This would be a god tier level development, and would seriously cripple Google's core business (serving ads) and youtube as well (serve ads or subscription).
One can imagine a different structure, where a wealthy philanthropist or organization funds the site, but that's just shifting the costs around. The other option is the government runs it, out of our tax dollars, which could work, if there wasn't a powerful vocal contingent of politicians that still buys the line that government can't do anything right.
Been feeling inspired by the SBF case lately.
Jokes aside, distributing compute to users is one way to avoid having expensive servers, which tend to be powered by ads, if not direct payments. There is the fediverse. Not sure how well that would work here, but there’s probably some potential. And before that there has been e.g. torrenting communities that require certain seed ratios. Basically: the product is “free” but you need to participate in some form that adds value rather than just leeching. The distributed model is established, I just don’t think it will ever outcompete a centralized one, if for no other reason than distributed communities have strategy and cash flow problems. As in, they don’t really have any functional mechanism to build, fund, and execute on a competitive strategy like YouTube can. All they can really do is make a product and hope people like it. But competing on merit is never enough.
Youtube, OTOH, used, and currently uses a number of marketing strategies to drive traffic to their site, and paid out ~$10B++ annually for content creators. GP's comment on "Given that things cost money" is not governed by compute, rather, cost of customer acquisition for the platform, and cost of content creation by creatives. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay for these. That is the merit of this battleground.
There are many! The problem is that the ads model supports the "winners take all" strategy that permeates Silicon Valley and all its copycats. There is no room for peaceful coexistence.