Ask Slashdot: Would You Pay To Subscribe To YouTube?

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes:
If you don't watch YouTube, then more power to you, but if you do watch it, then I bet you have noticed more and more intrusive and noisy and much longer ads along with frequent reminders that you can pay up and make the noise go away.

Feels like extortion to me and I'm not going to pay a blackmailer. But someone must be paying up. Is it you? Or do you even know anyone who is paying?
The original submission also shares shanen's argument that Google is exploiting copyright loopholes to monetize other people's copyrighted content. "It wouldn't even matter how much pirate video is uploaded to YouTube if the Google didn't make it easy to find... If the Google actually wanted to stop the piracy, the algorithm is obvious... The famous content has famous keywords and the searches for those keywords can be whitelisted. Pirate results can be disappeared and replaced with results that belong to the actual creator with legitimate exceptions for fair use." (But instead, the argument goes, they're just asking you for money to remove their ads on that content...)

That's shanen's opinion -- but what's yours? And would you pay to subscribe to YouTube?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.