YT's content isn't free. The majority of the income (55/45 split) from ads and Premium goes to the content creators. To compare, in 2021 Netflix had content acquisition costs of 60% of their revenue.

And then on the flipside, YT has a much harder infrastucture problem than Netflix. There's probably like 1000x as much content (both new and existing), and much more diversity in what is being watched. That means 1000x more storage and transcoding, and far lower cache hit rates.

(I've got no idea of whether/how profitable YT is. Just saying that if you're trying to reason about it via analogy to Netflix, you've got the directionality wrong on both of the issues.)

Transcoding and storage are far bigger costs than download, and people are uploading videos to YT all the time

But what if you can't afford having huge server, to contribute to the network?

And how to incentivise people in redistributing content?

For example in perfect decentralized p2p world, people on mobile clients would be leaching content from fat clients. You either have to rent server, to host for your own phone, or go to some company to do it for you.

That's complicated :-(

With blackjack and hookers, too!

Well, we had it, back in the late 90's. You wanted to put a video on the internet for people to see? You put it on your site, and paid the appropriate fee for the space and the bandwidth.

So people wanted to get paid for the content, if nothing more than to cover the hosting costs, and LEPT at the chance to put their crap in some walled garden that handled the monetization. If we had it to do all over again, we'd wind up right back at the same spot.

The only thing that will fix this situation is to force YouTube to charge for subscriptions at a price point that gets rid of the advertising, like Netflix. And then YT can share THAT money with creators. And this goes for every other "free" service where the product is YOU, like Facebook and Twitter.

I still can't wrap my head around how advertising is so valuable that the entire US economy seems to be based on it now. I just can't fathom there's apparently this strong of a correlation between annoying ad campaigns and consumer spending, but it MUST exist, ipso facto.

Not with the shit internet service we currently have. The bandwidth cost is the gatekeeper propping up youtube etc. If I try to serve anything with consumer internet service my pipe will clog or I will get shoved over to business class internet service. The "business class" internet service will soon choke also.

Next step? Rent a data center and start buying contract lines and millions in hardware.