No, and I'll tell you why: your video does not exist in a vacuum or some idealized free market of passing observers who are themselves free to see it or not, vi

No, and I'll tell you why: your video does not exist in a vacuum or some idealized free market of passing observers who are themselves free to see it or not, view it or not, and so on. You're posting from within YouTube and engagement largely depends on getting YouTube to show it to the largest possible demographic, which in turn must respond by seeing and then viewing the video. It's a symbiotic thing: it has to start with YouTube algorithmically deciding your video is going to be popular and that they stand to benefit from it being popular, and then the audience justifying this assumption. This is why you can get YouTube hammering you with particular video suggestions: it's decided that video is going to be popular and insists on you giving it a watch. It'll try for a while even if you don't bite. The FIRST step here is YouTube deciding your video is going to be popular in such a way that it will benefit them. They've recently taken steps to remove people's ability to even specify that they don't want to run certain kinds of ads: my assumption has been that this pressure was already in place, and that they favored video makers who went along with what YouTube wanted, namely default ad pressure as they define it, mid-rolls and so on. I would say that outside of external regulatory pressures, YouTube will punish video makers who don't serve YouTube's ad purposes to the fullest extent. I observe this myself, and have got about 10k subscribers by now in spite of very non-clickbaity, obscure content with low-pressure thumbnails and editing. That's my approach: I will use ad blockers personally, and expect my audience to be more predisposed to using ad blockers, while also turning over my video output to the preferences of YouTube with the understanding that if I don't comply, YouTube will punish me for it. It's pretty trivial to algorithmically scan a thumbnail to see if it says 'AMAZING' in big letters, or has striking value and hue contrasts, and then hype such videos more than the others on the grounds that they're better able to get clicks and thus ads. It's still fairly trivial to scan the video and see whether it's cutting from shot to shot more than once a second, and then hype such videos more than the others on the grounds that zoomers want it that way. Whether you click the 'enable mid-roll ads' checkbox is the MOST trivial signal you can send YouTube about whether you're serving their interests. It's direct interaction with their algorithm, intended to withhold something from which they make money. The idea that they don't respond to this signal is kind of ridiculous. So… you've got it backwards. The audience might like not getting badgered with ads, but if you're a YouTuber you don't serve your audience, you're working for YouTube or they'll literally take your audience away from you. You serve them first and they are your boss.