To be honest I'm surprised so many video's have been hosted without ads while the creators cash in outside of Google.
That has been the service since release, so yes.
Yes, because I am making content for them for free. It is unpaid labor on my part in exchange for free hosting. Now it is unpaid labor that makes them money.
YouTube is a business.
Hosting and serving your content costs them money.
If your content provides no means to recoup those costs, you’re not doing them a favor, they’re doing you a favor.
But you did ask youtube to host for free.
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
Lots of the advertisements ask you to visit a custom URL or use a discount code which the advertisers can use as lower bound on how effective an advertisement is.
The second is the type in these sponsor ads. They have calls to action and are still interested to a small degree in brand awareness, but it's not the main focus.
All that's to say, the latter type of ads is about how many people follow the link and less so about whether the ad landed on all the eyeballs.
At least that's my layperson's view, devoid of having ever studied advertising.
Heck, I’m surprised and confused that YT hasn’t just required these embedded ads to be separated out into their own video streams, which YT then would embed back into the video seamlessly in the regular case, but would be able to drop out in the YT Premium case. (And could also swap out for other ads at a certain frequency — 30%, say?)