Does YouTube mistreat and exploit its creators in a myriad of ways? Absolutely. Is it a fair platform and does it behave in reasonable ways? Absolutely not.

Does YouTube mistreat and exploit its creators in a myriad of ways? Absolutely. Is it a fair platform and does it behave in reasonable ways? Absolutely not. That said, I feel that a reminder about the nature of YouTube monetization, AKA the YouTube Partner Program is in order. The YPP puts ads in and around your video and gives you part of the profit from running those ads, but what does that mean? It means YouTube is: >Finding advertisers >Persuading them it can pick content (yours) that is profitable to advertise on >Handling the entire negotiation and payment work behind implementing that advertising >Handling the entire technical aspect of adding those advertisements to your video That is an enormous amount of work YouTube is doing for its content creators for free. You are not in any way entitled to YouTube doing that work for you. Having your videos categorized as not eligible for the YPP is not in any way depriving you of the ability to make money from them, just the ability to automatically make money from them with no effort on your part. Without access to the YPP, you are still free to find sponsors, find advertisers and run your own ads, receive donations, or rely on patronage services like Patreon. That means you have every single avenue of revenue generation (aside from paywalling your content) available to you that you'd have if you were hosting the videos yourself on a personal server. Hell you can even do that if you want to set up some kind of script that uploads your videos as Private and only adds viewer usernames to the whitelist after they pay you. It would be a terrible idea, but YouTube would be entirely within its rights to charge content creators for the bandwidth consumed by their viewers and offer no assistance at all for making money off your content. YouTube owes you nothing.