YouTube's audience size and advertising metrics have long since gone through the point where individual creators or groups of them matter little. If a creator walks off the platform there are more who will fill the place, in search of potential monetisation, so youtube will still have somewhere to hang adverts off. An advertiser leaving is harder to replace than a content provider.

eBay has a similar flip some years ago: they realised that there was more value caring for buyers needs than sellers: sellers swarm in attracted by the number of buyers and are difficult to put off for long as there are often few other options, buyers need to feel safe to hand around.

I get so many repeats in stuff I'm not interested in at all, and completely unrelated to what I watch.

I don't know if it's a matter of those ads bidding the highest or what. But YouTube's ability to show something I'm interested in is worse than even what the daytime TV ads were back in the day.

Twitter (when I downloaded my info, they were still called that) classified me as speaking three languages I know zero words of, and as having interests in several sports (I care for none); my YouTube ad experience is like yours; my Facebook experience today was about renouncing my US citizenship (I'm a British national); the Instagram ads are only marginally less bad — I do find myself liking them, but I have no idea what they're selling because what I get shown are all uplifting landscapes or cute animals with no sales pitch.

Edit: also, a friend of mine was just playing a game, advert popped up in a language neither of us could read. I had to open Google Translate just to find out it was Romanian and which button was "close" (and also to discover that it was an ad for "easy and fast international payments"?)

Youtube is indeed a monopoly -- but it's not actually addictive. Since they started this war against adblockers I have found that I can perfectly live without it.

When I absolutely would like to watch an informative video (for example, about how to fix something on my bike, etc.), I first try to open the video in a private window (with ublock on); if that also doesn't work I try to use yt-dlp.

But I have completely stopped mindlessly watching videos that are not the result of a search.

There's nothing necessary about youtube.

Youtube is definitely addictive to a large population of people. If you can live without it, the only thing we can infer is that it's not addictive to you.

It's great that you're in the majority of people who aren't addicted to Youtube, but that doesn't mean everyone has the same experience that you do.

Not everyone, sure, but a majority. People can get addicted to anything; yet we don't just call any activity addictive -- only those where most people have a hard time controlling their behavior.

I don't think watching youtube qualifies (not just being on your phone, or watching tv).

But the real problem is that Youtube makes all this money but it still took a decade+ to start looking profitable. It's extremely hard to compete with them even if you somehow got over the network effects because it's hard to make money while also paying content creators. Google could do it because they could commoditize youtube's early unprofitability to their ads revenue.

Ideally, something like Netflix spawns and lets "amateur" content creators host as well, which solves many problems. But netflix doesn't seem interested and the few competitors doing that are still in the discovery phase.

The economics of supply and demand disagree with you.

A lot more people want to be creators, than there is money in the ecosystem to support them.

If you want to hold platforms responsible for scams being advertised on them, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of law.