Fundamentally what YouTube is doing is an unprofitable model. Google bought them when they were in their “we can solve internet unprofitability with scale and more efficient data centres!” phase, but that has never really gone as planned for YouTube.

For a while I was very hopeful that YouTube Premium would solve that, but as they started removing features and making it an overall worse experience it became no longer worth the money. I don’t have an answer to this. If I did I could probably make a lot of money on that answer. What I do know, however, is that Google’s answer isn’t the right one.