Sponsorblock exists as well.

> A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.

Well or not show the sponsors to premium users. They could simply upload a separate premium version. Don't forget, these content creators are already getting a lot more money from YT when a premium user views their vids. So they're not entitled.

They can walk away but where would they go?? Besides, more and more people are using sponsorblock since it's become totally insane with these.

No, I think they shouldn't be double dipping. If I pay for premium I want no ads whatsoever. Not for the content creators to sneak some in anyway.

And no I don't tend to watch many with sponsor crap in them because they aren't actually very good (think the low-quality crap from LTT etc). The best channels (EEVBlog is one notable one) don't have sponsors at all because they're made for love.

What I am not doing is watching the sponsorship segments anyway. So yeah I use sponsorblock. And I use Ublock origin or revanced to remove the ads too because there's way too many now.

A peer comment said something similar to which I responded to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522719

However, you brought up the distinction between consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here [1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and authenticity.

You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators', is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his 'channel' would become?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2g1H5wPmUE

And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what products and services the world's resources are used for.

Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting, infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.

Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.

I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.

Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked from a court filing and their total annual costs, including labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800 million. [1]

Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...