Something like Patreon where people pay for premium content would work.

They could set something up so creators could mark videos as premium, and then people have to pay a certain amount to watch.

Google already has the payments side of things covered from their other services, it really wouldn't be a stretch to add something like this.

Creators are basically having to do this anyway using a different site (Patreon) so Google should look at how to bring that internal to them.

That also neatly sidesteps the whole demonitized for being advertiser unfriendly issue, because the only people paying for various content are people who want to watch and support such content.

Alternate take: video creators can already use Patreon; Google adding an equivalent feature doesn't help them. It would actually be harmful if Google decides to pressure creators to move off Patreon onto their own system, since the creators would need to rebuild their paying subscriber base from zero. The only party that would benefit from Google adding that feature would be Google.

> They could set something up so creators could mark videos as premium, and then people have to pay a certain amount to watch.

Isn't that basically YouTube Red? Which almost no-one pays for...

They had it:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3249135?hl=en

They killing/changing it:

http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/youtube-kills-paid-chan...

I thought Google wasn't allowing patreon links anymore?

I am paying for YouTube.

Oh noes, poor YouTube, poor Google. Their prime motive is making money. They are not forced to distribute it all for free. If they didn't, then maybe people would go back to the great days of selfhosting or distributed systems would finally become commonplace. I would prefer that.