@geerlingguy we have a European Commission sponsored project https://fediversity.eu that tries to find a way out of the “golden handcuffs” situation, but it is a tough problem.

Of course the reason for Google to be able to pay that much money is that they unfairly profile the hell out of your viewers. It seems that there is no “fair” way to give you a decent living without extorting the personal data of 100’s of 1000’s of people.

A project like @Taler might help here, yet the mental barrier for actually actively giving money for content when so much of it is available (seemingly) for free is quite high. Even for people that completely get the unfairness of the situation.

Would you be interested in doing some experiments? Like us hosting a peertube server for free under the project and adding taler to it for micropayments?