[Tanoc]

Google over-leveraged advertising on Youtube however. Most Youtube viewers use an adblocker on PC, and adblock is becoming more common on Android with each passing month. All because AdSense went with a more lax policy of moderation for ads after the 2017 fallout caused by Matt Watson scared away big advertisers like Frito-Lay and Toyota. The result was all ads were either falsely advertised Android games, multi-level marketing scams, or even nakedly racist political ads in the runup to the 2018 congressional elections. Adblock rates exploded, cutting Youtube's income and causing a panic response of running even more ads and locking users into seeing them. To this day Youtube still has a lax vetting policy for advertising partners, and actively hateful, harmful, or overtly false ads stay up for weeks until enough users report them.

As for subscriptions... Well, they tried that with Youtube Red. And then Youtube Premium. And then Youtube Music. Every time people turned it down, because the benefits weren't worth the cost each month considering all the features touted could be found legally for free elsewhere. And when video creators outed Red by showing they'd get a paltry amount of that revenue, despite Youtube saying the money from subscriptions would be used to pay them, even more of the viewing audience turned against it.

When you're in the uniquely precarious position of hosting high cost user-generated content, it's very easy for outside forces to break you over their knee and send you into a death spiral.