The creators you’re paying on Patreon aren’t hosting their own videos though, YouTube is. Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?

I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)

That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.

I don't really care where the videos are hosted, though. I watch on YouTube because that's where my beloved creators choose host their vids. If they started to host their videos on Vimeo or even archive.org, I would watch them there since I only care about the content.

> Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?

The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.

> The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.

You're changing the context of the discussion here. snailmailman had said:

> Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content [...] On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.

Saying they're unwilling to tolerate ads in YouTube. When asked why not just pay for YouTube premium, you came and said why you don't pay for YouTube premium. When pressed, you say "because YouTube's ad model will make them the money they need to host the videos."

Since you haven't said whether you block ads, there's two ways of interpreting this:

1. You don't block ads, you're ok watching YouTube ads, and you pay the creators directly through patreon. Great! But that makes your reply -- to why snailmailman doesn't pay for YT premium -- a little off-topic, because we were discussing ad-blocking.

2. OR, you're not ok watching YouTube ads, you block them, and then pay creators on patreon directly, meaning you don't care about covering the costs of hosting videos, because you don't believe YouTube should be showing you ads, and you don't want to pay them for the service. In which case we're back to "who should cover the costs." Maybe your answer is "other suckers, but not me", which is quite hypocritical.

YouTube Premium dishes out your revenue to creators based on how much you watch. See Linus Tech Tips’ video on their income streams (skip to 4:40): https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=xH5gTvzglaPlQyJ4

Sure, YouTube probably takes more off the top than Patreon. But YouTube also splits it up based on who you’re watching. I probably watch 30+ YouTube channels per week, some of which I find on the explore page and don’t even know the name of. I would never subscribe to 30+ Patreons. I think YouTube Premium is a good compromise.