essentially every YouTuber I've watched who discussed their financials said that their sponsorships brought in several times more money than all forms of YouTube money.
which is a very niche slice, and I have no idea how representative it is in aggregate. but sponsorships happen because they pay well enough to annoy every viewer, not just ones that aren't using the better-paying Premium - they generally are not cheap, to say the least.
If you look at Premium, it's about 100x more lucrative than regular views. So I'm pretty sure I'm providing more money to creators than the skipped ads.
To be clear: I completely believe that Premium is a major source for many people. 100%. I just haven't seen many examples of it, outside tubers that have zero sponsorships (because they're small and/or not doing the low-value slightly-shady ones that get spammed everywhere). I'm thrilled that Premium seems to pay relatively well, it's better for everyone to move away from ads where possible.
LTT though is a rather significant outlier in terms of subscribers (16.6 million right now). For truly large channels it's reasonable for the equation to be different.
And the equation for them really is different. They're a company with ~100 employees¹ and YouTube and video sponsorships came out to just 11.6% (ads AND premium) and 9.2% respectively of their multi-person company income. People claiming "SponsorBlock steals from creators" aren't talking about LTT, they're talking about smaller creators for whom YouTube stuff is a majority of their income.
Plus, like. Ads+premium lumped into one. It wouldn't surprise me if premium was lower than sponsorships.
I suspect we're in different niches then or something. If ya don't mind sharing / have links handy, do you have any examples? I'm curious what kind of channel it works well for.
I can try to hunt mine down, but most of the examples I've had were from a couple years ago, and YouTube's history is rather hard to search for stuff like that :| Not high odds of success.
These are niche Russian-language channels (@Varlamov, @Max_Katz). They disclosed their finances to drive up Patreon/Youtube subscriptions because Youtube stopped monetization from Russia.
I've been trying to find public numbers for English-language channels, but wow. So much slop.
