This doesn't make any sense. There are lots of YouTube creators who spend a LOT on videos. Mr Beast, the most successful YouTuber of all time, is famous for it

This doesn't make any sense. There are lots of YouTube creators who spend a LOT on videos. Mr Beast, the most successful YouTuber of all time, is famous for it. When he was barely known, he still did stunts which were staggering costly, given his then level of success. A different example is storytime animation. People telling cute, short stories about their lives used self produced animations to do so. This is literally hundreds of times more labor-intensive than vlogging to camera. They weren't paying money to others but they were using weeks instead of minutes of their own time to produce somewhat similar content. Several of these animators became huge on YouTube, to the point where they now hire artists and engineers. Lots of other creators have got success by doing things much more ambitious than the norm. The slo-mo guys did something like lots of others but much much more professionally. Jazza tested more art products than anyone else, for example one of every alcohol marker set in the world, and the scope made his content stand out. Of course if you aren't successful with an expensive project you will lose a lot of money but that's just a tautology. YouTube has literally millions of low-budget channels who also didn't come near to recouping their costs.