YouTube runs experiment addressing users with ad blocker

[Nominal Animal]

Everything Youtube and Google is trying to achieve now with their "we must control the entire delivery system, up to and including the software used to access our services; think of the children!" and claiming "you're stealing from us if you don't watch our ads", has already been tried, done, and utterly failed in computer games' DRM.

Those who tolerate ads will just keep using the services, and being the commodity Alphabet sells to its customers (= the advertisers and information brokers).
Those who don't, either pay a premium so Alphabets get their pound of flesh coming and going, and the rest do something different.

I find all of this extremely funny, to be honest: I am old enough to remember how and why Google initially gained any attraction in the first place.  It avoided all the noise and pushy advertising so prevalent on the other existing search engines.

It seems that the other greybeards here have forgotten history.  Fear not, it will happen again.  As Youtube becomes more and more annoying to its users to appease its customers (the advertisers and information brokers), one of the competitors will simply gain a sudden influx of users and creators who get fed up with it.  That's how Google itself started, after all.

I will only watch Youtube videos with my ad blockers enabled.  When that stops working, I'll just let the few content creators I care about know, and suggest they consider adding or switching to some of the other platforms, like Dave does.  I haven't watched ads for a decade now, and honestly, I do not understand how people can abide the vast vapid inane majority of them.  Fuck, I'd rather eat plain mashed potatoes for the rest of my life, than go back to dulling my brain with that commercial shit.  They just aren't worth my time at all.

If anyone starts whining about "you're stealing from youtube!", I'll stop doing that the moment they stop using my information, my email address, my habits, the sites I visit, as a commercial product they buy and sell.  I never gave them permission, and I never sold it to them in the first place.  So, until they stop, I'll happily exploit them back exactly as much as they try to exploit me.  Tit for tat is the marketplace rule.

[NiHaoMike]

In the short term, I think they'll like stealth adblockers since they'll still get paid even though the ad was never visible. In the long term, "push" advertising has become so "pushy" that it deserves to "die in a fire".

[ve7xen]

I find all of this extremely funny, to be honest: I am old enough to remember how and why Google initially gained any attraction in the first place.  It avoided all the noise and pushy advertising so prevalent on the other existing search engines.

It seems that the other greybeards here have forgotten history.  Fear not, it will happen again.  As Youtube becomes more and more annoying to its users to appease its customers (the advertisers and information brokers), one of the competitors will simply gain a sudden influx of users and creators who get fed up with it.  That's how Google itself started, after all.

I for one haven't forgotten. The Internet landscape has crystallized; there is less room for dramatic technical improvement, the user expectations, revenue models, and market players have all solidified, and there is far more inertia than there was in the 2000s when it was still relatively nascent and Google, YouTube or Facebook had something fresh to offer. Facebook is perhaps a more apropos example, coming later, and while many agree that it really sucks, and avoid it, no serious competitor has emerged and it remains the 'universal' standard. Other than 'less ads', what is a YouTube competitor to offer that would compel the billions of users (and perhaps more importantly, content creators) to migrate? What potential competitor can put up the sustained fight against Google to earn and keep market share, and how will they earn enough money to fund continued operation without the same kind of ads as YouTube has? Maybe Twitch? But their ad story is arguably already worse than YouTube's.

I haven't watched ads for a decade now, and honestly, I do not understand how people can abide the vast vapid inane majority of them.  Fuck, I'd rather eat plain mashed potatoes for the rest of my life, than go back to dulling my brain with that commercial shit.  They just aren't worth my time at all.

Me either, but I understand at the end of the day I will need to pay something to consume Google's resources. Nobody is going to offer me the 1000s of hours of video streaming I do every year out of the goodness of their hearts. As long as they take my money without destroying the experience, like game companies or traditional media have with their balkanization and DRM, I'm happy to pay a reasonable price.

I've no issue with piracy, I've been sailing the seas a lot more lately since all the TV and movie companies decided they wanted to make the experience of consuming their content suck by fragmenting into a dozen services, I just don't understand why people expect these companies to lay down and let you consume their resources without getting their due. Of course if a significant amount of people are doing that, they're going to spend resources to stop you. Folks acting like they're entitled to consume Google's resources without giving anything in return is absurd.

