Writing's on the wall. As soon as they make ads mandatory, a competitor with no ads and better support will look a lot more attractive, and they could eventually face an exodus.
That competitor will also bleed ridiculous amounts of money for years paying for infrastructure, legal costs, and rising engineering needs. That is, until they also start doing the same thing. Everyone here complains about what Google is doing to YouTube, but financially speaking this is the only thing they can do for now, YouTube has always been ridiculously expensive to run and hard to monetize, and with last year ad revenue not meeting expectations + the current economic scenario I don't see what else they should do.
Why would content creators post content there if they can’t make money? Where would the content come from?
Either the competitor has no ads and doesn't charge money, at which point it would bleed money, or it charges a fee, and hence would be even less successful than youtube.
How's this competitor going to exist without ads? How is it going to pay the bills? Massive bills mind you?