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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Pro pro tip: Creating content on the internet is not free and if a creator says you can watch their video in exchange for watching ads OR paying for premium, if you care about those creators you'll honor that request.

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Ignore the dissenters, I agree. people will pay $15 for Netflix and use it once a month but won't pay $11 for YouTube that they use every day. the insistence that YouTube should be a service that just houses all of our videos for free in perpetuaty never made sense to me.

Agreed. Youtube Premium has got to be the most efficient subscription I have, by far. Also, I like that it provides more support to the creators I follow than ads would, because I appreciate the effort they put into the videos I enjoy.

Depending on what type of video you're watching (pay depend on variables), your one view is probably worth a whopping $0.01. At that point you might be better off asking nicely for Patreon subs, considering about 0.5-2% of your followers convert to Patreon subs (and tiers usually start at or above $2), instead of annoying your viewers with horrible ads. Even creator-made shoutouts to products are more pleasant than the jarring built-in YouTube adverts, and that's before you consider that they're immediately skippable. And when you consider all the awful things advertisers are forcing YouTube to do in order to make the platform better for themselves and worse for users, it gets even more spicy.

I hope all YouTube creators go out of business. That way - no more YouTube addiction.

Big assumption that ad provider is acting ethically; almost never the case.

That deal is mostly forced by google, not the will of the creator.

And that's a great model. Ask for support, enough people offer it. Don't add paywall, the extra exposure will attract more people and statistically more payments. The whole ad driven model only works for the 'growth at all costs', VC financed platforms. To buy into their narrative whole sale is just naive. It's arguably quite detrimental because it incentivizes a race to the bottom with dark patterns fostering addiction (the very subject of this whole discussion). There are entire networks of content producers making millions by creating purposefully stupid and misleading videos on TikTok and YouTube, infuriating people driving engagement.

There are billions of absolutely fantastic videos that took exactly zero in production cost, nobody's forcing anyone to invest more than that.

If people want to base their main income on making free online videos than that's their problem. Some will then try to disingenuously guilt trip people on patreon and similar, and there are those who go get themselves some sponsors like a proper advertising business does. Do these creators classify themselves as a non-profit org? Because that's who runs on donations.

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