I’d argue that YouTube is a for-profit business. They have every right, within legal bounds, to do whatever makes economic sense to them.

If you want an archive, go with archive.org. But even then, nothing is free. If somebody thinks a footage deserves to be archived and preserved, somebody needs to pay for the cost anyhow, e.g. via donations.

As a user I am not interested in YT's profits. However, what I am interested in is being able to access useful content. For all intents and purposes, YT has become the central place for people to upload such footage and of course the prospect of its removal is worrying to me. There are vast amounts of indispensable knowledge and information uploaded to YT that is far from being deemed as profitable to Google and as such are under risk of being permanently and irreversibly lost. Hence my confusion at the OP's description of the situation as "a good thing".

> As a user I am not interested in YT's profits. However, what I am interested in is being able to access useful content.

Choose two: a) free* b) reliable c) universal

* not counting ads.

Youtube being a monopoly on videos, is a de facto public service.

There are alternatives. We just need to use them if we care a little about it. e.g. your own web server (e.g. blog) / p2p network (e.g. zeronet / dtube) or even 'the modern social network' (e.g. facebook / twitter)

> Obscure and/or old archive footage which usually doesnt get that many views is one of the best things about YT.

and one of the costs youtube bears, since by definition they can't make money off those videos, but has to pay for storage.

I dont know if there's a solution - perhaps non-commercialized accounts can't upload more than X gigabytes of vidoes, or be forced to have ads? Or you (the channel owner) pay for the storage?

> and one of the costs youtube bears, since by definition they can't make money off those videos, but has to pay for storage.

Sure they can make money off them - they just need to be creative. For example, you can have a category of 'archived videos' to which you need to pay to be able to access. The payment is for the service, not for the video so it does not matter what are the specific settings on a specific video.

Even consumer SSD's are around 10 cents per gigabyte of storage. These videos wouldn't get many views, but they don't need a ton to recoup storage costs.

Indeed - going further, the long tail is the only advantage centralized systems hold over decentralized ones. The day YouTube only shows the top 99% of content is the day we can all switch to BitTorrent and not lose a thing.