> But another reason why sponsor reads annoy me is that it breaks the youtube premium deal.

I totally get that, and I feel the same way when I see yet another read as a viewer and premium subscriber.

I don’t really have an answer (and if I did, I’d be doing it already), but I will say that my (subjective, based on my ad placement strategy and viewer profile) experience is that premium views are worth less than non-premium - although YouTube cleverly don’t actually give me enough data to _know_ that as a fact (and it would go against their stated position, which I guess they would never do).

Linus Sebastian has said the exact opposite of that whenever he's discussed the breakdown of where the money that Linus Media Group makes comes from. Premium views are worth more than free views.

Just a guess: maybe it depends by which vertical they’re in? Not all channels earn the same so many be there are cases where non-premium users are more valuable than premium ones?

A game streamer I sometimes watch also said something similar - that "youtube premium" views are tracked separately and worth significant multiples per view compared to those that get ads.

They also said it isn't variable in the same way for what ads can get assigned to your content, or for "limited monetization" content (which apparently pretty much sets the ad income to zero).

If I remember correctly the numbers given were 6x more direct payouts for a premium view vs. a free view.

I wish YouTube Premium (and honestly, Spotify too!) had a feature where I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support. I am already a member of several Patreons but wish I could cast a bit of a wider support net for the people I watch enough-to-want-to-support-them-but-not-enough-to-join-their-Patreon, yknow?

This somewhat reminds me on the discussions around the Web Monetization API [1] a few years ago.

I still wish for a service that gives me access to all paywalled sites or a way to sending all websites I visit a little money in exchange for them not serving ads.

[1]: https://webmonetization.org/

Is that not just youtube "memberships" though? The creator can choose the cost and have multiple "tiers" - I don't think there's anything stopping them having a $1 "tip jar" tier.

Sure, it's not quite the same, but at some point of similar-enough the number of people who actually use each feature becomes vanishingly small and/or the cost of managing the extra option outpaces the income, and it's just not worth it.

Even then I've heard of some channels uploading ad-free versions of their videos for certain membership tiers.

>I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support.

They halfway do this. The numbers are opaque but part of your premium is given to creators you watch, and that cut is based on your watch time, among other factors.

ofc I dobut we'd ever get that granular a control on CC's. As said in another reply, memberships are sort of that solution.

I've mentioned this in the past but I mind sponsorship a lot less when it's highly relevant for the channel. For example a lot of engineering channels are sponsored by JLPCB who provided machining services or PCBs for the project video - that makes sense.

Coffee influencers selling me NordVPN on a video about grinder particle size distribution does not.

I've actually bought/planned to buy a few things that I was introduced to via YouTube sponsorships, but it's never been any of the generic YouTube sponsor merchandise. It's always something highly relevant to the topic of the channel, or even the specific video. Usually some sort of specialty tool.

but if the sponsorship is relevant it could be a conflict of interest for the editorial