That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?
No it didn't : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Specifically 4.3.11 defines the start of a decade as any year where [year]%10==0.
Also there is no day 0 of the month, no month zero of the year. It's how calendars work.
Content is a public good in the economic sense: zero marginal cost, high fixed costs, nonrivalous, and poorly excludable.
Advertising is a rent (to advertisers) and an imposition (to its audience). There's an active aversion to it, the content is very often deceptive, manipulating, and against the recipients' true interests. At the same time, as more attractive audiences are driven away (and they will be) those who remain are subject to ever more, ever lower quality ads for ever more manipulative or harmful products and services.
Bandwidth and availability must meet or address peak demands which are infrequent though often predictable. Users' decision criteria, as with highway traffic, externalise most costs, whilst benefit is privatised, incentivising overuse. Provisioning must be based not on some average utilisation, but on probability of availability and service quality, with additional nines costing orders of magnitude more to provide. That risk environment may itself be quite variable.
The consequence is that demand, revenue, and cost components follow vastly dissimmilar dynamics, making the business exceedingly difficult on market terms, and incentivising numerous pathological behaviours.
I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow.
There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies.
So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.
As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.
There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.
Except it doesn't come from Google, does it? The amount of monetisation is entirely in the creator's discretion.
Disclaimer: I do work for Google, but that's public information.