I see the real issue in the lack of competition. Which unfortunately is an inherent attribute of the nature of social sites, as the natural tendency is to form

I see the real issue in the lack of competition. Which unfortunately is an inherent attribute of the nature of social sites, as the natural tendency is to form a monopoly even quicker than in other economic areas. This makes me not buy the idea that Youtube cannot survive without ads. I bet there are startups out there that would kill to be in Youtubes position sans the ads. "That's surely unsustainable" one might think. But I believe Youtube already markets the rankings of videos and how high up they are displayed in your feed and search result. I ran my own subjective experiments on Youtube, trying to determine the effects of the "not interested" and "don't recommend" buttons on channels I have never clicked but seemed to be promoted. The result was that there are seemingly promoted channels that transcend any such functions. Nothing political as the most significant example was a popular youtuber. Of course one can put that down to the normal workings of the youtube algorithm, but that's kind of the problem: those two cannot be discerned, which means Youtube can make money this way if they chose to. Other realistic sources of income: The US government stepping in and subsidizing, because of the cultural relevance and impact. Or the continuation of the current economic model: long term stock investments, raising the value of a google account ownership and acquisition of customers for other google products.