I tried VidMe for a while but realized it just wasn't sustainable and the site didn't work that great. The search feature was never that good.
The idea of people supporting peers out of their own pocket really won't work. We expect free or at least great and cheap content. Look at how many people use Showbox and torrent sites. For something like Netflix I pay what $8 or $9 per month. For me to support 8 or 9 creators it would cost the same and I'm not getting the quantity or quality of content that say Netflix or Hulu delivers me at the same price.
It also wasn't easy to support a creator, required typing your credit card number into stripe, wasn't like a one click type setup.
I tried it but wasn't sold. I was acually thnking about going back and doing a big dump of the past 6 months of Youtube videos on there and just happenned to see that it was shutting down