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If there aren't enough people willing to pay for someone else's work product to make it worth the producers time/effort, then I'd argue that maybe that work product is not actually worth producing in the first place. In the realm of youtube, that may require putting out enough quality content as a loss-leader to gain a following large enough that a percentage is willing to support the creator directly. Many have made this work well.

I have many issues with advertising in general, but put simply, it breaks the basic transactional nature of business. When the people benefiting from someone else's work product aren't the ones paying for it, then both the producer and consumer end up being taken advantage of for someone else's profit.

The way I see it, tools like Patreon that allow consumers to directly support people they benefit from are just what are needed.



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