[Bicurico]

I can imagine the following alternatives to Youtube:

1) People start to host the videos themselfes and Google has no other alternative than to show search results pointing to said videos. Example: Dave with EEVblog could host his videos himself and completely forget about Youtube. He would get his money from Patreons or ads, the increased bandwidth shouldn't be that expensive (I guess - could be wrong) and he would be in full control.
2) Youtube gets replaced by a torrent-like network, where all registered users share their bandwidth and disk space. Not one but several sites can then act as a search engine - pretty much how torrent based movie sharing works. A reward system could be implemented: host so many GB of contents and you get preferencial data streaming over those who don't share. Or make the sharing mandatory.
3) Netflix or a competitor offers his subscribers to upload and share videos! Why doesn't Netflix do that? Popular content can be rewarded (such content is produced without any investment and will gain new customers).

I am already a Netflix customer and I like the service so far. Why not allow people to share content? It could be limited to a given format like minimum 30 minutes, maximum 120 minutes, must not break any IP and be suitable for a potential audience of at least 5% of Netflix viewers. This would not work out for channels like the one I tried (I know, too specific, not enough viewers interested in it), but why not have the Fireplace Channel on Netflix (yes, that really exists - they only show like 6h of a fireplace, with a huge selection on different fireplaces). Or, instead of a minimal target audience, host the videos for an initial period and then renew this period based on a minimum of views. Those videos that don't reach the minimum view number get removed.

[Bicurico]

Actually, I just went with it and made the suggestion to Netflix's support chat.

Code: [Select]

As you probably know, Youtube is acting agressively against users using ad blockers.
The service used to be free, but is very annoying to use with all the ads (mostly unskipable)
I would like to suggest to Netflix
to use the opportunity and offer a "creators" functionality
allowing your users to upload their own videos to Netflix
with reasonable limitations (min/max duration, no IP infringement, etc.)
videos get an initial period
based on the views the period is renewed or the video removed
this way you don't have to host massive amount of useless videos
and creators will enrich the content for Netflix customers
Thank you

I am only posting my part of the chat, as I don't like when people upload other replies without consent.

You like this idea? Why not share it with Netflix's support chat? The more suggest this, the better the chances they think about it.

[ataradov]

He would get his money from Patreons or ads,

So, you are still paying or watching ads. What is the difference to the current situation?

the increased bandwidth shouldn't be that expensive (I guess - could be wrong) and he would be in full control.

You would have to hire people to maintain infrastructure.  Hosting video is not like hosting HTML pages. You will be miserable if the videos you watch in Portugal are hosted on one server in the US.

3) Netflix or a competitor offers his subscribers to upload and share videos! Why doesn't Netflix do that?

Because Netflix infrastructure is very locked down and not designed for frequent updates. They ship (or at least used to ship) sealed server boxes to the local data centers of the local ISPs. Data replication between those servers is not done in real time. This model works perfectly for their use case - low turnout low volume of content. It will not scale at all to user uploaded content.

Plus they would have to deal with DMCA stuff. And they would have to be really strict about it, since their main business relies on good relationship with content owners.

[MK14]

Folks acting like they're entitled to consume Google's resources without giving anything in return is absurd.

I think there is a huge number of ways, they can make money from such users.  A limited number of examples, follow.

• A person, looks for a particular item, e.g. An Oscilloscope, PC, TV or Car, for lots of video reviews, unboxing videos and detailed videos with descriptions of those items.  That would be very valuable information for companies trying to sell those items to consumers and businesses.  They can then send targeted internet adverts (on other platforms), emails or postal adverts, maybe even ring the person up.  Depending on that particular individual or business.
• A so called non-paying person, loves a particular youtube video, so they post links to it, all over the place.  E.g. Bigclive makes this funny thing explode into big flames, a must see!.  Many of the people who see those links, might be subscribers and/or have adverts enabled, so would (indirectly) get payments to YouTube
• By watching YouTube creators, not paying YouTube anything, but paying that creator significant funds, via Patreon, for doing better content in the future.  Which then also gives better content to the paying people, via subscriptions or watching YouTube adverts

In summary, YouTube can indirectly get a lot of payment/money/resources, from the people who don't watch the adverts (e.g. because they block them or ignore them), and who never subscribe to it.

[ataradov]

That's like paying contractors in "exposure".  It does not work. Just pay for the service you use. The amount of mental gymnastics people will do....

[Bicurico]

Dave hosting his own videos to a million of subscribers is a different league than YouTube.
His ads are not intrusive as YouTube ads and hence much better tolerated.

Regarding Netflix, there is no need for speed. I don't care if the latest 8bit Guy video is available for me tomorrow or in two weeks.

