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Comment by path411 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have YouTube premium? If not consider at some point, someone has to give the channel revenue stream or the channel will die

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Why not just throw some money at their patreon, or buy some merch? Fairly sure they'll get more of that anyway.

Exactly.

Personally I am done with indirect funding models where people burn my time and attention in hopes of getting me to waste enough money on something that surplus cash can be skimmed to pay for the original content. It's ridiculous. Direct payment or GTFO.

And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.

> And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.

Nice!

I'm still not using Patreon but I "guilty" of paying for promising alpha quality stuff, subscribing to services I don't use deliberately even after realizing I cannot use it yet etc.

I think we IT people have a reputation for being a bunch of cynical whiners and I also think it is somewhat deserved so I am happy to hear that I am not alone in actually wanting to pay for good stuff.

If anyone wonder what makes me pay, here is the best I can come up with:

- stuff I use or can see myself using

- one time payments, no subscriptions (unless there is a specific ongoing cost that I realized must be there)

- tokens are a nice alternative to subscriptions (eg: $10 for 50 tokens that let me start multi-player games is something I would easily consider for a good game like Polytopia)

- not too expensive, once it passes impulse buy at around $10 monthly or $40 one time it gets significantly harder bjt not impossible

I love this, but that means you are now paying 3 times: ads/premium, sponsored messages, and patreon. Even if you block ads - as well as the much more complicated sponsored messages - you are still paying by having to manage that system and work around its edge cases. Direct "donation" should include ad-free and sponosor-free access to videos.

In some cases it does, but that requires basically way too much work from the content creator, they have to have a separate way to give paying subscribers videos. For example, LinusTechTips has videos on their own video delivery service available, and they're pretty much ad free. I know some other creators do a similar thing (not setting up their own youtube competitor, but the rest).

Personally I just use adblock, skip the sponsor segments and live with it. Sponsor stuff is really easy to skip in my experience, especially on mobile where if you double tap the right side it skips 10 seconds. You get used to how many taps to do per content creator, their sponsor segments seem to be consistent lengths usually.

I'm mostly supporting people who are writers and the like, so that's less of a problem for me. But I hope that more direct payment shifts things in that direction.

I'd be willing to pay 5€/mo for ad less youtube. That can't be achieved by patreon in any shape or form and youtuber merch is pretty cringe.

Then throw 5 pounds at a rotating list of whoever you like's patreon and install an adblocker.

Merch, it depends. I've grabbed some tshirts here and there that are comfy and not branded all to hell, couple of random knick knacks. A lot of it is indeed not appealing, so I mostly just send money.

That's the problem. That is too much effort for the value provided.

> Do you have YouTube premium? ... someone has to give the channel revenue stream

doesn't youtube premium give GOOGLE a revenue stream?

YouTube premium sends money to creators as people watch their videos. According to a redditor [1], CGP Grey (a prominent youtuber) claims to get more money from premium users than ads.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeMusic/comments/8s1b70/does_y...

It gives a very significant cut to the creators, based on how much you ask them

Why would you pay YouTube only to watch videos with hardcoded ads? Let it die.

YouTube Premium doesn’t get rid of embedded ads, they’re part of the video, not a part of YouTube.

I’ve got YouTube premium but I’ve noticed more and more channels breaking mid video to go into ad mode. Ordinary Sausage has been a too channel with the kids but jeez the last few videos there are nearly more ad than content.

This is pretty much same thing as other websites in general. While the content is entertaining and good enough to watch it is not consistent enough to pay for.

I would think that cutting sponsored sections of videos wouldn’t affect the money they receive at all. With Adblock, they can tell it wasn’t loaded. Can the sponsor tell that your view skipped the sponsor part?

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