I’m not entirely sure myself, but the people I’m talking to have much smaller channels than the ones I often see talking about their Premium earnings, so that may have something to do with it.

I’m not sure if this has an impact as well, but I do know there has also been a lot of users spoofing their locations to regions where the cost of Premium is cheaper (and thus generates less revenue for everyone involved) the vast majority of their viewer numbers are from the US though, so that doesn’t seem to make much sense.

I do believe it can simply vary in terms of revenue-per-view depending on the creator, though.

Regardless, I think that, overall, YouTube and YouTubers would make more money if YouTube didn’t price Premium so high, and actually invested a portion of their profits into original content for subscribers. I have a hard time believing that YouTube is generating anywhere near $168/yr from ad supported users, compared to the monthly Premium subscriber cost.

YouTube’s share of Google’s global revenue is around 10%, but it would need to account for nearly half of Google’s yearly revenue to be earning the same rate as Premium costs, and that’s already including current higher-paying Premium subscribers.

Obviously, not every user is going to be buying Premium if it becomes cheaper, but YouTube isn’t incentivizing Premium users past just “please don’t use an adblocker, pay us instead.” which I think will inevitably lead to them just not converting enough new subscribers.