> Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? You

> Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? YouTube might (but probably doesn't) make $30 billion in revenue. It certainly doesn't make $30 billion in profit. It's questionable if it even breaks even, and even if it does it's certainly nowhere near paid back the amount of money that has been spent keeping it afloat post acquisition. > If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today? Because testing something is pretty much always a good idea. > Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product. That's not a radical idea, it's a bad one if you lose money on most customers and are hoping to make it up at scale. Ad blocking users are unquestionably money losers for Google. > And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship. What competitor do you think is coming that will be willing to (at a very conservative estimate) set fire to $75 billion+ for a decade to build this competitor, and the investors who loan that $75 billion dollars on a very risky ten year bet not expect a very significant ROI in exchange? YouTube objectively should never have existed - it was extremely predatorily priced in terms of lowered ad load or subscription charging to actually exist as a business, and Google kept it going to scare competitors away. If a competitor actually comes it will be significantly, significantly more monetised than YouTube is.