Personally, YT premium is my only subscription I have, and wouldn't really have any others if money wasn't this tight. But I was paying before this recent anti blocker war, I prefer YT Music just because of the way it handles a bunch of the music remixed by seperate and probably not "official" artists. And with how much youtube I watch on mobile instead of my PC, messing with blocking wasn't very appealing to me, since the jump from YTmusic to full premium is less than almost any streaming sub.
But I have always watched/backgroundnoised a lot of youtube, so its not that much of pain. Realistically, this was bound to happen eventually, hosting that much content hasn't really gone down in costs as quickly as most tech overhead. But its a fairly complex line item, not just hardware & facilities, but all the law office hours related to copyright log is an ongoing and probably still growing cost for them and since they are not Disney thats a real cost I'd imagine.
As a side note, it just reminds me how shockingly unaware I am of how much they must value our personal data, that it only just now became worthwile to fight blockers with this much effort and PR/image depreciation.
Except I can't think of a company that's large enough to be multi-state who hasn't made almost every decision in the last 10 years the wasnt the most short-sighted option regardless of how much more value would be made otherwise. No corporate strategies look anything like Shadow Boxing to me, they all want to just rape and pillage for a short of a time as possible the same they're more Bandits then Shadow boxers
It's only worth what people are willing to pay. Already have Spotify anyways and not a fan of googles app killing tactics, learned that the hard way a couple times.
Same as Walmart killing off every ma and pa shop is their fault, they lowbid the competition solely because they're able to with their monopolization, solution being actual competition in the industry.
Can't help but feel your goal posts are sentient with how much they're moving.
To add information on that the other person didn't, YouTube was purchased by alphabet in 2006, it was purchased in a very unstable state, it was bleeding money, but they wanted it because they saw potential in the platform for Data Tracking and video analytics along with the fact that it had a very high traffic ratio.
When they purchased it one of the first things they started working on was trying to turn it to be green instead of red, but despite this they still didn't start seeing any real decent change until about 2009, and it wasn't until 2015 that the platform itself started running in the green.
All this happened with YouTube being one of the most popular video platform sites out there. YouTube doesn't have to do anything to actively block competitors from doing it, with their established market dominance, search engine self promotion tendancies(there was an ongoing lawsuit in Australia regarding this) and the amount of sheer money they have, no company is going to try to compete, the closest arguably is likely twitch but they are pushing the reverse direction with streaming instead of video hosting