It's still a big bet. Youtube gets views multiplication by the suggested video feature which redirect people from the random video they stumbled upon into the big ticket videos.

All the small creators also saturate the search space with all kind of topics and content, which drives people naturally via suggestions to the larger channels with fat advertisers, so the benefit is twofold.

Bet they did the math and they still come on top for now, but social are quite generational and live off the network effect, so there's that.

“suggested video feature”

It will be interesting to see the shift in the suggestion algorithm since so many more videos will be non-monetized.

Google reported over 1.6 billion hours being consumed a day on average as of mid 2017 so they have a lot to work with.

You seem to misunderstand: Ads aren't necessarily going to go away. The uploader just won't get paid anymore.

YouTube has never shown ads on non-monetised videos. If I choose the no monetisation option on a video, it has no ads. So if YouTube is saying these small channels can no longer monetise their videos, it would be a whole extra policy change to say that non-monetised videos will now show ads.

Any YouTube video that currently shows an ad, the uploader has chosen to do so in order to make money from it.

That is slightly inaccurate: ads are also shown to videos of non-monetized accounts if a copyright claim is made by someone for content on that video and the claimer decides to put ads in it for allowing the content.

I have no monetization enabled for my account and still get text ads because of that.

Good point. Although I've disputed a (inaccurate) copyright claim before and had it removed. Plus technically you're not meant to upload anything that you don't have the copyright for.

Thus uploader quits and moves to say Twitch. Suddenly Amazon would be happy.

Or to one of the other sites.

We'll see. As it stands there aren't a lot of YT clones. Hosting a billion videos that will continue to multiply for eternity can't be cheap.

Lets face it most of the stuff on YT has very little ad revenue.

Twitch basically seems to be the only real competition at this point, but they are rapidly building up to take the fight to YouTube. They are publicly shifting away from the gaming focus and towards general content creation. This whole thing seems to be more in the hands of PR and network effects than anything else. Like if the Jiu jitsu community goes to twitch I have little reason to go on youtube anymore.

Google has over 1.6 billion hours a day being consumed and Twitch does not even register. #2 is Facebook with 119 million hours. So Twitch is not really competitive.

Plus Amazon purchased Twitch and then removed the app from the Roku which does not help grow the platform.

https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-... Amazon Pulls Their Twitch Channel from Roku - Cord Cutters News