This is a very interesting problem that I've considered a lot lately, even to the point of planning out a competitor on pen and paper. Here are my thoughts. An

This is a very interesting problem that I've considered a lot lately, even to the point of planning out a competitor on pen and paper. Here are my thoughts. And, on a personal note, I would absolutely love to build a competitor! Serving video at their scale and efficiency is quite advanced and non-trivial. Videos must either be transcoded multiple times and stored, or on the fly. Now, consider what you're asking for in terms of ad-free. You want to watch videos, but not watch ads. Fair enough. But who pays for the bandwidth? Who pays for the servers and infrastructure for storing the videos? I can only see four options. 1. You, the watcher. 2. The content creator. 3. The provider (YouTube). 4. A benevolent 3rd party, such as government or nonprofit. Watching videos with ads is option number one. You are paying by watching ads. I never see ads from youtube, because I pay for premium. That is also option number one. If you block ads, and do not pay for premium, then you are trying to do number three. You are expecting YouTube to pay all of the costs, but where are they going to get the money to do that? Economically speaking, it's an unsustainable position. Currently, they must make up the Lost revenue from other people who do watch ads. That means, in short, by you not watching ads, you make someone else have to watch more ads. The approach I considered taking was to provide a pay-for-what-you-use (bandwidth) model. Watching things at a lower resolution costs less, for example. It may only be a few cents per gig of transfer, but such a simple but fundamental change would have interesting repercussions. For example, content creators would be incentivized to be more concise rather than stretch things out as they currently do. Creators could also then be paid a portion of the transfer fee. So then not just views matters, but actual watch time. The balance of creating meaningful content and not just filler would be an interesting experiment. Honestly, I would love to explore this option more. I would love to build it! There is another alternative that I have considered, and that is to allow the users of the site to host the videos themselves. Sort of a torrent-based approach. It's still option number one (or two, depending on the details), but the users provide the infrastructure and bandwidth to one another. A certain part of me likes this approach, but I'm not convinced that it would be a good user experience.