Surely a direct donation would ensure more of your money got to them.

running video uses a fair amount of power. Both on your end and in the datacenter. I bet sending them 10 bucks a month would do better for them. Heck even a fiver.

Just give them 10 bucks a month dude

That will earn them more money than you will give them by YouTube viewing.

And YouTube watching will give you ads which will give YouTube more money than you will give to the charities.

Yes. I regularly leave a 30+ minute video playing on the background as I fall a sleep partly for this reason.

I appreciate what you're trying to do, but you should look into the numbers. I follow a channel that went through their YouTube earnings a while back. 225k subscribers, long-form (20-30 minutes) videos getting 30k views each.

He got about $40/video.

The only way you could make the math work -at all- is if you're already on resistive heat and you only do it during winter. In any other scenario, you'll spend more on electricity than they will get in revenue. Even in this one, it's ignoring things like increased wear for what might not even be pennies of revenue.

Wouldn't you get marked as a viewer bot for doing that?

Even if not for everything else mentioned here, I see TVs with the official YouTube client stuck at "Are you still watching?" in public from time to time, so there's that.