YouTube is a mysterious monopoly

YouTube Premium: Value vs “Pay to Undo Harm”

• Supporters say Premium is a great deal purely for ad‑free viewing; background play, downloads, higher speeds/bitrates, and bundled YouTube Music make it competitive with other streaming subs, especially for families.
• Critics argue those “features” mostly just remove deliberate friction (ads, sponsor segments, Shorts, interruptions) that YouTube itself adds, likening it to “pay us so we stop degrading your soup.”
• Some refuse to pay on principle, using ad blockers or third‑party clients, and instead support creators directly via Patreon, Nebula, etc.

Ads, Ad Blocking, and Who Pays

• One camp insists free, ad‑free video is unrealistic: creators, bandwidth, and infra must be funded; ad‑supported vs subscription is “fair price for hosted content.”
• Others counter that at massive scale per‑view costs are tiny, so the 45% platform cut is more “monopoly rent” than necessity.
• There’s concern that Premium mainly pays YouTube to stop annoyance, not to fund specific creators, though several replies note Premium revenue is pooled and 55% shared by watch time, often paying more per view than ads.

Monopoly, Network Effects, and Competition

• Many call YouTube a de facto monopoly: creators must be there for discoverability; viewers must be there for content; alternative sites (Vimeo, Rumble, PeerTube, Nebula, etc.) stay niche.
• Others argue it’s just a dominant player in a broader “online video” market that includes TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, Twitch, etc., and that dominance alone ≠ illegal monopoly.
• Strong network effects, Google’s ad machine, search integration, and CDN peering are seen as huge moats; past rivals bled cash on infra and lost.
• Some propose regulation: treating YouTube as a utility, splitting hosting from the front‑end, or forcing open access to its catalog/metrics.

Product Quality, Algorithms, and Policy

• Frequent complaints: degraded search (cluttered with Shorts and “people also watch”), aggressive Shorts promotion, autoplaying thumbnails, heavy/intrusive ads, anti‑adblock tactics, auto‑translation/dubbing that breaks multilingual use, and jump‑scare/low‑quality recommendations.
• Others praise YouTube as one of the last high‑quality platforms: rich educational/DIY content, lectures, music, and niche expertise.
• There’s frustration with opaque moderation/copyright systems, demonetization, and inconsistent enforcement; some note creators quietly getting suspended or throttled, others say they’ve never seen it.

Metrics, Views, and Creator Economics

• Several point to recent “view drops” with stable likes/revenue, suspecting YouTube quietly changed what counts as a view or filtered bots, with little transparency.
• Creators worry less about AdSense and more about sponsorship deals tied to visible view counts.
• Consensus: YouTube is a marvelous but fragile single point of failure; many creators now use it as a discovery funnel while trying to migrate income to paid communities elsewhere.