I think this is a bad decision but let's look at Googles options for showing content to users who pay for their service.<p>Option 1: Don't show you videos from creators who don't sign it's deal.<p>Option 2: Show you videos from creators who don't sign it's deal, but include ads.<p>Option 3: Show you videos from creators who don't sign it's deal, but eat the loss.<p>Option 4: Remove videos from creators who don't sign, and you as a paying customer now have access to all videos without ads.<p>Really, for Google it's a loose loose situation, someone is going to be pissed one way or another, or they loose money. What would you do? Eat the loss? Easy to say, but hard to do. So they picked the one that benefits both them and their paying users (if you ignore the fact that a portion of youtube is going to go dark) at the same time.<p>Option 5: move ad based content to a new medium that isn't youtube so that content creators aren't tied to a single service for hosting.... But I only mention that because this is Hacker News and it's what I think we'd all want to be done, but Google isn't going to create that service.<p>Edit:formatting, and if I see another option someone has in a subsequent comment I'll bubble it up.<p>Edit 2: From JoshTriplett <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10428378" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10428378</a><p>Option 6: take advantage of whatever "we can change this agreement at any time" term in the partner agreement to just say "this is our new approach to getting revenue, and we'll give you a cut of that just like we give you a cut of ads".