Comment by djaro

About as likely as opening a grocery store where people can pay through voluntary donations.

I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.

A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.

I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.

YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.