SponsorBlock – Skip over sponsorship segments on YouTube

Overlapping options for content creators (many of which do or do not apply depending on various factors, mostly forms of privilege) include picking a different business model, having a different means to support yourself, giving up, and realizing that your existing business model is compatible with free viewing.

Depending on consumers to be selfless by donating or choosing to consume ads is not the only business model in town; there are more paths to take than "expect selflessness or give up". Selflessness isn't typically a basket worth all your eggs.

It's not a matter of deserving, it's a matter of supply and demand and technological capabilities. To ignore the latter, let's pretend YouTube is capable of 100% effective DRM, such that you only watch the content if you see all the ads and sponsorships, eyeballs on screen, in the style of "15 Million Merits".

Even in this case, it's unmistakable that the supply of entertainment overwhelmingly exceeds the demand. This is why all the traditional Hollywood companies are all entirely focused on making blockbusters: it's the one thing they can do that no one else can (because of the initial investment required). But they're the exception. The vast majority of content creators, including people trying to do it full time, are making basically nothing or just enough to get by. There are thousands and thousands of Twitch streamers scraping by on 12 hour days where they average a hundred or so viewers.

In other words, even in this DRM hellscape, the push of the market is going to be towards less and less remuneration for each creator, because the total market capacity of entertainment as such is not enough for each entertainer to live off of. There is quite simply not enough money in it. If I'm forced to watch ads, I'll switch to content providers that don't use ads. The result is worse for the creator, because the vast majority of them are suffering from lack of visibility. So they make their content more palatable by reducing ads, and the downward spiral continues. This is already happening, because most creators are not making enough to live off of.

The only way to solve this problem is for us to decide socially that artistic creation is good as such even if there's not a marketable demand for it, and that therefore creators deserve to be compensated. The fact that it's society that would have to come to this conclusion means that it's society upon which the burden of providing this compensation would fall, not individual consumers. In other words, the solution isn't sponsorships or watching ads, it's something like universal basic income.