[max46]

It's called Youtube Premium and the vast majority of people of the internet made it very clear they will never pay for it even if the ads are driving them crazy.

Youtubers also get far more money from premium views than normal views.

Ironically, most of the complains people have with youtube are derived directly or indirectly from the fact that the platform is ad-supported. Youtube doesn't care that your video is offensive, but advertisers do. Every demonetization wave was preceded by a mass of people putting pressure on them (eg. NYT "journalists" literally searching for isis videos, taking screenshots and telling the companies with ads next to them that they will be listed in their article if they don't stop doing business with youtube)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'm torn, because on the one hand, yes, YT ~deserves to get paid for their product. On the other hand, as a user, it feels like they intentionally made the free tier worse - more ads, removing features - to try and get people to pay, which makes me want to avoid giving them money. It feels like rewarding them for solving a problem that they artificially created.

[danShumway]

I did subscribe to Youtube premium for a pretty decent chunk of time, I think a couple of years, and it was specifically to support creators. It's a worse experience than adblocking, not just in terms of cost, but purely in terms of the service itself.

It doesn't get rid of tracking, and it doesn't get rid of the eternal problem of Youtube's recommendation engine. However blocking ads, cookies, and several key scripts on Youtube does seem to get Youtube to at least stop constantly customizing things for me. Maybe it's gotten better now, but Youtube was also constantly trying to get me to watch exclusive videos, so it wasn't even actually getting rid of ads, just ads inside videos. It promised the ability to download videos, but they were locked in a weird format on Android and periodically deleted themselves or errored out, they were completely unreliable. Their app also used something like twice the battery of NewPipe, a program that (for viewers) seems to do literally everything their app does but better.

The final kind of insult to injury was that I found out that if I was signed into Youtube on both my desktop and on my phone, it would block me if I tried to play videos on both at the same time, which... nothing else has that problem. I don't have that problem when I'm blocking ads, I can watch videos on as many devices as I want. Logging into Youtube shouldn't give me a worse experience than logging out of it.

I eventually gave up because I was paying Google $10 a month, and then signing out of my account and using UBlock Origin to watch videos. So none of that was going to the creators I wanted to support, and I just didn't see the point anymore. For a while it was getting bundled with Google Play Music, which was at least something, but even that ended and now they have Youtube Music or whatever. So I dropped Youtube Premium and just started giving people money on Patreon instead. It's more direct, it's more valuable to them, it's a better experience for me, and I get very slightly better privacy.

It's not necessarily that people are unwilling to pay, it's that the service is bad. Even if Youtube Premium was free I wouldn't use it. If Ublock Origin and NewPipe were $15 a month, they would still be a better deal than Youtube Premium was at the time I was subscribed.

[Chris2048]

If YT demonetizes you, do you still get money from premium viewers?

[knorker]

I don't have a reference for you, but when I last researched this the answer was "yes".

Now, that of course doesn't apply if a copyright holder is claiming your ad revenue. But my researched back then is that yes, it does mean you still get paid for "advertiser-unfriendly" content.