If I want real time, I use live TV.

[MK14]

That's like paying contractors in "exposure".  It does not work. Just pay for the service you use. The amount of mental gymnastics people will do....

But it is techniques like that, which allow and pay for Google, to provide a (so far), free search service for everyone.

If they had listened to what you seem to be saying.  Everyone would have had to pay, perhaps $9.99 per month to ever use Google's search system in the first place.

I suspect, that if Google had charged $9.99 or whatever, right from the start for searches, we would have never heard of Google, and they perhaps wouldn't even exist, now.

I use the above as an analogy to YouTube, re this discussion.

[Bicurico]

The thing is: Google results are far from being what they were.
Nowadays the results are highly determined by commercial interest. If whatever you search for can be shown as a commercial result, it will prevail any other results.
This renders many searches almost useless.

[ataradov]

His ads are not intrusive as YouTube ads and hence much better tolerated.

What "his ads" we are talking about? I don't remember any sponsored content apart from equipment donated for reviews. He relies on the YT ads. So, if that goes away, his ads would have to be the same raid shadow legends crap as everyone else does.

[Bicurico]

Even this forum uses ads. Have you noticed? Sometimes I even click on them, mostly by accident, sometimes on purpose.

[ve7xen]

1) People start to host the videos themselfes and Google has no other alternative than to show search results pointing to said videos. Example: Dave with EEVblog could host his videos himself and completely forget about Youtube. He would get his money from Patreons or ads, the increased bandwidth shouldn't be that expensive (I guess - could be wrong) and he would be in full control.

This might work for mid-tier creators who have enough dedicated viewers to drive them to their site. But this is not the way people consume content today, they want a single pane of glass showing them new content, not to have to constantly refresh a dozen websites to wait for something new or sign up to a dozen e-mail lists or RSS feeds. They want a first-class experience on their TV and mobile. Ultimately I think even popular creators would see attrition under such a model with little hope of gaining viewership. I don't think we're going back to that consumption model.

There's also a bit of a scaling problem with no diversity. If a stream is 5mbps, you can only host 200 streams (optimistically) on a typical single server. Maybe the average case is 20 viewers watching your streams, but when you release a new video it peaks up to 1000 (no idea on realistic numbers) and you're well underwater. I don't think these are big numbers, but you're talking about a fairly significant infrastructure investment to satisfy those peak loads. Or you need to start getting into Cloud infrastructure and it stops being so simple and cheap. There are also tons (probably most) of mid-tier channels with very little technical ability.

For creators just starting out, it's a fairly large barrier to entry compared to today, and it is much harder to get discovered and gain viewers if you're not where the viewers are. And you still need to make money somehow, which likely means - you guessed it - ads. At the other end, the huge channels, they can probably afford to pay a SaaS kind of thing for hosting, but they also have the scale to implement the same kind of ads YouTube uses, and likely would need to (or more aggressive 'embedded' spots) to make the funding work, and they'd be a lot less efficient at selling ad space etc. Hosting it themselves at that scale is probably not really viable.

None of this solves the real problem that YouTube solve(d), which is putting all that content in one place and helping you find other stuff you might like.

Ultimately someone has to pay real dollars to at least maintain the infrastructure and pay the creators a living wage, and over the history of video content, that has either been via advertising or pay-to-view.

2) Youtube gets replaced by a torrent-like network, where all registered users share their bandwidth and disk space. Not one but several sites can then act as a search engine - pretty much how torrent based movie sharing works. A reward system could be implemented: host so many GB of contents and you get preferencial data streaming over those who don't share. Or make the sharing mandatory.

Technically this is probably viable, and I think it's been tried if something like that isn't actively operating today. There are a few problems - ultimately you need to host 'seed' copies somewhere, which someone needs to pay for somehow, and someone needs to develop and host the discovery / search / community mechanism, which also requires money or dedicated individual effort at least. Even so, it likely won't ever be anywhere close to as good as something like YouTube.

In summary, YouTube can indirectly get a lot of payment/money/resources, from the people who don't watch the adverts (e.g. because they block them or ignore them), and who never subscribe to it.

I'm sure there are other models that might work, but the bottom line is Google needs to get something out of the relationship, and in almost all cases, that means you (or at least some significant fraction of users) are giving something up. It is not quite zero-sum, but there's not much that earns Google money that helps you, outside of very specific targeted advertising, like you describe, which is still advertising. Your #1 for example is way more offensive to me than inline advertising, that is literally 'selling your information' that people always bring up, which is something that Google doesn't currently do. Getting more views from people who also won't see the ads is actively harmful as views cost them money; ultimately they need people to watch them so that they get paid, which isn't likely to increase if they let you just turn them off.

