You can easily get all of these features in the official YouTube app by subscribing to YouTube Premium, which also provides revenue to content creators.
I don't want "all of the these features", I want background play, like it used to have.
I don't consume a lot, and a couple of the creators who are my "dailys" don't monetise with ads anyway. I also watch occasional YT on my TV via chromecast with the "full advertising experience" enabled.
The thing that irks me is that background play used to be part of the standard Youtube app (as far as I recall anyway), and now it's been taken away in what feels like a strong shepherding hand towards subscription - which annoys me enough to look for alternatives. (eg. I'm working towards migrating off gmail having been on the grandfathered free custom domain thing long enough to take free for granted).
But why, when YouTube has chosen to provide the content ad-free?
If I see content I appreciate and then – for whatever reason – decide I'd like to support the creator, I'll probably just donate to their Patreon where they'll actually see most of the money I send their way.
If I pay for YouTube Premium and then I watch a video that wastes my time, I definitely do not want to send money to that creator but Premium will unavoidably do just that.
> But why, when YouTube has chosen to provide the content ad-free?
Why pay for games when you can pirate them? Why pay for the New York Times when you can read all their articles on archive.is?
Are you saying you would prefer if YouTube locked everything down with DRM?
And I don't really buy the "I'll just support their Patreon" argument that a lot of people are using in this thread. Ignoring the obvious issue that you're depending on people to go out of their way to give the creator money, unless there's some kind of micropayment solution most creators just go from making some amount of money to making no money. A bigger cut of $0 is still $0.
Viewing videos hosted directly on YouTube servers where they share them openly and without restriction is hardly analogous to pirating video games.
But even so, YouTube videos are categorically different from video games in that merely by watching them once you consume their value. For video games one presumably may read reviews, play at a friend's house, etc before deciding to spend money on them.
Your Patreon counter-argument presupposes a conclusion though; that the creators deserve anything in the first place. For content I'm not willing to pay for, and which is offered to me for free, creators do not by default deserve any greater than $0!
It is up to them to convince folks to pay them for their content, and if they choose to host their content on YouTube they have made their own decision. Not all creators probably know that YouTube will offer their content for free without any advertisement-supported content, but that's their problem. There are video hosting options which do indeed require folks to pay for access, but YouTube is not that.
And as a side note, I'm a living counter-example to your $0 example, as I have myself donated to creators that published free content on YouTube in hopes that they will continue to produce it.
