YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads.

Or you can use any of these solutions:

Android
iOS
- Yattee with this guide
- (Adding Piped/Invidious website to Homescreen)
Web
- Piped
- Invidious
- ViewTube
- (Tubo)
Desktop
- FreeTube
- (Using any of the web solutions as PWAs)
TV
- Android TV
  - SmartTubeNext
- Apple TV
  - Yattee with this guide

No mention of revanced? It's a great option, has sponsorblock and all
- I feel like I'm experiencing deja vu. Wasn't there a thread just like this yesterday?
  Edit: There was!
- ReVanced is by far one of the best solutions.
- I have a question for people using sponsorblock. Why? How do you expect a content creator to pay the bills? I use an adblock because fuck Google but content creators pick up sponsorships specifically because YT pays like shit.
+1 for yattee on IOS. Until we can get ublock origin on iphones, but that’s another story
- uyouplus and sideloadly/trollstore is great combo

'rightfully' is doing a lot of lifting here.

Or you update your uBlock Origin blocklists and declare YouTube the war.

Considering a DNS block
- Doesn't work. I have network wide DNS filtering, but that alone doesn't stop YT ads.
  If you have a link to a GitHub host file for that, I'd definitely take a peak.
  Otherwise, uBlock and *Pipe apps.
- Try blocking the ads.
  You will block the video serving domains as well :)
  YT/Google aint that stupid and knows how to bundle both for your convenience.
I never see Vivaldi mentioned in these. Yes, it’s chromium based, but I have not seen a single YouTube ad since they implemented built-in ad block many years ago. Without the need for extensions, plug-ins, or user managed block lists.
- yeah, ive been using vivaldi and only very recently did i see my player diabled with ubo off but if i disable ubo and put vivaldi's blocking option to just block trackers, that does the trick tho the ad starts with a black screen but the skip button instantly appears under .5 seconds or the video starts
- Vivaldi is proprietary garbage

I'm willing to pay for content.

I'm not willing to give Google money, or any proprietary solutions.

I judge adverts to be a waste of limited human life. I hope that industry can change.

So then you're unwilling to pay for the content
I mean, we can't act surprised that YouTube needs to somehow afford the infrastructure to serve content? Adblockers caught on & youtube cracked down.
More technical solutions will be created in response, and those wi be picked up by a small majority causing the cycle to start over once more.
- Where was Google's concern for paying for infrastructure in the past? Google choose to bleed money which made it harder for smaller competitors to compete and take a share of the users, and now Google wants to have their cake and eat it too. Too damn bad.
  I am unwilling to pay for the content while Google is where the content is. Odysee seemed shady to me so I stopped using it. Floatplane is proprietary and I'm trying to kick the nasty habit of using proprietary software, I don't want to start using new ones. I used to pay to listen to a podcast but I got tired of the content. I donate to Wikipedia.
- You're getting unfairly downvoted. I agree with the negative sentiment around Google but the only semi-alternative is nebula but they obviously don't have the same amount of content. It's not reasonable to expect YouTube to operate for free
- Youtube by itself produces almost no content. All content comes from content creators on the platform, which are getting severely underpaid by Youtube. If Youtube actually paid them their fair share, this argument would be somewhat valid.

Aww. Are the greedy megacorporations upset that consumers are being greedy in return? Poor megacorporations. :c

All these billions in revenue are not enough :(

well i for one ain't paying shit to google, nor am i watching any ads 👍

If it comes down to it, I have no issue just not using Youtube ever again. FireFox and Ublock are your friend.
Preach!!

This is why Google has been using their browser monopoly to push their "Web Integrity API". If that gets adopted, they can fully control the client side and prevent all ad blocking.

Thankfully, Firefox is still a thing. If that comes out, it's going to be a hell of a lot more popular.
- ... and dependent on Google ; they may either push that API into FF or push something different so bad that FF would lose even more users.
https://9to5google.com/2023/11/02/google-chrome-web-integrity-api/
- Thank fuck
- Delayed... For now
- Google also said they would cancel there plan to roll out FLoC after significant pushback a while ago, only to renamed it as Ad Topics and roll them out anyway when no one is looking. If Google do the same with web integrity API, I wouldn't be surprised anymore.

Still haven't gotten any on Firefox with Ublock Origin. The usual explanation is that it rolls out in stages, but I've nothing weeks later.

