this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It's a win win
Alright, let's say I do that. I'll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I've watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows... about 100 different channels.
Let's ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I'd have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let's do math together:
Ok. That's ~$0.06 per channel instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. I don't know about you... but I'm kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let's go ahead and factor in would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:
In other words: I'd be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the "no money" problem, there's also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. Of course, we also conveniently ignored the issues of currency conversion and the man hours required to fill out 100 donation forms...
Let's be honest with each other: you weren't being completely serious when you said that your suggestion had anything to do with ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I'm certain that you don't follow your own advice because it's quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
We watch a vastly different amount of videos online I guess. I was thinking 10 or 20 people at most. But even with 100 people, if somehow you wanted to donate to every single person, the solution is simply to donate yearly rather than monthly. (Seriously tho, not judging your lifestyle, but 100 channels? That's a lot)
You are making a lot of assumptions with your argument.
In your current model, a considerable share of your subscription money goes to the platform (in this case, Alphabet), rather than directly to creators. While this is indeed a reality of the current system, that doesn't mean it is the most effective way to support creators, and it is this point that the suggested model seeks to challenge. Direct contributions, even if smaller in size, have a larger portion reaching the creators.
Also, your argument assumes that you donate an equal share of revenue to every creator, but that doesn't always make sense. You have the Power of Choice: In the current model, you pay your subscription fee and have little say over how it is distributed. In a direct donation model, you have a greater ability to vote with your wallet, supporting the creators who you feel truly deserve your support.
No, I don't, I donate more than that, and most of the time without third party platforms that take their cut, but look I agree, it's not practical for every individual to distribute $12 among dozens of creators around the world. But, if a significant number of people were to adopt this approach, the collective impact could indeed be substantial.
Also, patreon and similar platforms are only used for convenience, and are not the end all be all, for instance liberapay takes no fees (with the exception of the processing fees that are charged by the payment processor).