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They relentlessly extract value from whatever they built to make profit, until there is no value left and they're back to selling their own customers.
If consumers do pay for premium, then consumers at least have a moral leverage they can use against Youtube. As it stands, consumers are in the "wrong" here.
Either:
1. We agree that ads is justified.
2. Or Youtube as a service and many like it (free service) does not make sense and should not be made illegal if it can't make profit. It will literally bleed money for the rest of eternity and can only survive by going into debt.
Or people that don't actually have money
Ads make the internet suck
- Nonprofits
- Public funding
It would be a painful event, but we'd finally get some much-needed competition in the video hosting space.
That's part of it, but not the whole story. Network effect is a bigger force.
People publish on YouTube because there's a large viewership, then YouTube gains viewership because people publish there.
Other companies also have big economies of scale on hosting. Amazon, Microsoft and CloudFlare come to mind. Network effect, not cost, is the reason they haven't bothered trying to build competitors to YouTube. If they could guarantee a viewership half or even a quarter as large as YouTube, I'm sure they would have launched one by now.
I mean, anyone who's had a job/career for a number of years should realize that they get paid for bringing value to the world, and that the folks behind YouTube (both platform and content) are bringing value to the world and need to get paid. Of course only about 60% of working age adults actually have jobs (in the US) so I guess the other 40% have a hard time grasping how money works.