Actual unpopular opinion: get yt premium. It gives creators the money they would've got for you watching an ad, while giving you an ad free experience, and also includes yt music which might take some adjustments if you're used to Spotify, but then you will also not be supporting Spotify which is probably the worst streaming service in terms of paying artists.
(They're all bad and many people would argue similarly against supporting Google via YouTube, so perhaps it's a moot point, but that's part of how I justify my sub to myself anyways.)
The few cents a creator gets from your youtube premium subscription is way more than they would ever get from you watching ads, so yes, OP is actually right.
Just because they're not gonna get a massive cut from your sub doesn't mean it's not the most beneficial solution for everyone.
Sorry but I deeply disagree. Youtube is not the solution, it's the problem. Giving money to youtube/google, hoping they will give back a fair share to creators is in absolutly no way "the most beneficial solution for everyone". Sorry to say but that's capitalism brainwashing. On bandcamp, you set your own price and get 90℅ of the revenues. Patreon, sponsoring, Tidal are all much more interesting solution. Soon enough, self-hosting will make services like youtube irrelevant, and we will finally get to create fair revenues for creators. Meanwhile, trusting any of the Gafam is just reinforcing their position.
Or you could just become a member of their channel. I look at it this way though. If a youtuber I'm watching has lots of subscribers, one more member in that community probably isn't going to make a difference. If a youtuber I'm watching doesn't have the subscriber numbers they deserve, I will become a member. I always choose the highest tiers for them too. And join their patreon and do the same there. If I do that, I will actually listen/watch on patreon then put both YouTube versions in my watch list for when I need background noise and just upvote both videos.
That way they get all the things I can possibly do for them without giving youtube as much as I give the creators. This is my understanding of how that works though. With premium, if they actually give any of that money to the creators (my heart says no, corporations suck), it would be way less than the channel membership would give them. I don't actually know how much premium costs though.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong. At the moment I don't have very many people on my memberships. And I know most people these days probably can't afford to do that, but even a $1 or $2 membership to one or a couple of them can make a difference to the ones you really support and who probably need it more than they'd get from premium.
My biggest one is $30 total. That's also my only patreon currently. I will do more of those soon. I have a list. The youtube memberships probably add up to somewhere around that amount in total. Yes it's probably way more than premium. I really loved the pay what you want phase of music, but at that time I was broke.
I am a big believer of supporting talent whenever I can. I am grateful that I have the chance to do so now. My current budget for that stuff is low right now because we are working on moving.
Thanks to the state of the US, we would have been considered middle class before, but now it's back to lower. Your dollars don't stretch very far. I'm lucky to have a husband who feels the same way I do. We will never be rich in money, but we help as much as we can wherever we go. We also make donations to non-profit organizations we know don't use that money to line their own pockets. So those are the smaller places that always get overlooked. I foster kittens, and we sponsor each one. That means we pay the fees associated with adopting said kitten.
Apologies for the info dump, but it's a subject I love. I've been dreaming of the day I could do these things since I was in single digits.
Even more unpopular opinion: come to terms with the fact that it's not unreasonable for even a large company to want to charge a fee for the service that they provide and that I consume for several hours a week.