This surprised me, so I looked it up. Basically YouTube pays ~55% and Nebula pays 50%.

This is complicated by Nebula's "creator owned" situation. Which is complicated [0]. It's something like:

  - Nebula's assets live in Watch Nebula LLC

  - Watch Nebula LLC is owned by 83% Standard Broadcast and 16% Curiosity Stream (CURI)

  - Standard Broadcast "is owned by 44 total people, all of whom are creators"
So it's fair to say there are creators with significant equity stakes in Nebula. It's NOT fair to assume that the 50% of revenue left after share is distributed evenly among all creators on the platform via an equity mechanism.

Of course then there's Floatplane, which is entirely owned by LMG. At least a couple years ago they targeted "a 70/30 split" but arrive there via "a fixed cost menu for features [...] based on bandwidth/maintenance costs' [1]

I'm glad YT is still sharing a meaningful amount of money with creators.

[0] https://medium.com/@cameron-paul/who-actually-owns-nebula-95...

[1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1335443-floatplane-creator-s...

Of cause, I assume it's difficult to compare 50% of paid subscriptions to 55% of ad revenue. I have heard that YouTubers earn per view from premium subscribers than from ad supported views.

I suspect that 50% at no risk of demonetization is quite a bit more than 55% with it for quite a significant chunk of those content creators.

percentages are meaningless in the ad space and I think topic specific CPM would be a more meaningful comparison. Even on youtube itself things like kids toy videos can make 4x or more per 1M views when compared to a Political show or something technical.