This isn’t the market deciding as it’s not using an alternative
It’s more like an event charging too high of an entry fee so you jump the fence - if you were to let the market decide, you’d pay, go to another event or stay at home, and the event organisers are free to build the fence higher to stop people jumping it… Google have a product that’s good enough that the majority of people will watch it with ads or pay to watch without ads, and nobody else has come close despite their efforts
As much as I’d like competition, what is on par with shoplifting is still not a competitor or alternative to the YouTube
Also, fighting against them IS 100% a valid method of market action. We are part of the market, we want to support the creators, not the platform, so we block their ads and pledge to the creator’s patreon. As an analog to the concert example, it is jumping the fence to stiff the venue and spending the ticket money on the band’s merch.
If you are going to use shoplifting as an analog, then what they do to content creators is wage theft. They purchased a service which has hundreds of thousands to millions of people “working” for them producing content, which they then censor or go to great lengths to minimize the amount they are paying for it, to the point that the overwhelmingly vast majority of is free to them, then they place ads on the content, even if it is demonetized to reap their reward for the work without actually paying for it.
Also, wage theft vs shoplifting in real life is an orders of magnitude difference in how much money it actually accounts for, and I will let you guess which side of that scale has created a crater when it was released.
This isn’t the market deciding as it’s not using an alternative
It’s more like an event charging too high of an entry fee so you jump the fence - if you were to let the market decide, you’d pay, go to another event or stay at home, and the event organisers are free to build the fence higher to stop people jumping it… Google have a product that’s good enough that the majority of people will watch it with ads or pay to watch without ads, and nobody else has come close despite their efforts
As much as I’d like competition, what is on par with shoplifting is still not a competitor or alternative to the YouTube
Also, fighting against them IS 100% a valid method of market action. We are part of the market, we want to support the creators, not the platform, so we block their ads and pledge to the creator’s patreon. As an analog to the concert example, it is jumping the fence to stiff the venue and spending the ticket money on the band’s merch.
If you are going to use shoplifting as an analog, then what they do to content creators is wage theft. They purchased a service which has hundreds of thousands to millions of people “working” for them producing content, which they then censor or go to great lengths to minimize the amount they are paying for it, to the point that the overwhelmingly vast majority of is free to them, then they place ads on the content, even if it is demonetized to reap their reward for the work without actually paying for it.
Also, wage theft vs shoplifting in real life is an orders of magnitude difference in how much money it actually accounts for, and I will let you guess which side of that scale has created a crater when it was released.