Wintermute

Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there’s no way you’re going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.

I think GP is saying the the total income from Premium doesn’t cover the cost of running all of Youtube, not that a single premium subscription doesn’t cover that one user’s costs, which it obviously does.

I think this is right, but there is a bit of a confounding factor in that mods and power users of reddit are disproportionately likely to jump ship IMO. So while the masses might still show up to reddit, it’s entirely possible that the quality of the content will take a nosedive anyway. I’m not really sure how much of a difference that makes. I suspect not enough of one to kill reddit off completely, but I do think there’s a good chance that it’s enough to get Lemmy off the ground and viable. I think we probably only need to see 1% or maybe even fewer users migrate here from reddit to make Lemmy active enough that I never have any reason to go back to reddit again.