It strikes me that, as YouTube puts its hand into the bag to pull out a marble, there are probably just a lot less marbles than we think, and certainly less marbles worth watching than we think, and far far less worth watching that have been made in the past week?

Additionally, if youtube was forced to only play videos where copyright was proven to belong to the owner of the channel, would it collapse completely.

Is that perhaps what is shrinking the bag of marbles ?

Which interestingly suggests that if we force youtube to actually respect IP, it would reward new creators of quality work more proportionately