> Why not?
I said why not. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
The vast majority of people on YouTube are not going to make any money for what they post. I don't just mean "pocket change they wouldn't have had otherwise". I mean literally 0 dollars versus YouTube easily taking in millions over the long tail.
As an example, I'm one of these such creators. I have a few videos that have been up for a long time and in that time have gathered low 100k+ views.
If those views had all occurred in one month, YouTube would pay me somewhere around $2000. But because this happened over 10 years, YouTube has always said, "eh, you know what, it's not enough to bother."
I'm sorry, but in any other case, if someone wasn't paying me $200 a year that they owed me, I'd be pissed. But I digress, that's not the issue, and that's not why I post videos to YouTube.
The issue is that this is the case for the majority of content creators on YouTube. YouTube makes a massive amount of money by exploiting people's content that they will never pay 1 red cent for. For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.
Through the revenue sharing model, YouTube has created a perverse incentive structure that pushes content creators to do things in ways they wouldn't otherwise have done, on a promise that is likely never to occur. YouTube creator shouldn't be a job not because I think YouTube creators should find "something better to do", but because YouTube is a shit company that shouldn't be allowed to operate the way they do.