Earlier quoted context omitted.
They stay unprofitable forever individually but they stay on YouTube instead of making another video site popular, which on the whole is better for YouTube.
But that isn't an as big deal as it sounds. Many use TikTok for example, but TikTok barely pays anything to creators so anyone who gets big on TikTok moves to YouTube to make money. As long as you make the most money at YouTube that will keep happening, and all those ads is why people make so much money making videos on YouTube. This leads to an Apple situation where Apple doesn't have the most users but most of the…
Of course Vimeo would have to fight off adblockers too to compete in money extraction with YouTube but that's not my point, my point is that YouTube now has a monopoly and any actions that threaten that, such as strongarming people into watching 3 preroll unskippable ads, are in my opinion silly and self-defeating.
They're just too greedy. If they made the price of YouTube Premium something reasonable ($1 or $2 a month instead of $14 or whatever it is) they would get a lot more subscribers and probably even get more revenue. $1 or $2 is not worth spending even 10 minutes digging in obfuscated JavaScript to fix an adblocker, so this whole thing would go a lot smoother for them if they charged that. Even if $14 is not a lot people just don't want to pay that much.