[zeta0134]

To be fair, I do pay for subscriptions for a few YouTubers. Wintergatan in particular is excellent. Of course, many creatives are using Patreon and other external revenue sources and frankly that's wise, given YouTube's track record with unusual copyright strikes and other platform nonsense.

Even if I were to pay for Youtube Red, this application has a feature that I cannot get with the official app: a lack of dependence on the Google Play store and services. Since I run a build of Android that does not include those services, this app is wonderful to bridge the gap, as it performs much better than playing the videos directly in Firefox. That it happens to include a bunch of extra features the official app does not is just a bonus really.

[izacus]

Those "bunch of extra features" are paid features for the service though. For which you're not paying.

[valvar]

And which they are unable to use even if they were to pay for them, as they depend on Google Play Services.

[gary-kim]

This is actually the situation I'm in. Google Play Services are disabled on my device so I cannot use any YouTube premium features anyways.

If there was a way to pay for YouTube premium and make the money go to the creators I watch while using a FOSS client like NewPipe, I'd be willing to pay several more times the current price of YouTube premium for that.