Maybe not right now. Maybe not next year. But they’ve decided to make everybody miserable, for a “business” that still won’t cause enough misery to turn a profit.
Meanwhile creators are censored worse than broadcast TV. Nevermind the effective ban on swearing - they can’t even reference concepts without a surveillance program declaring that their latest video doesn’t count, even though they’ll still slap ads all over that bitch.
Those people have things they want to share with an audience that wants to see. Any middleman can either help, or become irrelevant. Bandwidth is cheap. Some creators are just in it for the money… but the money is bad, on Youtube, and it’s getting worse. Patreon is more direct and far less stupid. As with all these lumbering ruins of 2010s internet media, the network effect of being the default will keep them relevant for a while, no matter what they do. Twitter’s on fire and it’s still not dead. But its prospects sure aren’t getting better… and not because people changed.
People are sadly predictable. These idiot robots exploit that masterfully, to a point, and then act bewildered when more pressure stops making more money. Like they forgot we can just leave.