[danShumway]

This video has been viewed 134,000 times. At $2000 per video, that would be a cost of 1.5 cents per-view, and that's assuming no one else after this point would pay for the video. Inline sponsorships are probably the best form of advertising out there in terms of creator payout, but the reality is that even at its best, advertising for creators pays so low that it is really feasible for you to just sponsor the creators you're following for even just a buck a month and you'll probably be more valuable to them as a contributor than any of the people who are leaving ads enabled.

Especially if they're small creators. There really is a threshold in advertising where a lot of indie creators are not going to be offered this kind of money.

I don't blame creators for doing what they need to do to make money, the state of advertising is not their fault. But as an ecosystem of users and developers and as an industry, we can make a choice about whether a system that encourages influencers to lie about product recommendations and directly influences their content and the topics they can talk about is more or less exploitative and regressive than asking people to give money to creators directly.

Advertising is often phrased as an alternative to regressive taxes on content -- it allows us to give content to people who couldn't pay otherwise. But advertising is itself a regressive tax; advertisers would not be paying any money for advertising if it didn't change purchaser behavior. And for the social cost of that regressive tax, content creators get very little payout in return. $2000-6000 for a video sounds good only because we're thinking about it in comparison to Youtube payout. But it's not very much money for a video that likely required multiple workers and several weeks to a month to produce.