[mattbrewsbytes]

One perspective is thinking about what would happen if YouTube is a separate entity from Alphabet/Google and more importantly adsense and search.

I think a lot of people that turned a hobby into a full time content creator job on YouTube will find themselves with much less ad revenue. Adsense is going to start charging a third-party company for services, which YouTube would be at that point, and those costs are likely to eat into any adsense revenue creators make, across the board.

There would also be the question of what search will power YouTube and if that can be physically separated from Google. There are likely economies of scale with how Google organizes data for search behind the curtain. That could be lost and increase YT operational costs or be another service YT needs to purchase.

[bobdvb]

If you could opt-out of Google ads and just be distributed/indexed by YouTube, then you'd be paying for hosting/delivery/indexing. Given that the economies of scale are spread among many users, the bigger streamers who this would benefit would then make the platform worse for everyone else.

Youtube is spreading the burden of carrying all that content, from utter crap that no one watches, deep archive and onwards to Mr Beast, etc. There's a huge volume of content that Google hosts that's costing more than it earns them.

[mattbrewsbytes]

Your comment I think drives my point even further. No content creator is paying for YT, neither is any end user[0]. So in this theoretical world where YT is separate from Google, now YT has to possibly pay Google for storage and one way to subsidize that would be to deduct it from creator's adsense revenue and/or limit the free content one can post in some way, like plans with different tiers of GB.

In some ways in this theoretical world, the small/new upcoming creators would have a larger chasm to cross into profitability if they move from a free plan into a paid hosting/delivery plan before becoming profitable. Unless a small/new creator gets massive quickly or goes viral they will have a much longer time before adsense can fund the storage. This might mean that the nonsense content goes away because churning out volumes of content to have more "surface area" for people to discover a channel can't be profitable.

[0] There may be premium content subscription options where some users pay a creator but I would imagine that is a minority of creators.