> I don't think what he meant with "no ads" would translate to no monetization.

I know. I wasn't assuming one way or another that they had a monetization plan. I was making what I thought were two simple points:

1. Hypothetical monetization plan matters a great deal more than hypothetical tech stack.

2. The raw concept of "ads" are not the problem. Right now, there is a confidence crisis in advertising, but I don't think that's a problem with advertising as a concept or a revenue stream. I think that's a problem with adtech since the 1990s. Tech companies have hyper-focused so much on the "tech problems" of advertising over the people and the needs of consumers and advertisers and have been pissing away centuries of general goodwill to advertising while doing that. (I think YouTube is a key contributor to the problem, so extremely relevant in this context of discussing a hypothetical YouTube competitor.) Consumers have started to route around the damage that is modern adtech by looking for more "no ads" services. In some ways this trying to avoid the disease by treating only one symptom.

I think "Sponsored Content" and "Sponsor Segments" are another case in point with reference to that: Advertisers have also started to route around the damage that is modern adtech. Sponsored Content is one of the oldest forms of advertising. Radio started out with mostly just sponsored content for advertising and it was years before they invented something resembling the modern ad break. I don't think it is a coincidence we've seen such a massive return of sponsored content in recent years, and I personally think I can point a finger at modern adtech as a root cause.

> They just get the paycheck to display what advertisers pay for.

Newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations all knew that advertising was content and subject to other content rules including moderation. They refused paychecks all the time. For a brief golden era "Truth in Advertising" was considered the law in the United States and it was a hard-fought law, but it required everyone accepting ads to be vigilant and refuse paychecks for scams and from bad actors, if for no other reason (like ethics or integrity) than that they could be sued for simply running bad ads.

Modern adtech is acting like advertising content moderation is a technically unsolvable problem and it's just too bad that they have to cash all the checks and ignore what it means to their brand image, their integrity, anything but their bottom line. (Either "Truth in Advertising" is dead or it has been having much too hard and slow of a fight against major adtech companies and their enablers. YouTube being both.)

> No service is eternal.

No duh. That wasn't the assignment, was it? If you start a hypothetical question assuming your major competitor no longer exists and has created a vacuum then it doesn't matter a lick of beans what tech stack you are thinking about. You can use 60 year old tech for all it matters if you've got First Mover Advantage in a Vacuum with known demand.

"Be careful of the current biggest competitor that you yourself mentioned in your hypothetical question as a known threat" shouldn't be a surprise answer here, by any stretch of the imagination.

> Will the next generation embrace P2P? Possible. New generations are tech savvy. They are aware of their digital presence. They are aware of censorship.

We're dangerously verging into anecdata categories that aren't useful to the hypothetical question assigned here, but this reads to me like you possibly have some interesting bubbles. Anecdotally, I've never met anyone in real life who cares about P2P other than as the means to some end and the only people I've met who "are aware of censorship", or have strong opinions on censorship at all, I've cut all ties with. Not because they "were aware of censorship", but simply because their perceived "threat awareness" of censorship was being fed to them along with the brain worms of terrible conspiracy theories and worse. Not that I'm implying you are at risk of similar brain worms, that just as likely correlation as it is causation and I try to make no assumptions about that without more than just anecdata.