I watch a lot of youtube and spend a lot of time just watching regular uploads by the close to 90 youtubers I follow. More time actually than Netflix, for which I pay per month. I've been following a lot of these youtubers for several years and quite a few of them seem to be doing this for a living. As far as I can see most of them are doing fine financially and seeing increases in subscriber rates and converting some of that into e.g. patreon support, sponsorships (e.g. nordvpn and squarespace seem to enjoy burning a lot of cash on this), and other revenue. I've followed quite a few long enough to remember their early years when they were amateurs and their gradual learning process as they got better at editing and producing content and figuring out what worked for them.

Youtube as a business seems a combination of insanely profitable due to ads and at the same time hopelessly inept when it comes to practical details like filtering/recommending stuff, and bleeding cash by doing silly things like not monetizing my behavior in any way that is obvious to me.

Like many long time users, I ignore their trending feed. It's beyond terrible and seems aimed at German teenagers who consume content in German. Thus showing their 'AI' (the quotes are intended sarcastically) hasn't figured out that I'm a middle aged expat who never consumes any content whatsoever in German despite living in Berlin. And presumably they are intimately familiar with my search and browsing history. I carefully micromanage recommendations to get any value out of them. Basically it defaults to "more of the same shit I saw recently", or "the exact same shit I already watched or that I dismissed repeatedly". Occasionally I get some value out of it though. But mostly I seem to find my way to new channels via referrals by those I follow. Collaborations among youtubers seem to be a thing and I often end up following new channels this way. IMHO a lot of youtubers could do well exploiting this more effectively. E.g. curated lists of similar channels could be a thing and being on such lists ought to bring a lot of traffic where Google's 'AI' just doesn't get the job done.

Youtube's failure to convert people like me to paying customers is a problem. I spend hours watching great content for free; and like most clued in users these days, my browser has an ad blocker which works great on Youtube: I never see ads. I'm grateful that it is free but I'd like this to be long term sustainable as well because I genuinely enjoy the content.

I feel slightly guilty about not doing the Patreon thing, which I know a lot of youtubers depend on. The thing is, I'd gladly distribute 10 euros or so a month among the youtubers I enjoy watching but I can't afford to pay that to each of them, which seems to be the patreon way; or micromanage dozens of donations more or less aribitrarily. Also, 20 cent patreon donations are not a thing as far as I know I'd feel vaguely embarrassed doing that when people are clearly expecting/hoping for more. I also have some reservations about Patreon as a platform and its content policies. IMHO puritanism and political correctness is a not a good thing and it seems ad publishers and VC funded companies are hyper sensitive about this. When F-bombs become a monetization risk and e.g. European youtubers feel compelled to self-censor or bleep out their own swearing, something is wrong.

10 euros is ballpark what I spend on Spotify and Netflix every month. I get good value for money on both. Measured in hours, I probably spend about as much time on Youtube.

However, Youtube red/premium or whatever it is called now as a value proposition is completely uninteresting to me because it does little or nothing for the channels I actually follow and I rarely seem to encounter any youtube premium content that would require me to sign up AND is compelling to me. Additionally, I already get an ad free experience and for whatever reason Youtube seems to be completely fine with this. I'm sure they are well aware that their ads largely don't work on desktop or maybe their mobile revenue is such that they can't be bothered to give it a second thought. Either way, that 10 euro is something they have not figured out how to tap into for me or indeed hundreds of millions of other users.

I believe that this is true for the whole of Google. Yes, they are making a lot of money but company wide their product strategy seems messy and subject to rather large and arbitrary changes rather frequently without obviously yielding results other than year on year growth in ads (which I never see). At the same time they seem super sloppy about monetization. E.g. up-selling for stuff I clearly use and appreciate never seems to not be a priority for them. They are not actually trying very hard as far as I can see. I suppose it is nice to be able to afford to spend blindly on R&D like that and to not have to worry about monetizing.