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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that viewers have to pay twice for content - once via Patreon, the second while watching ads.

My cousin is a YouTuber, and for him (and a few others) they follow a "Premium Content" model.

Their YouTube channel has free, ad supported content to develop an audience, and Patreon subscribers get that content ad-free, as well as extra content.

It's a decent model, but as I find myself watching more YouTube than Netflix/Hulu these days, I really wish this concept was supported by YouTube itself. They have YouTube Red, but that doesn't directly support my favorite YouTubers.

YouTube Red does directly support the YouTubers you watch.

I think he's saying that he wants $X per month to be delivered directly to the content creator's bank account regardless of how many of that content creator's videos he watches. That's what Patreon does.

Twitch has a clearer subscriber model, I think. When you "subscribe", you're actually giving your actual real money to the channel. I'm not sure why YouTube doesn't have that. (Different horses for different courses, I guess. YouTube is more about the "1 billion people will watch this and some people will see an ad", versus "I know I like you, here's some money." Both can be profitable for everyone involved, but the models are very different. Scale vs. curation, or something.)

Only somewhat. As far as anyone can tell, because afaik Google hasn't come out and said precisely, all the money goes into a large pot and then the whole pot is split by the portion of minutes watched with Red that for each channel. ie in a simple case with two channels and 2 Red viewers if person A watches 20 minutes of channel A and person B watches 10 minutes of channel B in a month: A gets 2/3 of the pot and B gets 1/3.

At least that's what seems to be happening as far as I can see from the various articles written about it.

Given how a video has to be monitized by the creator (i.e. set up with ads) to get Red dollars as well, I'm curious if the changes to ad placement will have a knock-on effect for Red dollars as well...

I'd hope not, but stranger things have happened.

I'm not clear on what you're saying.

It has the wrong model. The consumer isn't choosing what THEY want to support al-a-cart or even automatically based on what they watch. (Either of these would be good models for the consumer.)

The least regressive model would be for viewers to pay per time unit of video, say in 5 min blocks (round down) and probably with a decaying rate of compensation on a series per block of content produced (recovery time would probably vary depending on the popularity of the series, really popular things would recover more quickly, the producer should have some feedback from this metric).

That kind of a model avoids penalizing groups of content creators, having them compete against each other (other than for viewer time, which is unavoidable), and it reduces the advertiser influenced network effect of more popular creators being over-paid compared to more niche / rising creators.

I believe it is automatic, though. Some % of your Red subscription gets divvied up among your views.

Is there any evidence of that?

One pays the content, one pays the hosting.

Should that matter, to the viewer?

It's honestly bizarre to me that more YTer's aren't promoting red for this very reason.

Youtube red is only available in

* Australia

* Korea

* Mexico

* New Zealand

* The United States

I'd buy it in an instant (in fact, I already have all access which is bundled with red) but it's just not available in most of the world.

It is worse with ESPN.

I buy the ESPN Magazine. I buy ESPN Insider. And I still have to watch ads on ESPN videos.

Youtubers can disable ads on their videos if they don't want any ad revenue.

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