Payments are all so fucked up. If you watch a lot of YouTube in your niche, what you really want to do is spread the amount of a subscription among the people you watch.

Flattr was the original attempt but it had a chicken/egg problem so nobody adopted it.

Patreon used to be great for this - by bulk billing all your patreons once a month they worked around the “a $1 charge means 30% goes in credit card fees” but they couldn’t be bothered to explain this to people and were too addicted to Apple/etc payments that had to change each patron subscription to separate charge so if you’re not supporting anyone at anything less than $5/month why even bother, you’re just funding the banks.

Credit card/banks could have innovated here but they’re too comfortable in their position.

Crypto could have solved micropayments if it wasn’t literally just all scammers scamming each other 24/7.

Ironically YouTube Premium is probably the best way since they take a 45% cut and then spread the rest among everything you watch by view time, but Google has zero trust among users so everyone assumes it’s a scam somehow. (edit: OK so Google just changed their cut to 70%, WTF ok now it is a scam, fuck Google)