>Give us a subscription and we will pay.

The problem from the video creator's perspective is that Youtube often decides to "demonetize" your video for breaking one of their "community standards" rules, which are vague, constantly changing, and seemingly randomly enforced. If that happens, their video gets no payout from Youtube. Its no surprise they would take sponsorships into their own hands in order to get a more fair and consistent paycheck.

Don't they still get YouTube Premium revenue even if the video is demonetised?

Yes, but premium revenue is decided by watch time, long videos get more revenue usually, with videos at around 90min length being 50/50 payout from ads and watch time. Assuming ads only at the beginning and end of videos and the video target the "average" audience, and average view duration of 30mins.

So you're looking at a 50% reduction in income minimum, much more if you make short videos that target audiences with higher $/cpm like finance or health, in those youtube premium is probably only around 5-10% of revenue.

I have a paid youtube subscription to avoid the ads, but the in-video sponsored content still appears anyway. At least I can scrub the video timeline forward to get through it faster, but it would be nice if youtube would send an edited feed to paid members so we'd just get the real content.

Given the rise of services such as Patreon, Substack and OF, I feel like people have done exactly that. And yet, it's not enough, Patreon & Substack track. They just can't get enough of that sweet sweet data.

Or alternatively feed static advertisements without tracking or overlay and I'm personally okay with that.

I've disabled my blockers on sites that do that, but it's a very small percentile.

So, sponsored content then? That’s basically what it is - ads without tracking, that don’t block or lock away content.

I have no problem with sponsered content, especially if the advertisement is relevant to the content I'm consuming.

Some (most) of the YouTube content is of such a poor quality that I feel that I should be the one getting paid to consume it.