this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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"YouTube said the hike will “allow us to continue to improve Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube.”
Bullshit, bullshit and more bullshit. They say that every single time they raise the prices. It's the same dogshit excuse.
Despite what their marketing says the service gets worse every time the price goes up. The word enshitification is overused and often misused but not where YouTube is concerned.
They allegedly give 55% to he creators and pocket the rest... And this is AFTER paying creators fractions of a cent per view and shoving expensive ads down the huge majority of their visitors throats.
They are a massively shitty company. The amount of money they steal from content creators is WILD.
content creators mostly cant live off it, they have promotions and brand deals that is seperate from youtube. also patreon accounts, or thier own website.
Yeah what a fucking joke. The one and only feature they're selling (especially since they bailed on original content like 2 years after they started) is ad-free viewing. You need a price hike every 18 months to ensure the "don't show this guy ads" line in my profile config stays set to True? Fuck off.
Honestly, the biggest selling point for me, and pretty much the entire reason I do have premium, is that they pay the creators you watch way more than a regular view. I guess the alternative would be to sign up to their patreons for a dollar.
Funny you mention that. It occurred to me that the handful of things that would really make me sad to lose if I just bailed on YouTube were all things I could indeed support on Patreon. So now I'm doing that haha. I don't think my current Patreon load costs me anything more than I used to pay for Premium.
According to this page:
TLDR: YouTube premium pays out to each content creator about A$0.23 per month. Regular ad watching gives A$0.09 per month.
Tap for math
Current price of premium is A$16.99 a month in Australia. 30% of $16.99 totals $5.10 monthly pool distributed across every content creator you watch. 70% or $11.90 of your monthly fee goes straight to YouTube and royalties to maintain their music platform you may or may not use.
The math gets really speculative here, but let's say you watch 20 different content creators, half of them make long form videos like Reject Convenience, half of them make shorts. You watch an even mix of 10 minute videos and shorts. Each long form content creator will receive ($5.10 • 0.55) / 10 = $0.28. Each shorts creator will receive ($5.10 • 0.45) / 10 = $0.23. Per month. It's a pittance really.
In comparison, an ad view gives about $0.03 per view, which if you watched 3 videos from each creator, would total $0.09. So premium gives more, but it's like 14¢ per month more per person.
I can't be bothered converting all these numbers to USD, sorry. You can roughly calculate it for your own situation using this formula:
C = (P • 0.3 • F) / NWhere
It's math like this that convinces me that you can contribute more to the ecosystem by paying even a single dollar to a creator's Patreon (even when Patreon takes 30% off the top) and watching w/ adblock than paying a monthly subscription to YT.
I think you're right. Even with the same math (20 subscriptions), you're paying only $3 more per month as a consumer. Meanwhile, each actual creator gets significantly more income per month, even after the Patreon cut: $0.70, or 304% more. Also they're not forced to create 3 videos per month just to eat
Honestly, after sitting down and doing the math, I'm a bit disheartened. I thought I was supporting my favourite creators more with YouTube premium, but 70% goes towards subsidising the music app I don't even use, which is insane to me. Really it should be called "YouTube music (plus ad free)" or something
thats why most of them supplement thier income with brand deals, promotions, , collabs,,,etc and patreon.
well, doubling the minimum watches to pay people blocking ad blockers harder and halfing the rates at which they're getting paid does fit the text they gave