> Income from premium is distributed by your watchtime. YouTube takes a portion of your monthly fee and divides it between the videos you watched. You watch only a single creator, that creator will get all of it. You watch only few videos, those videos will earn a larger chunk each. You watch hundreds of videos, each video will only earn a small amount. You pay a lot for premium, more will be paid to creators. You use a vpn to buy premium from india or so, only a fraction of that payment will be distributed accordingly.
> If you are not using premium creators get paid from advertisements that are actually watched. So either you have to watch the full advertisement, if it is shorter than 30 seconds, or at least 30 seconds from a longer advertisement, before you skip it. Skipping an advertisement after 5 - 29 seconds means no payout to the creator.
IIRC, premium was a large part of the reason behind those wacky auto-generated kids streams that was in the news a couple years ago. Parents don't want their kids watching ads, so a good number of kids have premium accounts. Premium pays a lot better than ads, so targeting kids can be quite lucrative.
I believe it shows as a different line item in their revenue dashboard.
Super basic official answer: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en
Edit:
From a creator at https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/xv8k6n/i_have_yout... (so take it as you will):
> Income from premium is distributed by your watchtime. YouTube takes a portion of your monthly fee and divides it between the videos you watched. You watch only a single creator, that creator will get all of it. You watch only few videos, those videos will earn a larger chunk each. You watch hundreds of videos, each video will only earn a small amount. You pay a lot for premium, more will be paid to creators. You use a vpn to buy premium from india or so, only a fraction of that payment will be distributed accordingly.
> If you are not using premium creators get paid from advertisements that are actually watched. So either you have to watch the full advertisement, if it is shorter than 30 seconds, or at least 30 seconds from a longer advertisement, before you skip it. Skipping an advertisement after 5 - 29 seconds means no payout to the creator.