By what metric will they lose miserably? They do not care about you if you block their shit. This policy will do 3 things:

• Make a miniscule amount of people who generate no revenue stop using the platform (basically noone).
• Make existing adblockers slightly inconvenienced for a little bit (again, google doesnt actually give a shit)
• Make some of the less tech savy people who block ads either whitelist or premium up (this will happen and is the intended outcome).

Google only gains from this.

I doubt it, unfortunately.

Like many other online services they’ve saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.

They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.

Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don’t see anyone being able to do that for free for long.

Unfortunately, if anyone is going to “disrupt” youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they’ll have to monetize as well.

My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.