I suspect, that if Google had charged $9.99 or whatever, right from the start for searches, we would have never heard of Google, and they perhaps wouldn't even exist, now.

Of course not, that is the story of so many tech companies. Launch for free, get users, and figure out how to monetize it later. Ultimately that depends on venture funding, which depends on people believing money can be made, or it will eventually collapse under its own weight when people stop believing and stop funding the operation of the service, regardless of how well-loved it is.

Search is funded by, you guessed it, advertising. Being the top Google result for your search term and desired demographic is apparently less offensive to folks than being forced to view an ad, and likely also more valuable to the advertisers paying for that placement, so there's less 'noise' about this, but ultimately this is the same basic model as YouTube and pretty much everything Google does.

It's interesting and maybe enlightening that AFAIK none of the new AI hotness is free.

[ataradov]

Even this forum uses ads.

But the forum ads are not video ads. Do you think it is viable to make a living from the forum ads? The only reason none of this is intrusive is because it is only a part of the income.

Once you have to live off those ads, you will have to start accepting anything and everything.

[MK14]

In summary, YouTube can indirectly get a lot of payment/money/resources, from the people who don't watch the adverts (e.g. because they block them or ignore them), and who never subscribe to it.

I'm sure there are other models that might work, but the bottom line is Google needs to get something out of the relationship, and in almost all cases, that means you (or at least some significant fraction of users) are giving something up. It is not quite zero-sum, but there's not much that earns Google money that helps you, outside of very specific targeted advertising, like you describe, which is still advertising. Your #1 for example is way more offensive to me than inline advertising, that is literally 'selling your information' that people always bring up, which is something that Google doesn't currently do. Getting more views from people who also won't see the ads is actively harmful as views cost them money; ultimately they need people to watch them so that they get paid, which isn't likely to increase if they let you just turn them off.

I (partly painfully) accept, that Google/YouTube, need to transition, from what was mainly a free service, with ad-blocking being (possibly disliked, but accepted), to a much harder stance on either receiving/viewing ads (ad-blocking disallowed), and YouTube subscriptions, being the desired (goal) objective, of Google/YouTube, much more so, than before.

As I (and some others), have previously said.  They seem to be pricing it, significantly too high.  Also, I'd prefer (and perhaps they would get better results), if people got more perceived value from such subscriptions.

E.g. Amazon Prime, can claim things like cheaper/faster/free delivery services, cheaper (prime exclusive) items in some cases, included ad free (may be adding ads, at some point, in the near future or already, unless you get another subscription, country dependent), and a number of other things.

Hence the Amazon prime subscriptions, make sense for some people.

Just spamming horrible, ultra-repetitive, petty / silly (in my perception), adverts in a number of places, with YouTube videos, then trying to sell a partially blackmailed subscription, to avoid those highly annoying adverts, that they are forcing people to watch.

Doesn't seem to put me into the buying mood ("Hey, maybe I should subscribe to that?").

Whereas, other subscriptions, at apparently much better price levels, free trials or month or months, if you take out their subscription services.  Seem much more palatable.

I suspect, that if Google had charged $9.99 or whatever, right from the start for searches, we would have never heard of Google, and they perhaps wouldn't even exist, now.

Of course not, that is the story of so many tech companies. Launch for free, get users, and figure out how to monetize it later. Ultimately that depends on venture funding, which depends on people believing money can be made, or it will eventually collapse under its own weight when people stop believing and stop funding the operation of the service, regardless of how well-loved it is.

Search is funded by, you guessed it, advertising. Being the top Google result for your search term and desired demographic is apparently less offensive to folks than being forced to view an ad, and likely also more valuable to the advertisers paying for that placement, so there's less 'noise' about this, but ultimately this is the same basic model as YouTube and pretty much everything Google does.

It's interesting and maybe enlightening that AFAIK none of the new AI hotness is free.

I think the recent AI things, are considerably more expensive.  Because some of the activities, need big, expensive computing horse power (computers and/or graphics cards).  So they need to pass that cost on to the consumers.

When it costs the company, $0.00001 for a quick search or similar, because of the 0.01 seconds CPU time of one webserver.  It can be easily paid for by advertising and/or other things.

