For years YouTube allowed content creators to post videos without any ability to monetize, and they harvested your data and sold it while they did.
Let me preface this by saying fuck YouTube. But they were losing money on YouTube during this time on purpose. They weren’t actually making enough money to run the site by selling data alone. Their long game was to starve out any potential competition because they knew nobody else had enough capital to just give the same product away for free. The plan worked, hence their monopoly on Internet video hosting. Ever since they’ve been introducing more and more shitty limitations, ads, and anti consumer bullshit simply because they can. Google’s monopolies really need to be broken up. Let me end this by saying fuck YouTube, and fuck Google, too.