[vueko]

So, I actually think that if YouTube went poof tomorrow, totally gone, and was not replaced by a similar ad-supported medium, it'd be a boon for makers of quality video content and disproportionately harmful to clickbait chum-farms. Ad-supported video is the incentive system that delivered us Elsagate, and the scale of YouTube w.r.t. feasibility of paid hosting isn't all that it seems.

Every single YouTube creator I watch with any degree of regularity has a Patreon, merch shop, or some other way for those who appreciate their stuff to directly contribute to its production and continued existence. Many say that they rely on those sources of income a lot more than ad revenue, especially those in non-advertiser-friendly niches who have to worry about demonetization. In a no-YouTube world, even assuming p2p video streaming never works out, those folks would be able to pay for hosting with those non-ad income streams, because YouTube's scale is deceptive. Most of the ones I watch don't even have all that many views relative to the big boys - five to six digit, usually - so their viewer:contributor ratio is a lot higher than that of a successful clickbait slop video with ~zero genuine dedicated supporters but a lot of incidental ad views. This dynamic implies that creators with dedicated followings would have a decent shot at supporting themselves even if they had to pay for bandwidth, because their bandwidth spend to revenue ratio is a lot better than average.

The thing about YouTube is that slop outweighs quality content by such a massive margin that if you do napkin math around the raw cost of hosting n hours of streaming video, you end up with a way higher number than you'd have if you stripped out the bulk of the material that wouldn't be economically feasible in a non-ad-supported environment.

A corollary is that without competition from low-quality ad-supported material that couldn't hack it in a donation-centric environment, the good stuff stands out that much more. It's kinda like how you can't really post a recipe without it drowning in an ocean of algorithmically generated fake-ass life stories about grandma's cookies with seven ads before you hit the first ingredient. Without those, organic content, even paid/donation-supported organic content, has a much better shot at encountering the kind of eyeball that'll shell out for the good stuff.

I think the existence of spaces like Bandcamp (for now, anyway, fingers crossed re acquisition) demonstrates that donation-supported streaming can be economically viable. I've spent far more on Bandcamp albums I could have just kept streaming indefinitely for free than I ever did on CDs, because I know that the bulk of that money is actually going to the people who made the stuff I liked, rather than getting siphoned off into corporate middlemen a la legacy record businesses / Spotify and its ilk. Direct-to-artist support in places like Bandcamp has enabled a flowering of high-quality, niche content. People may complain about a simplistic top 40 or whatever, but I'm running into more music right up my alley than ever before, and that's largely due to the newfound ability to cut out the middleman and go right to the creator. YouTube is like the old record industry; it benefits the lowest-common-denominator painfully-focus-grouped artist far more than it does the auteur.