can you enlighten me?

It’s a service, why should you pay once? It’s like water and electricity, ongoing cost needs to be balanced by ongoing revenue. Especially when the utility is also ongoing.

If you prefer paying once, get some dividend ETFs and use the dividends to pay for the service. Yes, it’s expensive, but you can also sell the etf again when you stop using the service.

Cross-Posts don’t show.

Exactly.

If YouTube wanted to, they could disable that.

Honestly, I’ve always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It’s basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping