Basically, yes. You're not going to get all these free services (search, email, etc.) for nothing; the price is the ads. Of course, some of us don't look at ads much, thanks to ad-blocking technologies, but enough people are too lazy or ignorant to do that, so that's how all this stuff is financed.
If we eliminate ads, you can say goodbye to many "free" services people take for granted now, or expect to need to subscribe to them for a monthly fee. Of course, that could work, but it'd be very different than what we're used to I think.
I’m not sure. I pay for YouTube Premium because I watch a lot of content there and hate ads. Presumably, they added that option because there are people who exist who don’t like ads and are willing to support a different model. I even had a paid NHL subscription where commercials didn’t run.
The fact that we are even able to have this very conversation to discuss the pros and cons of ad-supported models seems to point to the fact that someone can like an ad-supported business’ services while not liking ads, and it is not a ridiculous or nonsensical position to hold.
Anyway, it seems we’ve diverged quite a lot from whether or not you can be a fan of watching tv sports and also not like ads.
Your YouTube Premium still isn't going to eliminate ads: surely you're still seeing all the embedded ads that "content creators" add to make more money? You're just cutting out the really annoying randomly-inserted ads from Google/YT.
I think it's the same with pro sports: it's all about profit, so they're going to shove ads in there somehow. Sure, maybe you can buy a subscription and avoid the most annoying ads, but you're not going to escape the embedded ads: sponsor logos, digitally-inserted ads, etc.
If you just want to watch sports without ads, the only way is to watch sports that don't have a profit motive, which excludes professional sports.
If you're curious there are other threads in this topic where people are discussing different (existing) tools for removing sponsors from YouTube videos or podcasts, and using ML to remove digitally inserted ads, for example. I like to stay up on this kind of ad-blocking tech and remove ads from content I like as completely as possible.
Maybe I'm a unicorn here (it would be surprising to me given the number of people working on ad-blocking tech, but who knows) but I truly, sincerely do simultaneously like ad-supported content and do not like the ads, and am happy to pay creators directly through subscriptions and use technology to otherwise get rid of them.
