Doesn't Patreon then take a cut? What's the difference? (Fee % might, haven't checked to be fair)

I'm supporting one creator via Patreon and got merch from another one (and have tried channel memberships), however this doesn't really scale.

• merch is only really great when one needs whatever is offered anyways
• Patreon is nice, but requires explicit effort and regular payments for each channel

So from that perspective, having creators being payed more per-view is actually a nice, convenient effect and will cover channels that might otherwise get nothing. I'd like to have something like this for the general internet - pay some monthly fee, no more ads and websites, news sites etc all get some share (that is ultimatively more than what the ads would've given them in the first place).

If i paid money to every the patreon of every content creator that I want to support, it'd be a lot more money than youtube premium. Better believe ill be cancelling premium the very first ad I see though.

No no no no, you're supposed to use the app on mobile devices. There are no browser pages in mobile Ba Sing Se /s

When they first started ramping up ads and demonetising more videos for being insufficiently advertiser-friendly, they probably still had enough goodwill from users that if they'd immediately launched YouTube Premium and presented it as a way to both remove ads, and support video creators that couldn't rely on ad revenue, it would have been decently successful. A good number of YouTubers who had to switch to sponsorships and Patreon could have been pushing for people to subscribe to Premium instead of play Raid: Shadow Legends, which presumably would have boosted subscriber counts, and might have been enough to make YouTube profitable and much more pleasant for both free and premium users than it is today. Instead, they burned through a large amount of goodwill before implementing Premium, so people were already more reluctant, and for a long while it only shared revenue with a select few channels who were already raking in ad money, and was unaffected by view counts, so early Premium subscribers were paying Logan Paul even if they never watched that kind of video, but weren't paying the channels they actually watched.

Maybe we should start mirroring to a federated service

Just some time ago, I was thinking about some P2P Video service, where everyone would provide the data they have - so like a BitTorrent YouTube

But I'm not sure if that would be viable

Just to be clear, ads free cable TV was a thing on a very small minority of cable channels for less than 10 years (from 81 up until 87 if I recall the research I did on the subject correctly), the only reason people keep talking about it is because they didn't live it. At first the vast majority of cable channels were just regular channels from regions too far away to get a signal for with antennas and cable only channels mostly had ads as well, there were something like four of them that didn't.

You get amazing features like: background play (which is more of an annoyance), remember where i left off (which doesnt work whatsoever, even 5 years after it was first released), download video's to watch offline (you need to remember to download them first or hope that YouTube's recommendation algoritm didnt pick videos you've already wachted) oh, and you can get a slightly higher bitrate for 1080p. So basically it loses all value.

Well, you get to pay for YouTube and see ads!

Executive bonuses, of course. Won't you think of the poor millionaires?

/s