> YouTube channels earn revenue from viewers with YouTube Premium. Throughout this month (August 2018), I earned approximately 55p per 1000 regular views and 94p per 1000 Premium views, so it appears that if 75% of your viewers went Premium, that would actually be beneficial.
> Per user, creators usually get a LOT more from premium than ads. If I divide my monthly views by my monthly unique viewers, I get about 1.9 cents per viewer.
> The way premium works is, first youtube takes a cut--I believe it's 45%. The remaining amount is divided among all the creators you watch based on how much you watch them. I believe that's based on view time.
> So if the YT premium price is $13.99, the creators get 55% or $7.69. You would have to watch 405 different creators for each one to get 1.9 cents.
I used to, but I don't consume enough YouTube videos anymore to make it worthwhile. Give me a top-up plan that I can use to pay for individual videos and I will definitely do it.
But what's with the weirdly aggressive second part of your message?
There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.
So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.
You can pay for Youtube Premium right now and the ads go away.
For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly.
Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.