Nah there was an article that said that it's fully deployed now.
Your ad block solution must be filtering it out appropriately.
I've had to do the full purge and refresh filters thing.
I just have all my YouTube subscriptions feeding into an RSS feed. Haven't gotten a single ad.
Are you logged in to YouTube on Firefox? Anonymous visitors with ublock origin doesn't seem to get the nag.
- Yep, logged in and haven't seen a thing.

Kinda glad my uBlock Origin is still working.

This should be illegal, actually in Europe it's about to be...

what is illegal? Havinadblockcks, cracking down onadblocks or upping the price on the software after ""forcing"" people to move to it.
- Anti Ad-Blocking Software would be (and arguably, already are) illegal as not only do ads count as a form of malware, but Anti-AdBlocks run scripts on YOUR machines without your consent, and thus are ALSO malware.

I will never watch 20 ads in a 15 minutes video, it's worse than television.

Make it a reasonable number of ads and I might consider it

Some youtubers are so greedy it's unreal, you barely see the red line because it's way too filled with yellow spaces

Who could have POSSIBLY seen this coming?

Enshittification must be stopped

Is enshittification the new word for late stage capitalism?
- Enshittification, also called chokepoint capitalism, is a term coined by Corey Doctorow (sp?) that lays out a common pattern with platforms in a capitalist system where:
  Platform builds a product to entice users to it for little to no cost to the user (Google search, Facebook, Amazon shopping, etc)
  Once users are locked in, make the experience worse in ways that increase profits for business partners (Google ads partners, etc)
  Once business partners are locked in, screw them over to rake back as many profits for the platform owner.
- Sounds like it is.

Yeah, no.. it's already overpriced.

Paramount + £6.99 Netflix £10.99 (standard) Youtube £12

Makes no sense.. they don't have anything like the production overheads. Stuff like Star Trek and Stranger Things are expensive. '10 greatest cat videos' is not.

Heck, they don't even pay a good fraction of their bandwidth because they put caching box in your ISP location to reduce loads. This is a huge privilege as ISPs won't let any random companies run equipments for free in their network, which is one of a huge barrier for any YouTube competitors.
- They might be allowing them to run the boxes for free, but the ISPs are saving money on bandwidth, too.
  Get enough users for the ISP to care and they'll work with you. Otherwise, you probably don't have all that many users to begin with, so the overhead that maintaining and distributing these boxes would create wouldn't be worth it anyway.
Youtube expenses is revenue share with creators and hosting untold hours of video, over 500 hours uploaded per minute, that others just don't have to deal with.
It "makes sense" in that, unlike those two, YT has to deal with thousands of hours of video being uploaded to their servers every minute. What they don't pay in streaming rights, they pay in storage and bandwidth costs, plus a couple of peanuts for "moderation", which is probably more expensive in the long run
you forgot to add spotify which is about 12$
- YouTube Music is included with YouTube Premium though so no need for Spotify if you have YTP.
Depends on how much you use it. I watch Youtube pretty much every day for at least an hour, while using Netflix or other streaming services about once evey few months. I use Spotify every day too, just because I like their app more in some ways.
- If I had to choose, I'd swap my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions for YouTube. I think I watch YouTube videos about three times as much as Netflix and Disney.
Well it also includes a streaming music service which are normally $10/m on their own.
- I already pay for Spotify. They knew exactly what they were doing when they lumped that shit in YouTube premium
- They should offer it seperately.
- I can't see the value in using youtube for music.. it's not like I can watch music videos in my car. That's worth $0 to me, and I imagine the majority. Spotify is better.. or apple music if you're on the fruit side.

If some day I cannot block ads on YouTube I'll go to Patreon or any other platform that gives creators a real share of what I'm paying. Google will not see my money.

