>>gonzo4+g4
I hate ads as much as anyone but providing a free service that runs ads and shares part of that income with content creators is hardly particularly evil.
>>yreg+G4
People were quite ok with the ads when they were not as obnoxious as today. Apart from techies, few people would put the effort to block them.
But these days, you want to watch a 2' video on YouTube you are subjected to 20-30" of unskippable ads. Discounting the privacy (and even security) concerns, this alone pushed a lot more people to start ad-blocking were they can.