But if you use up a (wild estimated time) couple of minutes (perhaps to draw an AI generated image or complicated and long text thing), of a $250,000 computer, jam-packed with very powerful and expensive, very high end, specialist (AI) graphics cards.  It perhaps is costing them (wild guess) $0.25 a time, for such activities (big difficult things, small or medium things, are probably more like $0.01 or less).

Hence the paid subscriptions, and usage limits, to minimise losses, if someone tries to use it too much.

[ataradov]

Hence the Amazon prime subscriptions, make sense for some people.

I will be dropping Prime subscription when it is a renew time. It became less and less useful over time. Shipping is always late and prime items are just priced higher. This was fine when Prime was cheap, but now it is more expensive.

Just spamming horrible, ultra-repetitive, petty / silly (in my perception), adverts in a number of places, with YouTube videos, then trying to sell a partially blackmailed subscription, to avoid those highly annoying adverts, that they are forcing people to watch.

Ads are ads, they will always be annoying. I'm not sure what you want YT to do here. Ship you some groceries one in a while?

Their other option is to go full Netflix and only offer a subscription, but that's obviously way too disruptive.

At the same time I also subscribe to Nebula and there is some stuff worth watching. But it will never be YouTube. YouTube is good for goofy stuff that is not polished and well produced.

[langwadt]

As I (and some others), have previously said.  They seem to be pricing it, significantly too high.  Also, I'd prefer (and perhaps they would get better results), if people got more perceived value from such subscriptions.

you get to pay creators (and youtube) for their work without wasting time on ads, you can listing to music without having to have the YT app in front, I think just those conveniences are worth much of the price

[MK14]

Ads are ads, they will always be annoying. I'm not sure what you want YT to do here. Ship you some groceries one in a while?

Their other option is to go full Netflix and only offer a subscription, but that's obviously way too disruptive.

Ads are ads, but for me, it is something like a pop something advert (some kind of sweet or similar), which they literally keep on repeating every few minutes, numerous annoying times.  For a product, presumably meant for people, a fraction of my age.

There are various features they could offer, such as:

• YouTube light basic, removes all adverts, only $0.99/month*(*then $1.99 after the first 6 months, new customers only)
• YouTube medium, $3.99*(*$6.99 after 6 months) all of the above and also adds the following features:
• 2 TB of storage for gmail and other google services
• Triple creators payments, and you can choose up to 5 creators per month, who will get a good extra payment
• Up to 10 hours access, to our Netflix like, extra films/movies and other stuff, channels
• YouTube Deluxe $14.99 / Month, features as follows:
• Unlimited time access to the new Netflix like, extras channel
• Ten times creators payments and much bigger amounts for up to 15 creators per month
• Enhanced Google Bard AI features, click here to see list of twelve extra features [***]
• Special advanced deluxe search engine access,  extra options including annonomous searching, which gives 73%** extra improved search vitality {**me poking fun at adverts with relatively meaningless stuff in them**}
• Many other similar features.............

[ataradov]

They are making more than $1.99/mo from ads though, so they will be losing money. And what you are basically describing is the cheap plan you want and then some extras that you (and absolute majority of people) won't ever pay for.

Don't get me wrong, I would totally get that $2 plan, since I don't use any of the mentioned google services. But there is zero incentive for them to do this.

[Bud]

I think MK14 has a point though. Youtube could  benefit from diversification of service options and partnering with other networks, say offer an option with a voucher for $X discount from Amazon purchases. Would not you pay Youtube like $5 a month for free Digikey shipping on your 3 orders per month? Heck, I would be first in the line to sign up.

[ataradov]

How would that free shipping be financed? You are trying to come up with some sketchy schemes instead of clear direct payment for services.

How would it make sense for them to take my $5 and then somehow provide free shipping that normally costs $8?

[Bud]

Obviously that was a conceptual idea, but human brain is wired to use offered discounts. Therefore Youtube vouchers certainly can lead to increased purchases on the partners' network. Think holistically, not from your "ataradov is not planning Digikey orders this month" specific perspective.

[ve7xen]

As I (and some others), have previously said.  They seem to be pricing it, significantly too high.  Also, I'd prefer (and perhaps they would get better results), if people got more perceived value from such subscriptions.

It may very well be the case that there's a value disconnect between what Google needs to get to make the ad-free service viable, and what many users are willing to pay to not see ads. Whether that means they don't use YouTube, pay and grumble about the price, or just put up with the ads is up to them I guess, but apparently Google is interested in forcing them to make that decision.