Has YouTube even done anything to improve the platform in the last 8 year? The only thing that I’ve seen change is the search turning to trash with “recommended content” after 4 real search results.
- They removed the dislike button. That improved the platform right?
- No.
  In fact they've made it objectively worse by restricting what you're allowed to make videos about.
  The state of True Crime is abysmal.. it has gotten to the point where censorship is stricter than Cable TV, as the names of various felonies have to be bleeped out in order to not catch youtube's wrath.
  Yet Far Right Political Channels are free to drop whatever slurs against transfolk they like.. and openly accuse whatever drag performer they want of being a kiddie diddler even though true crime channels get a content strike for saying "pedophile" even though it's in the context of someone literally tried and convicted as one.
  Ever wonder why the kids are saying "Unalive" so much? It started as a cute 4th wall leaning cover for death in a Deadpool/Spider-Man crossover...
  Now it has regular usage because direct references to death (Again, Regardless of context) is against Youtube Terms of Service.
  It's so bad that a close friend of mine who is a streamer, despite not posting to youtube, has had to train himself to exclusively say Unalived so that clips of his streams can be safely posted to youtube, his livelihood cannot risk him using the "d" or "k" words.
  It's absurd because a reason web content became so popular is that it wasn't restricted to the same kind of censorship the FCC puts on Cable TV.. We can have an Angry Nerd drop as many F Bombs as he wants while talking about something as innocuous as Super Mario 3...
  But thanks to Youtube.. not anymore
- Probably a lot on the backend. Honestly fewer changes on the front is probably for the better at this point.
Only issue would be getting the creators to move. That nay be more difficult than said with some. I already follow some on rumble, I only stay on YouTube as others haven't.
Otherwise I agree
I was under the impression that YT Premium paid creators the same per view as YT with ads. Is this not the case?
- I believe Louis Rossmann said that giving a single dollar directly to a creator is more than a lifetime of watching their ads. Premium I think is really good comparatively but that's only because ads pay so little.
  (https://youtu.be/4Q3ZXQZZlcE?t=55 is where he says this according to his cpm)
- Some creators have said that the cut they get from premium viewers is higher than that of ad based (SpiffingBrit for example, in his YouTube download exploit video).
  If that still holds true is unknown.
- I don't believe so. As I understand it, all Premium money goes into a big bucket. Then, views/watchtime/etc. are used to calculate what percentage of the pie a given creator will receive.

*you pay YouTube for the content they didn't make or they turn the thumbscrews.

This is misleading : a substantial part is distributed to the content creators. Traditionally the YouTube cut is alleged to be rather low.
Because it costs nothing to run data centers, employ thousands of people, distribute exabytes of data.

why is everything being enshittified this year? :(

Tech bubble is deflating, high interest rates are probably also a culprit
- And the idea that a company that doesn't grow every single year is somehow a failure, even if it is making millions or billions
- You mean POP!?

Unpopular opinion: this is a good thing.

(Waits for down votes... )

This is healthy for the ecosystem, it makes it possible for other video platforms to compete, and be sustainable. Google providing the loss leader in video streaming makes it difficult for other platforms to exist, and sustain themselves, because they don't have Google's war chest.

So it's going to be a difficult transition, but now there is wiggle room for other platforms to exist. And with 1 gigabit, and 10 gigabit home internet connections becoming more common globally, we have options for more interesting gorilla distributed video streaming.

Will the gorillas go door to door with a pad or something with a video on it, or are you thinking memory sticks?
- Both services are available, and I recommend paying the extra for the 'please dont rip my arms off' extra.
- More like IPFS. If you have a bunch of gigabit residential internet connections distributed globally. That's a reasonable approximation of a video streaming platform.
  I'm not saying I have a good solution for today, but all the components are there to build a competitor to YouTube, and now if the price barrier going up, there's room for whatever organization competes with YouTube to get some sustainable income
Significant portions of the US are still on copper cable or DSL, I don’t think there’ll be widespread fiber, let alone 10G for at least 10-15 years
- Agreed, I'm in northern Canada and only the capital city of my territory has cable internet, the outskirts of the city and the smaller communities are stuck with ancient and capped (300GB per month) DSL at 15 Mbps while I get unlimited 100/10 Mbps for $140 per month. I'd kill for symmetrical 100/100 so I could access my plex server outside of my house, let alone 1 Gbps fiber internet.
  I'd guess we're a minimum of 5-10 years away from fiber internet sadly, we just don't have the population to make it profitable enough for the greedy ass telecom companies, even with the extra government funding the telecom gets for serving our low population territory.
You're right I hope. Especially about gorillas sharing video! We need a guerilla movement to get these gorillas some cell phones and I've been saying it for years!
10Gb to the home? Where have you seen this, and.for how much? I had no idea that was a thing for residential
- 64.75 Swiss Franks per month from my ISP, it's the same price as their 1 Gb/s and 25 Gb/s plans.
  I'm currently still on 1Gb/s because buying the faster router, switch and network cards to make use of more is kind of expensive
- I get 2gbps to my home in singapore for $30USD a month.
  10gbps is available in a few places globally, but its becoming more common. i.e. https://www.utopiafiber.com/10-gbps-info/
This is what I've been saying, youtube providing the service for free is what's been preventing competitors to exist.
This is a really good point, I never thought about this. While we still haven't seen the anti-adblock message from YT (Firefox + uBlock Origin on Linux Mint), we've been using Nebula more and more lately. It would be great if there was a similar service for quality kids content. As it stands we stick to just a couple YT channels for our 2.5 year old because of how much absolute, irredeemable garbage there is targeted at kids there. I can't imagine how shit the ads are for them.
- I have no idea what the content is like on YouTube Kids but on my YouTube app when I cast kids stuff the display ads on the phone side are often for mobile games with really creepy shit like dead Paw Patrol characters and grieving Elsa.
  I'd never leave a little one attended with an iPad with YouTube on their own
No, not really. I get what you mean but the truth is, that unsustainable practices should've been capped, and made illegal BEFORE there was a monopoly. Now that there is one, they can do what they want. Google aren't idiots. They know FULL well they can do this. All of this is calcualted.

