The vast majority of all yt content makers do NOT pay the bills with ad rev but sponsors.

These platforms are sucking every penny they can from everyone at every step because number must go up. That is what they are suppose to do being public.

A private company like steam with a sub pay model where creators still can do sponsorship videos throwing out the attention algos would be a better product and still be plenty profitable.

Not all companies should be public and often the best are not.

Funny thing is: I can subscribe to Netflix for one month a year, and watch everything that I want to watch within a week or two ... which is to say there isn't much there that interests me. With YouTube, I can typically find an hour or two of content to watch per week.

I'm not claiming that YouTube is better. It's simply a case of different people having different interests. While YouTube is almost certainly a poor option for higher budget productions, it seems to work out for lower budget productions where the producers are willing to seek out their own revenue streams.

Compare it to the widespread refusal to pay for Youtube Premium even as ads get worse there.