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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. If they care about monetization, they would sell merchandise or use Patreon or similar.

The TOS bans patreon etc. links unless you meet monetisation requirements: https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/28/16380186/youtube-patreon-d...

Ha. That's gold.

If you have a following in Patreon or any other similar platform, it shouldn't be that hard to jump ship and start uploading somehwere else. Any serious internet publisher should have at least one alternate channel for followers. I'd go with Twitter and a newsletter, so if YouTube decides to screw me, I can tell people "hey, I'm moving to [random platform here]". Patreon allows you to communicate with your followers too, so going, you can take your actual contributing followers with you wherever you want (theoretically).

This describes the benefit of being diversified but it doesn't explain how you get there in the face of YouTube's efforts to prevent that. I mean you could plug your Twitter then plug your patreon there but then you're relying on the YT -> Twitter conversion rate multiplied by the Twitter -> Patreon conversion rate.

You could just plug it verbally and skirt the enforcement of the YouTube rules that way, but if they became concerned enough they have automatic transcription and did start enforcing it on annotations/descriptions...

I find it almost callous that not only do they make it super hard for "small timers" to monetize their channel using their own product, but then proceed to block any efforts to let fans contribute via others.

I've gone with patreon to support smaller channels, 1 to 10 dollars each, budget 20 dollars a month.

Mentions among creators drives me to new channels and I add to Patreon.

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