uBlock Origin and ReVanced users: I missed the part where that's my problem.

i know my problem: besides im almost immune, my family isnt, my devices connected in the same network could be affected by a malware sponsor on 1st search result, besides im the one who got to fix anything that could go wrong in their devices, etc
- It's good that there is at least one person in a family that can fix electronics. It's worse when there's no one. I think the majority of malware coming from ads (and persisting on devices) is in those families that lack that one techy person.
Do you feel better after making fun of people who use other devices and not just a smartphone and browser? There are a hundred news that aren't your problem and you don't comment there, but you make sure to come in here and "rub it in" to people who care about this, by not providing an actual solution.
Very noble.
- Sucks for them. This is what happens when you buy into the corporate, locked down, sanitised and monetised walled garden.
  Privacy first and FLOSS software have been out there the whole time for people willing to invest the time (and money, but often it's cheaper than the commercial option) to learn them and gain those benefits for themselves.
  But if people want a device so they pick up the one with the shiniest marketing and then wonder why it's shoving ads down their throat, well, that's what they get for not researching the options. There are alternatives, they've been posted many times over in this thread and similar ones.
- Your comment certainly provided "an actual solution" in a "very noble" way
- Yes
it's going to be your problem soon regardless of your idiotic optimism
https://lemmy.world/comment/5021168
- Read the article that has been posted under the linked comment!

happily continues using uBO and Firefox

Get fucked Google. Glory to the adblockers.

The way Google is starting to abuse its position of power to crackdown on its users, its really comes to show the cracks in its armour.

It's the beginning of the end for Google.

Long live open source software!

Google isn't going anywhere. We are the minority. People who know what "open source" even means are the minority. The vast majority of people will just put up with it because they don't know any better. You are highly highly overestimating the tech literacy (and motivation level) of the average person.
- If anything, I expect two things to rise - people that just stop watching videos online cold-turkey, and pirate mirrors of popular YouTube channels
- Well, more crazy things has happened. Do you think that Google is going to be here forever?
  It's the little things that corrodes a company. Hence the "crack in the armour.
  I like to think that most people surf the Internet with an ad blocker. Simple because the Internet is just riddled with ads and the experience is frustrating without one.
  So if you see your grandma has a bad experience online, you are likely to install an ad blocker to help her out. Most people knows how to do this, at least one person in the family. That is what hurts Google the most.
  It's the annoyance factor that is a great driver of change. The way people do things. Even if they are used to do things in a certain way.
  I personally have notest the Google maps are much more inaccurate nowadays than it used to be. It has become an annoyance.
- I read that only 6% of people even use adblockers
If we are going to do this capitalist market thing than we need competition.
- Amen!
What abuse?
- This article.
- Another Google Abuse Example.

More enshitification.

