I don't know YT's monetization history, but longform video is incredibly easy to monetize because advertisers are willing to pay much more for their content being there. They get some edge from all the tech they have built for matching ads to users, but it's just fundamentally one of the easiest things to monetize on the internet, so I don't think they would have struggled there.

> Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance) didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the company's other products like Toutiao.

Or, which is more likely, by the CCP. TikTok is the perfect piece of propaganda warfare - it gives destabilizing forces, anything from weird left-wing Hamas supporters to the hardcore far-right / incel crowd, a direct link to the brains of our children. It's unreal just how toxic the trending content on TikTok is, and how little effort is done to moderate it. Way worse than the YouTube radicalization spiral [1], but for whatever reason there's almost zero attention to TikTok.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...

Academic studies of social media are often very hampered by tooling and data access and studying a moving target.

It's hard to even know if the methodology of the paper you cited (analyzing comment trajectories) is a good one, given YT is constantly tweaking their algorithms, including in response to public outcry, and this phenomenon does not show up in other analysis: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...

I assume the methodological questions are even trickier for TikTok which has many more creators than YT.

I would love to see someone actually study TikTok though, since people love to ascribe blame to platforms for radicalizing people rather than accepting that some users just have views we find unacceptable regardless of the platform.