Pretty sure YouTube has been losing a lot of money every year before they very aggressively ramped up ad frequency and duration as well as subscriptions in recent years. They could only do that thanks to Google’s main cash cow; YouTube would have been dead if not acquired and subsidized by Google.

I am both a Youtube Family Premium and a dedicated ad-blocker user.

studios are the target here, not consumers. Pareto principle applies when you need more than a passive user. 20% or less of the serious studios (which is already a minority) will end up providing 80% of the value of any given AI solution.