I suspect that YouTube is a lot more expensive to operate per user than your posts suggest, and that even at the obnoxious level of ads, they aren't making a lot of money. Also do keep in mind that the content creators do have some control over the type and volume of ads presented on their content. This is not solely Google's decision; many creators are also willing to stuff their streams full of ads to the maximum extent to maximize their own revenue.

E.g. Amazon Prime, can claim things like cheaper/faster/free delivery services, cheaper (prime exclusive) items in some cases, included ad free (may be adding ads, at some point, in the near future or already, unless you get another subscription, country dependent), and a number of other things.

Hence the Amazon prime subscriptions, make sense for some people.

Just spamming horrible, ultra-repetitive, petty / silly (in my perception), adverts in a number of places, with YouTube videos, then trying to sell a partially blackmailed subscription, to avoid those highly annoying adverts, that they are forcing people to watch.

Doesn't seem to put me into the buying mood ("Hey, maybe I should subscribe to that?").

Whereas, other subscriptions, at apparently much better price levels, free trials or month or months, if you take out their subscription services.  Seem much more palatable.

Spotify charges $10.99/month (CAD), and offers none of that kind of thing, is wildly successful, and people don't seem too upset about the pricing. YT Premium is $13.99/month (CAD) and also includes a similar music streaming service. So basically it is $3/month if you drop your Spotify subscription. Seems like a steal to me. It's not going to make value-sense for everyone, but I don't think it's wildly unreasonable based on other competing and similar services. Ad-free Netflix is $16.49 CAD, for example.

I think the recent AI things, are considerably more expensive.  Because some of the activities, need big, expensive computing horse power (computers and/or graphics cards).  So they need to pass that cost on to the consumers.

When it costs the company, $0.00001 for a quick search or similar, because of the 0.01 seconds CPU time of one webserver.  It can be easily paid for by advertising and/or other things.

But if you use up a (wild estimated time) couple of minutes (perhaps to draw an AI generated image or complicated and long text thing), of a $250,000 computer, jam-packed with very powerful and expensive, very high end, specialist (AI) graphics cards.  It perhaps is costing them (wild guess) $0.25 a time, for such activities (big difficult things, small or medium things, are probably more like $0.01 or less).

Speaking more or less about LLMs here. Diffusion models and other generative AI is a bit of a different category, I think. Though something like Github Copilot definitely straddles the line.

This is true (though I'm not sure how to compares to doing a Google search 25 years ago, it might well be comparable in terms of cost thanks to Moore's law), the point is more that they have decided to figure out the monetization model ahead of time, rather than rely on VC with an unclear monetization strategy, and everyone seems to have chosen a model where the user pays based on their usage. Whether that signals that they don't expect users would put up with a 'watch a 15 second ad to see your result' situation, that they don't think it's viable financially, or they just feel it's unethical because it would incentive them to mess with the LLM, I don't know. I do think it is interesting that none of the big players seem to think ads are a good option. Unclear yet if Google, one of the biggest ad companies in the world, will choose to make theirs ad supported or not once it's out of beta, but I kind of doubt it.

[Nominal Animal]

I just don't understand why people expect these companies to lay down and let you consume their resources without getting their due. Of course if a significant amount of people are doing that, they're going to spend resources to stop you. Folks acting like they're entitled to consume Google's resources without giving anything in return is absurd.

You forget: even though I block the ads, they're still collecting information of my habits and sites I visit and videos I watch, and my e-mail address, and combining that information to a valuable packet of information advertisers are willing to buy (even if that packet contains the information on ad-blocker use).  It is this information profile that they make their profit on, and their gathering of it and selling to others, that is the price I pay for using their services.

The sale of these profiles along with my email address causes me direct personal harm.  Unsolicited directed email advertising to private customers is illegal in Finland, but because Google et al. collect and sell these, I get so much international spam that I have to spend actual resources to combat that.  I've never gotten spam from Finland or from a Finnish company at all, only in English (and in some Asian languages, as sites like Banggood et al. also do the same), plus recently autotranslated crap.  (One that is flooding now sells 'momentary bidirectional translator', because they cannot even get 'instant/momentary' translation right.)

The fact that you're considering me as "acting like they're entitled to consume Google's resources without giving anything in return", is both idiotic and offensive.  Equating it with piracy puts you in my ignore list, because that shit just gets me angry, and that leads to no useful interaction.