I used to have YouTube Premium.

The main reason for paying for it was that I don’t like having to sit through ads. A nice benefit of Premium over ad-blockers was that a part of the revenue from YouTube premium goes to creators in lieu of advertising revenue. YouTube gets money for running the service, the creators get money for making videos, and I don’t have to watch ads.

I stopped my Premium subscription not because it was getting too expensive, but because YouTube is an American company. Ever since Trump got elected for a second time I have been progressively working on cutting out products and services by American tech giants from my life, and YouTube Premium was a very easy one to cut out.

These days I just use an ad-blocker. If the creators want revenue from my view, they can upload to a platform that isn’t YouTube.