Youtube charges $10 per month and doesn't produce a single video. It's an amazing money maker for them and the only media subscription i pay for (to avoid ads on TVs). They should quit it with the Shorts though, nobody likes those
This is like complaining that your fridge takes money to run even though it produces none of the stuffs you put in your fridge. Serving video is enormously expensive especially if you let practically everyone use your platform as permanent storage for videos that will never be watched and will never generate ad revenue. There is a reason why no real competitor to YouTube has emerged and the alternative platforms that do exist target professional content creators even more than YouTube.
> They should quit it with the Shorts though, nobody likes those
No one on this website likes them, sure. The number of likes and comments some of those short videos get suggests that there are enough people who like them for YouTube to keep pushing them. They just don't tend to get very vocal about it on a nerd social media.
I'm also in the same bucket, happy to pay my subscription.
The only reason I really watch shorts is because Vsauce started using them a lot, and his content is definitely worth a watch every time in any format.
It is different from Netflix (that pays upfront for production costs), but there's of course a revenue share + the bulk of the revenue for creators is actually from sponsorships (which YT doesn't take a share of).