Spending an hour on Reddit or Twitter means downloading a few megabytes of content.
Spending an hour on YouTube means downloading a few gigabytes of content. The cost to serve that is massive.
YouTube lost money when Google bought them. It continued to lose money for years. It was only after YouTube finally got large enough and their ad targeting got good enough that they started to turn a profit on YouTube.
I’m really skeptical that anything other than a big tech company could provide a similar platform like that for free.
Sure, it could work if you could get people to pay $10/month, like YouTube Premium, but people wouldn’t do that without there being enough content to make it worthwhile. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The only way to get past that point is with a massive amount of initial investment.
jinarched