YouTube is a private service funded by revenue that has to come from somewhere, we're not entitled to have it for free. How do you suppose they'll earn money without ads or subscriptions?
Or they can drop the adtech business or spin it out as a separate company. But either way currently there is no way to fairly deal with ad tech companies with thinly veneered “free” services on top.
Spoiler: $0. Your data is not worth anything.
1. Your kidneys, or heart, or any vital organ.
2. Weapons grade Plutonium.
3. Falcon heavy.
4. A single grain of rice, 100 million times.
What you are saying implies “we don’t have a good marketplace for user data”, which is pretty obvious. But I have no idea how “thus it is worth nothing” follows from there.
Your individual data is worthless. Data is only worth something in aggregate.
A business model based on taking away basic web browser functionality like being able to play videos in the background and removing unwanted content then selling it back to the user is a toxic business model. Anybody who pays for a blatant scam like Youtube "Premium" is part of the problem.
You can like the content while hating the delivery mechanism and trying to fix it up to the best of your ability.
In reality, I once had monetized videos until one day they changed the rules to “number of subscribers” and none of my videos mentioned “subscribe” so I didn’t have enough. Oh well.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. Most people will never see a dime of the money made from their videos. One-hit-wonders on YouTube are now pointless.
Free storage of data uploaded by willing users = hosting the data hostage?
This is untrue. As there was significantly less users on Youtube early on, it's highly likely that most of their total content consists of recently uploaded videos. This becomes more and more true as time goes on.
On what basis?
I'd go to a competitor, but there isn't one, due to YouTube's VC-funding-fuelled anticompetitive practices. I literally wish that private service funding never existed; I don't owe YouTube here.
If they don't earn money then they'll go bankrupt and open up room for someone else, which is an outcome I'm perfectly happy with.
My only concern is preserving videos between when YouTube goes down and a competitor comes up, because a lot of them are liable to disappear.
In fact, a lot of Youtube videos disappear anyway, so we ought to back them up regardless.