I think this is because that idea isn't sustainable for the majority of youtube content, which isn't produced by professional YouTubers. Most video is hardly even edited. In the current system, all video can be monetized whether or not it's a music video, well-produced documentary, a sponsored gear review, some video of someone's baby crawling around, an explanation of taylor series, or a 24/7 webcam livestream of someone's backyard.
In a viewer-contributed system, only creators that have a good audience worth paying into would receive donations, but those lesser known videos would essentially have to be subsidized by those donations since those videos wouldn't bring donations in themselves. YouTube's cut, 50% as you suggest, would probably be better spent making the platform better for those creators than hosting videos that brings in no donations.
Also only a very very small subset of the audience will donate. Platforms that have been predicated on donating or subscribing to receive content are struggling to lift off (besides Patreon, which is effectively a marketplace for content, merchandise, behind the scenes stuff, etc rather than just a video hosting platform).
Most of the views land on professional channels. You basically have to be at least semi-pro to reach the numbers you need for "monetization" by Youtube anyway.
There are 2 Youtubes, one for embedded viral clips you discover around the web and one for professional content that viewers subscribe to.
I think Youtube has issues shoe-horning both systems into one monetization scheme. I think this is mostly a problem of inertia but either they need to make things more stable for their professional creators or someone else needs to build a better platform for these pros.
There’s a whole ecosystem of niche review channels that have decent but transient viewership.
For instance some chromebook reviewing channel posts reviews of almost every chromebook coming out to market. There might be some people subscribing to that, but the bulk of the views will be from search results, and only for 3 or 4 videos per viewer (once they make their buying decision they’re done).
That’s an example I could think of on the spot, but there are many many facets of youtube that have a decent traffic with no allegiance from the viewer. They also survive by managing in-content ads themselves, having affiliates or any other system external to youtube, but youtube ads must still represent something to them.
Not really. The requirements for monetisation are 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in the last year. They're not the easiest numbers in the world to reach for new YouTubers, but they're also not beyond many amateur creators either. I know many people on the platform who reached/far surpassed that without much in the way of video production/editing knowledge and no budget whatsoever.
That situation seems to be the case already - Professional YouTubers are the ones pulling in big view counts and so receiving the lion's share of the revenue. Yet there are millions of tiny contributors doing it for non-monetary reasons.
This situation is also true on Twitch. For every big streamer pulling >1k viewers per stream, there's thousands of small streamers with <10.
Youtube has already made a token effort to mimicing this with the 'join' button, but right now that more patron-centric revenue model looks to be a short- and medium-term winning formula. Youtube would likely benefit from pursuing it.
In a viewer-contributed system, only creators that have a good audience worth paying into would receive donations, but those lesser known videos would essentially have to be subsidized by those donations since those videos wouldn't bring donations in themselves. YouTube's cut, 50% as you suggest, would probably be better spent making the platform better for those creators than hosting videos that brings in no donations.
Also only a very very small subset of the audience will donate. Platforms that have been predicated on donating or subscribing to receive content are struggling to lift off (besides Patreon, which is effectively a marketplace for content, merchandise, behind the scenes stuff, etc rather than just a video hosting platform).