Could potentially be content creators that pay the subscription only. But yeah, something somewhere has got to give. Eventually people are going to be sick enough of ads that they will pay $5/month to remove them.
Maybe. But the thing is, as we move towards higher-resolution video formats we get into more expensive stuff. A 1080p60 Twitch stream is about 6128 Kbps per second (6Mbps video, 128Kbps audio). YouTube recommends 12Mbps for uploads. 4K is worse. YouTube recommends 35-45Mbps for 24/30fps videos and 68Mbps for 4K60 uploads.
So we're looking at using roughly a gigabyte of transfer for three minutes of 4K30 video at acceptable quality or about nine minutes for 1080p60 (video games, etc.). I dunno about you, but most of the creators whose stuff I follow are between 20 and 45 minutes a video. Call it 30 minutes. So if they put out one video every two weeks and I watch it once, I'm pulling ~4GB for 1080p or ~10GB for 4K30.
At S3 prices, that means that of that $5, Amazon eats $1.20 or so. It's worse if they're more prolific. You can say "raise prices", but Patreons, subscriptions, etc., are brutally inelastic. When Patreon wanted to go to a model where they passed transaction fees onto the funder, a ton of people came out to claim that they couldn't afford to keep all their pledges if they had to eat a ten to thirty percent surcharge. And I believe it.
It sucks. I'm trying to come up with a better option just for my own stuff. My solution, which I can do because I'm a software developer, is probably something like OVH, where they hand you effectively-unlimited transfer. But I also don't then need to pay somebody to manage it for me--and to try to turn it into a going concern, you're going back to the "hey, how much a month is this gonna cost me?" problem.
It's not an unfixable problem. But it is a problem where the winners have economies of scale. That means...well...a YouTube.
