People doesn’t really seem to understand how costly and difficult it is to offer a service with 99.99% availability.
I mean that it costs them a lot of money? Yeah sure. But how much is that per viewer and per view?
Making a good youtube video can take hours, days and sometimes month, depending on the content and production effort. All of this labor is free for youtube and similiar to reddit i would say it is far exceeding the value provided by the company.
There is no guarantee that your video that took you days to make even gets 10 viewers. Even though, you don’t pay anything for YouTube to make it available in different resolutions and to start playing within a second after the viewer pressed play. Also all of that at an service availability of 99.99%.
While there are creators that does quality content there way more junk creators publishing their work on YouTube.
If your argument was valid there would be competitors to YouTube that quality material creators would move to when they got demonitized by bullshit reasons.