the annual total is going to be quite high.

Not to mention included YouTube Music. It's one of the few subs I pay for, because I watch a _lot_ of YouTube on the TV. And also like to have it in the background for "Podcast" style videos where the video is really only an accompaniment.

14 dollars a month for a decade is $1680.

To save $1680 I'd prefer to just use an adblocker (which I have done for the past decade)

That's extremely subjective, but I'd rather save that $14 a month towards retirement. And if YouTube was only available with ads... well, that's no videos for me, maybe for the better, I would waste less time.

$14 dollars better spent on liberapay

>ad-free

hasn't been in over a year

I hate google, and I refuse to give them any money.

my "personal" information there is as personal as my profile here

Many people have had multiple gmail accounts since 2004.

I have a gmail account used solely for google store and Android TV related verifications that's unlike other business, personal, registration, or spam email accounts.

The TV's in the house, smart wifi devices, and guest wifi accounts are on separate subnets, the NAS hosted media has limited read only keyhole access accounts for TV apps to use.

Whether it's SmartTube or any other app (iView, SBSOnline, Netflix, etc) it's wise to assume that anyone can be comprised by malware to sniff traffic for (say) bank account passwords, host bots for DDOS or mining, etc.

Obligatory call to free yourselves from having GMail as your (only) main email and especially to not tie it to YT or other unrelated services.

I can absolutely imagine my YT accounts at some point getting banned for using adblock, some stupid private upload or some comment.

one AND the same

how does this matter?