[butz]

I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.

[djaro]

Sponsorships are definitely the highest if a youtuber actively engages in them, ad revenue vs patreon depends highly on if you have i.e. a small but highly active fanbase of core fans, versus a wider more general audience that you entertain a bit.

I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.

[izacus]

Do you think those creators pay YouTube for bandwidth, storage and transcode servers? Where do you think money for that comes from?

Streaming video is very expensive, even in 2026 and ignoring that someone is paying the main business expense of those creators is not very honest.

[Scoundreller]

Dunno about the storage side, but fly by night operators seem to be constantly available to stream every movie and tv show and somehow afford the bandwidth, transcoding and all other costs while being shunned from the general ad industry…

[izacus]

How about you actually look at the costs and try setting up a streaming website yourself and see how true your bs is? :)