by mrguyorama | 2025-10-29 20:10:38+00:00
>Then your money goes to the video makers you watch.

It does not actually, a large chunk of the money goes to Youtube.

And actually, I would happily pay for either the creator or myself to fund the content hosting. I pay for Nebula for example.

What I refuse to pay for is a company who has routinely fucked over innocent creators doing nothing wrong, and a company who has threatened to burn those people's livelihoods to the ground for triggering false positives in terribly made automated systems that Google leans on to have a higher profit margin.

What I refuse to pay for is a company who uses their absolute control of the platform to enforce a system of Clickbait thumbnails and titles, by insisting on an adversarial system of surfacing content. I am subscribed to a creator, but if I don't click on their next video one of the first times google shows it to me, google will stop showing me content from that creator that I am still subscribed to. If enough people do not click on it in the first couple impressions, google will not show that video to anyone.

Google will also punish users who make such awful and deplorable content as... War history (accurate or not), until recently swearing, videos about aircraft (somehow ended up labeled as a content mill), An end of year summary and highlights video that is exclusively crafted out of content that exists already live on your channel and is not demonitized but when you release that highlight reel it immediately gets demonitized so since you are a big ish channel you ask your account rep wtf and they tell you oh its a mistake it wont happen again. And then, next year, it happens exactly the same, with the added bonus of this time all the content on your channel that wasn't previously demonitized also gets demonitized to go with it, even though your rep once again says this is a mistake.

Remember how youtube used to have so much small time animation, and some of it was great? Notice how it's gone now? Youtube changed what they were prioritizing in the algorithm, and that killed the entire business of small time animation. An entire era of internet media that started before youtube and drove the power and influence of Newgrounds was just wiped out because it wasn't profitable enough. This was separate from the time that youtube also cut ad rates in half without warning.

I will pay for youtube when they demonstrate that they want good content on their platform. I will pay for youtube when, instead of platforming and supporting and paying big bucks for Mr Beast and his awful empty content, they support channels like Applied Science, and Breaking Taps, and NileRed, and Explosions&Fire, and Thought Emporium, and Stuff Made Here, and BPS.Space, and Jeff Geerling, and Dave from EEVBlog, and Brandon F, and Technology Connections, and Practical Engineering, and How to Cook That, and Ze Frank, and AvE, and the other Mountains of people who make great content that is high quality and well made and carefully done and not feeding into gross addiction systems.

But their hard work does not match Youtube's desire to be a constant churn 24/7 watching ad delivery platform, so google punishes them and rewards the people literally trying to scam children instead.

That is why not pay for Youtube Premium.