That’s just not true… When you have YouTube premium, you pay the creators you watch proportionally to your watch time of their content out of your subscription. You are giving them more of your money the more you watch that specific channel.
And even the pittance is more than 3x your AdSense view. As far as I’m concerned, premium is paying creators i watch while providing me with a more than serviceable music app and an ad free experience on both.
If you pay $14 for YTP and watched literally only one channel, ever, that channel could get up to a max of $7, less transaction fees. Alphabet eats the other $7. If you use uBlock and SponsorBlock, you get the same ad-free experience and can then control how the $14 gets distributed. I technically spend more than the cost of YTP each month on the creators I support, but I can see my contribution going directly to the creators in nearly the full allocated amounts. That’s a huge difference to small channels. Corporate lackeys will go ‘but the server costs!’ but Alphabet made ~$34B off of other people’s creations last quarter alone and have consistently made the user experience worse since they acquired YT, so any complaints from Alphabet’s C suite can be safely filed under BS.
I don’t disagree with your point but your data is not correct…
Alphabet reported $34.46 billion in net income for Q4 2025 on total revenue of $113.8 billion.
Ads generated $82.3 billion (72% of revenue):
Google Search ($63 billion)
YouTube ($11.4 billion)
Network ($7.8 billion)
This is all REVENUE not Profit! Yes Alphabet made ~34B Profit that Quarter but not only from Youtube ad’s. I would assume a 25-30% margin on Youtube Max, so it’s more like ~4B Profit of Youtube Ad’s (Yes still a fuck ton of money).
I never mentioned premium, because yes it works like that for premium. But even for that paying them directly is better, as it avoids youtube’s cut completely.
That’s just not true… When you have YouTube premium, you pay the creators you watch proportionally to your watch time of their content out of your subscription. You are giving them more of your money the more you watch that specific channel.
A cap of 50% of your youtube premium goes to the creators.
Small creators are given a pittance, large creators get the lions share, even with equal watch hours.
And even the pittance is more than 3x your AdSense view. As far as I’m concerned, premium is paying creators i watch while providing me with a more than serviceable music app and an ad free experience on both.
If you pay $14 for YTP and watched literally only one channel, ever, that channel could get up to a max of $7, less transaction fees. Alphabet eats the other $7. If you use uBlock and SponsorBlock, you get the same ad-free experience and can then control how the $14 gets distributed. I technically spend more than the cost of YTP each month on the creators I support, but I can see my contribution going directly to the creators in nearly the full allocated amounts. That’s a huge difference to small channels. Corporate lackeys will go ‘but the server costs!’ but Alphabet made ~$34B off of other people’s creations last quarter alone and have consistently made the user experience worse since they acquired YT, so any complaints from Alphabet’s C suite can be safely filed under BS.
I don’t disagree with your point but your data is not correct… Alphabet reported $34.46 billion in net income for Q4 2025 on total revenue of $113.8 billion. Ads generated $82.3 billion (72% of revenue):
This is all REVENUE not Profit! Yes Alphabet made ~34B Profit that Quarter but not only from Youtube ad’s. I would assume a 25-30% margin on Youtube Max, so it’s more like ~4B Profit of Youtube Ad’s (Yes still a fuck ton of money).
I never mentioned premium, because yes it works like that for premium. But even for that paying them directly is better, as it avoids youtube’s cut completely.