When you see a polished video clip on the net, it's the cumulated result of an hour or more work for less than a minute of your time. Simply put, it doesn't scale.
If I spend hours making a video clip and put it up on YouTube it would be true, because no one follows me on YouTube.
The most views anything I ever posted got was just over 100, which was a short video of something weird that happened when I set my water bottle on top of my car that I no longer remember enough college physics to explain [1].
Second most was a water pipe like at the building my office was in [2]. That got a bit over 80.
Third has a little over 50. That was some chestnut backed chickadees landing on my hand to eat peanuts [3]. That's closely followed by some antics of a Douglas squirrel and an Eastern Gray squirrel on my front deck [4]. (BTW, if anyone watches the one with the chickadees, try watching in slow motion or single stepping. Some of them have cool poses that go by way to fast at normal speed to see).
I'm not actually sure why any of those have more than a handful views as they were put there to share with friends.
There are a couple in the 30s, which are the only ones I actually tried to get anyone other than friends to look at. Those are videos of my bike's rear tire on a stand, with a weight on the rim, rotated and allowed to swing back and forth. I posted those to a bicycling group, and asked if it was possible to determine from how long it took the oscillations to damp if my hub was in need of lubrication.
Everything else has been in the single digits.
So yeah, if I put any effort into a video (which I think only the leak and the chickadees one involved anything more than just selecting one continuous clip from something filmed in one take on my phone) it doesn't scale.
But what about people who do get a lot of views? If someone spends an hour on a video and a million different each spend a minute watching it that has scales pretty well. There are lots of people that can spend an hour on a video and probably get people spending years worth of time watching.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODjTBPPAFg
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoSotRRVqg