[nine_k]

AFAIK more than 95% of all email traffic is spam. I still consider email an absolutely vital tool, despite the efficiency below a steam engine.

Same with YouTube: the small sliver of content I care about is important enough for me to pay for YouTube premium.

Sometimes people compare something to a gold mine, to emphasize how rich that is. A typical gold mine extracts several grams of good per tonne of rock, that is, a few parts per million.

Don't cry about the Sturgeon's law; embrace it and celebrate what you can extract.

[kibwen]

YouTube isn't analogous to email, it's analogous to Gmail. We were hosting video in the 90s, and the cost of storage, bandwidth, and compute have become orders of magnitude cheaper since then. Video hosting is not magic that only YouTube can pull off.

[nine_k]

Unlike Gmail, YouTube is a large public repository of media.

Pulling your email account from Gmail affects you. Pulling a video from YouTube affects potentially huge numbers of people.