If only there were some way that money in my pocket went to some of the people related to the things I like to watch. Some sort of premium service where YouTube could pay for a person to come to my house and collect money from me, and them give it to the people making videos, and then we won't have ads?

Nah, that'll never work.

I really wish there was a little micro-donation button, using something like the lightning network. I'd smash the crap out of that for good videos. But YouTube would never support it because they wouldn't be able to insert themselves between the creator and consumer.

It already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10878910?hl=en

Wow, so it does. I just checked. Most of my subscriptions apparently do not have it turned on. The one that I found that does have it turned on, it's hidden behind a hamburger menu that's located next to, you guessed it, an AI button. Nice to see Google prioritizing their crappy AI integration over their content creators getting paid.

You can already "super thank" people in the comments

I am being completely honest when I say I had no idea this even existed. As per my other comment, it’s very well hidden.

do we know what happens if you run premium and an ad blocker together? I would hope they would still pay the creator for my views but I'm not sure now

They pay creators more when a person with premium is watching their videos. Ad-blockers have no relevance in this case.

Apparently ad blockers can interfere with key view metrics.

Unclear what premium uses to disburse the 55% share that goes to creators; hopefully it's not those ones.

I don't think it's likely that the ad blocker is interfering, because you need to be logged in to use premium.

I expect my (Premium) views are no longer counted, because my ad blocker is blocking the API endpoint that counts my views.

The fact that I have Premium is irrelevant; if YouTube isn't getting the metrics that says I watched a video, then it won't be counted.

Certainly YouTube could change the method they use to count views so it would work in my case, but they probably don't have an incentive to do so.

So... BlockBuster video ?

You're describing an existing plugin called SponsorBlock.

IIRC it even has lots of options such as enabling you to allow/disallow self-sponsor segments (the creator promoting their own product), "like and subscribe" calls to action, shock-and-awe intros, podcast recaps, and several other segment types.

YouTube has it built in now. We just need auto skip to be built in now

Only for YT Premium users. But since premium views pay creators more it's less of an impact.