They burned a lot of VC, getting market share until Google bought them and shutdown “Google Video”. They had some media deals but I don’t think they would have survived very long without the huge infrastructure support Google could offer.

What was the state of the art in terms of open source ad blockers at the time, do you know? Its seems like this is more of a recent thing, cracking down on adblockers

YouTube was founded in February 2005. Google acquired it in October 2006. It was an independent company for less than 2 years! It was growing at such a staggering pace that it was definitely going to die if it didn’t get bought soon!