The stupid thing is that they could have approached this in a much less dickish manner. Seriously. First, they are making money off us as it is with their demographics and the fact they are not utilizing this cash cow as before means they have gotten too greedy for their own good, or mismanaging funds which is a completely unrelated problem. Long ads, unskippable ads, expensive premium. This is the beginning of the end of something they used to offer as free, resting on their laurels as a monopoly, like the airline industry. When they are now practically forcing the cobra effect. Eventually, it will get so silly, it will go the way of the dod like Angelfire. AOL, and Geocities. Or, soon, Netflix.

I would have started it similar to Patreon, like, "by donating $1/mo, you can support artists like this," and incentivize the publishers with monetary gain and higher search results. Nobody is gonna miss $1 or $12/year. You multiply that by millions of viewers, that's millions of dollars on top of their demographics. Second, they could have had a 5 second bumper, similar to PBS, like "This and other find content is brought to you by Exxon and the Chubb group" or whatever. Five seconds. Front and back. Not enough to cause outrage. Skippable, but not so annoying, everyone skips.

God imagine SML allowing Jeffy to ask if Mario is "fucking high" again?
Pretty hyped for the death of Youtube.

mine went from 17 AUD to 33 AUD.

what a bunch of greedy assholes.

I was paying for it for years. But now I'll go out of my way to not pay for it. No doubt a lot of people will too.

TF? (aka fuck'em) That seems like the USD price is probably going to rise too then. USD 9.99 right now for me and that's AUD 15.41.
AUD 33 would be more than doubling it for me, just like Disney more than doubled my barely used subscription (I instantly cancelled that).
One Piece is going to have real live action now methinks.
Not certain what is up with yours, but mine has been increased to $17 from $15 AU.
*Ah, the Family plan.
$18 > $32. An absurd increase especially given the single plan was just $2.
- yeah sry the family plan I, didn't specify

If ads werent accompanied by malware, scams and right wing propaganda farms I might have considered not blocking them but as it is, no.

The right-wing propaganda thing has been odd for me. I'm a liberal gun nut and watch tons of gun related stuff. You would think I would be run over by BS, but I'm not. Can't explain it.
OTOH, if one has a soft mind, I can see the rabbit holes they might fall into. Perhaps we shore up education so even the idiots know enough not to fall in?

Or you just continue to block the adds.

I think I will do neither of those things instead.

I will be stone cold dead before I pay a single dollar/euro to Google for THEM to harvest MY DATA to resell.

That's 4 global continents, that counts as worldwide.
I think they only missed Africa in terms of populated continents
Mapmen continents
If anybody wants to debate how many continents there are I will provide you the most inflammatory list:
Americas
Asieurorica
Australia
Antarctica

.

Or how about I continue to use uBlock Origin and do neither.

The worst part of it is that they are still driving up the cost by bundling YouTube music.

They know nobody else will use it if they don’t
Just wait, it’s google. They’ll sunset google music and not bring the price down
- Honestly I think Google has a horrible management culture. It worked fine when they were printing money regardless but at this point the incompetence is starting to show.

They've already calculated, how high and in how many increments, they can rise their prices, while still coming out ahead. For every country specifically.

They've been also serving ads for YouTube premium as well recently

My guess it that it's to rope in people who don't use adblock

Wait... YouTube Kids has ads without Premium?! I would've hoped they'd keep the ads away from kids at least.
- Anyone who grew up in the U.S. in the 80s can tell you that we spent hours every Saturday morning watching ads for toys disguised as cartoons in between ads for toys not disguised at all.

I still maintain that YT Premium is a great service if you're like a lot of people and YT is the majority of your online video consumption. From a price to use comparison standpoint, it's unbeaten. Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc all pale in comparison.

But their insistence on bumping up prices, bundling YT Music and their war on ad blockers now is making it really hard to try to keep it. Hopefully now that Google is trying to cash in, we get some real competitors. Because right now when it comes to the sheer amount of content, visual quality and reliability of streaming nothing compares.

The problem is that, as I understand, YouTube still loses money.
They could probably break even if they screwed over their creators like other platforms, but their creators are their moat.
- I've heard that too, but I don't know the details. It seems to me that their massive compute, storage and bandwidth requirements would be the culprits. If they're paying creators so much that they're unprofitable, that would make them very unsaavy with their money.

A few months ago I was thinking about getting YouTube premium. It's a platform I'm on everyday and have been using it for years. But they decided to block adblockers and increase prices, so they can go fuck themselves.

