I generally agree, though I'd say donated money should go to every sponsored individual/party equally by default, with donors able to set weights to recipients in their preferences.

Weighting videos on watch time, or GitHub sponsorship amounts based on number of repos, creates perverse incentives. High quality tutorial videos that get to the point and communicate ideas efficiently get less money than those with a minute-and-a-half intro and two minutes talking up a sponsorship at the end. Similarly, GitHub projects that are broken up into many repos, even needlessly, get more money. Same as the microservices hell that many software companies have faced when they drink too much of that koolaid.

Doesn’t Patreon already solve this problem?

I might have selection bias because I support an OSS dev there but isn’t that a pretty efficient way of directly supporting specific projects?

Almost, except for the low end. It would be perfect if it grouped donations and charges, and let you allocate any arbitrarily small amount to any creator. As it is, it charges fees per creator you patronize, and limits donation to being at least $1 per creator. I'd put $30/month there easily if I could spread it over 100-200 creators with fees of $0.30 + 2.9% on the $30, but the current $0.10 + 5% on each $1 donation means a lot less of my money is going to the creator (who also gets charged those fees + 5-12% for Patreon services when cashing out) than I think is useful, and that's even after downsizing the pool of creators I'd like to donate to in order to meet the minimum $1/each.

To be fair, in looking this up, I did find it's a lot better than when I cancelled my Patreon account, since at the time they were proposing $0.30 + something% even for $1 donations. But the bundling of donations was my whole point in using them, and when they clearly said they weren't going that way, that was it for me. That's why I like the Brave/flattr/"sponsor pool" approach so much more. It lets me support creators (especially web comics, bloggers, and video creators) in a much more similar scale to the advertising model, which many were on before, and for which I think we need a popular replacement.

> As it is, it charges fees per creator you patronize, and limits donation to being at least $1 per creator. I'd put $30/month there easily if I could spread it over 100-200 creators with fees of $0.30 + 2.9% on the $30, but the current $0.10 + 5% on each $1 donation means a lot less of my money is going to the creator (who also gets charged those fees + 5-12% for Patreon services when cashing out)

Liberapay lets you donate a minimum of ¢1 ($0.01, and they also support 32 other currencies) a week https://liberapay.com/about/faq#maximum-amount, and IIUC lets creators choose the cut that goes to them

Thanks for looking it up. This was news to me, I always assumed Patreon charged whatever fee on the gross amount I pay every month.

Patreon has the same issue described in the OP: the marginal cost (both psychological and financial) of supporting additional creators is too high. Since YouTube Premium distributes payments automatically based on watch time it doesn't suffer from that issue.

What is the difference between popularity weighted global vs local pool.

As I understand it with global popularity.

If 9 people watch A and 1 person watches B and C equally and each pay $10 then:

Total money is $100. A gets $90, B and C get $5 each (as they get 1/20 total viewership).

This seems to be same as local pooling? Am I misunderstanding the terms?

The difference is that if 9 people watch 99 hours of A's let's plays or last 2 music videos on repeat, and one person watched 1 hour of B's 20 well-researched and edited 3-minute educational videos, A-watchers put in $90, B-watchers put in $10, and under global popularity A gets $99 and B gets $1. Local pooling would mean that A gets $90 and B gets $10. This is my main complaint against Youtube Red too.

Can you link to an article or something about how YouTube Red's payment model works? I've always been curious.

Here you go[0]. Basically they're treating it like ad revenue, where each view nets you a certain amount.

[0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Re...