That was probably his stance when YouTube ad revenue was his stream of income.

In 2024 they pay pennies, and his real income is from sponsorships like those d-brand skins and manscaping utilities. And their own merch, of course.

They've been pushing their own media platform (floatplane), so I'm willing to bet this was a bit of a game of chicken with YouTube. YouTube wouldn't ban one of their biggest channels, and even if they did it'd turn into great publicity for floatplane.

While I don't think they'd be able to get a lot of their subscribers over to floatplane completely, I do think they'd be able to pull over lots of random views by having their shorts on Facebook, Instagram and whoever else is trying to mimic tiktok these days.

They've been pretty good about playing both sides. There have been plenty of videos of how to bypass add traffic and in the same video explaining how they rely on ad traffic . I don't love everything LMG does but they do seem to be kind of Open about the house wise and why nots of ad blocking.

In 2022 he tweeted this.

That might be what you're remembering, but he's definitely addressed his views on piracy during the WAN show several times as well.

Edit: someone else posted the full context elsewhere in the thread. I'd link to that comment, but idk how on lemmy so here: https://archive.ph/VavFc

You're not misremembering. I remember seeing it on there "podcast" or whatever it is where they talked about it extensively and I believe louis chimed in with a video going over it.