I'm on the go fuck yourselves side even though I use YT everyday quite a lot.
Us Aussies got it hard, price went up from 18 to 33. I'm strongly considering this to be my last month.
- See you in the other side ⚰️🙏😔

uBlock beat the filters almost immediately. Annoyingly for google once you've downloaded something its out of their hands.

How? I keep having to clear cookies. Now use Firefox. With logged in window I find the video I want and I open it in private window with ublock origin enabled. No warning in private logged out window.

The less people who watch YouTube, the less valuable those ads are, and therefore the less valuable premium just be.

Have YouTube viewers been going up to justify ads being more valuable?

Video serving can cost a lot of bandwidth. Hence it could be sensible.
- YouTube don't even pay a fraction of those bandwidth as they run caching box on your ISP for free. ISPs won't let any random companies run equipments for free in their network, so this is a significant competitive advantage. You'll have to be a company as big as Google, Apple, or Netflix to do this.

I was honestly thinking about buying premium, so I would support the creators. Welp, that's out of the window.

See if they have Patreon, or better LiberaPay or OpenCollective. If not, you can ask them to make one.

For youtube revanced, use revanced manager

- How to avoid ads in YouTube on Fire TV Stick?

I will do everything within my power to take from them as much and give back as little as I can.

I don't need YouTube that much. It's competing with books, more traditional TV shows and movies, and Nebula / Curiosity Stream and Wondrium / LinkedIn Learning. I guess I might miss some reaction videos, but oh well.

I'd even be willing to consider paying them, if it was not as pricey and came with less bullshit.

Obviously, even compared to yt premium, third party Foss solutions are by far superior, but to support the creators, it would be okay.

Yet, when they higher the already ridiculous price further, I'm noting out.

Yeah, I don't want shitty music streaming, strip that out and give me a no ads only option for like $100 a year and I'd consider it
- That's still a pretty high price

And I'm from a country where YouTube Premium isn't even available.

I pay for YouTube because I leave it on basically all day. It's worth the 14ish(I don't remember) a month. I just wish more of my pay would go to the creators.

If you're happy with the service then I hope it remains a good cost for you, to me it costs too much for what I would actually want it for.

Can confirm, my YTM subscription in Poland went up from 9.99 to 10.99 PLN.

YouTube sucks ass now anyway, just don't watch it

But you're Assman, shouldn't you be enjoying a bit of ass sucking? 🙃
Nah, there’s still plenty of great creators on it.

I'm shocked /s

I tried to get youtube premium because the ads are wack af and they won't even let me.

Aren't there sites that offer YouTube premium sharing for something like 3 euros and change? I remember landing on one while I was meandering the tubes.

- Better to just gather some friends and split the family plan. $17/6= 2.83/mo, just gotta get 6 people. I wish there was an easier way to discover new music within the same UI as apps that play personal mp3/flac collections otherwise id ditch Spotify too.

Personally I'd say they should regulate the ads that are being rolled out so we don't have constant obvious scams but oh wait that would make for a better and safer user experience

I have thought about this but haven't seen anything about whether or not they will regulate the ads better. I enjoy not having obnoxious, repetitive ads. I also enjoy having no ads and directly supporting the creator of the media I like.

I'm so glad I early adopted Google play music all access. It locked me in at a permanent lower rate, and that got rolled into YouTube premium with the release of YouTube music.

Seems like this could be turned around if enough people would just consciously refuse to patronize anything they saw advertised on youtube.

That seems like it could work, and I would love to say you're right, but many of the companies advertising—especially as we're seeing more and more of the big players—have a really diverse ad spend budget so their dollars are all over the place. Because so many ads aren't looking for a direct sale but rather increase your awareness when you DO want to buy, say, laundry detergent, there's no way to tie your purchase to having seen an ad (though marketers LOVE to try and draw lines to efforts, many are hazy at best). So seeing ads and consciously not buying what you're seeing could in theory lead to a dip in sales, but the watch numbers are high, so no adveriser would be able to tell that dip is because of youtube, or podcasts or... uh... radio?.
So sadly the best way to hurt the system is to a) keep blocking the ads so the watch level is low and the advertisers want out or b) drop the watch level naturally by picking another platform.
Source: a lot of time in advertising.

The horror. Paying for your content. Shudders