This has always been the case over in the world of freemium games.

The vast majority of the playerbase (70~80%?) are Free2Players (F2Pers), while the rest are whales (paying players) and an even smaller subset of them are space whales who spend enough in a month to buy a luxury car or two.

The games go to great lengths to retain those F2Pers because they are the ones the whales and space whales play together with and/or against. No F2Pers, no whales, no game, no business.

I think YouTube should take a similar approach and try to extract more from high value users to cover the costs of low value users. It’ll be easier to get a few thousand extra dollars from a music fan by bundling live interaction/events into YouTube than squeezing more ads into the bottom 1%.

> Every minute someone watches them is a minute that they aren't watching a potential competitor

Actually, they would prefer if all of the ad-blocking, refuse-to-pay customers would spend a lot of time on their competitor's websites.

In that case, why don't they allow competitors to host their videos?

I took the parent's comment to mean they would rather 'free' viewers leech off other people's bandwidth, as if they're not Premium and not watching ads, they are just consuming bandwidth and costing resources.

If they go to a competitor and block ads and consume bandwidth, then they are actively costing the competitor rather than costing Youtube for hosting.

Youtube allowing competitors to host would just consume youtube's bandwidth but with the 'views' also going to the competitor's domain (so the competitor could then potentially get additional sponsor support for having 'eyeballs' on their domain).

My point is that they intentionally obtained an effective monopoly on content, so it's weird of them to complain about too many people wanting to watch content there.

How exactly did they obtain a monopoly on content? They don't name most content creators sign exclusivity agreements.

I said an effective monopoly. Most people who create a video will automatically upload it to YouTube without even thinking about alternatives.