The main problem with youtube was the introduciton of adver…

The main problem with youtube was the introduciton of advertisers in my opinion.
Which, at the time may have been inevitable, because a mail account couldn't be priced in in an economic way.
Or maybe it could, I don't know. But some internet services are just worth a few pennies, which was really hard to price in.
Merging a site request for either text, audio or video or acces to a service with an additional transaction would make sense.
Maybe one cent, maybe less, maybe more.
The http devs even considered this back in the days with an html error code "402 payment required".
And at the moment we already have additional protocol interactions when a site is being requested in the form of all sorts of handshakes.
So you are doing stuff (handshake, end to end encryption, tls, https and whatever all the stuff is being called) which we already do, but in a better way.
Then people can have fun again and if your content gets viral intentional or by accident you get money.
At the moment we have absolutely no clue, if those stuff which is going viral is really going viral through real users demanding such things or if they are moneypulating the metrics in the background so we are getting fed bullshit all day till we get addicted.
Because I agree: back in the days the stuff on youtube was much funnier.