It scales, though. It makes sense that a thing like Google YouTube exists: if you can scale enough, it becomes worthwhile at least to yourself to provide it. Your main benefit is control and exclusivity: you can expect very large results from very small controlling actions.

Most likely doesn't make you enough money to redistribute it to lots of content creators, though it serves your purposes to have 'em thinking that is what they're there for.

I'm happy enough to serve consumer-grade video content at no cost to me through YouTube, on their terms. It's limiting, but I can put a lot of video out there without paying a host to serve the bandwidth. And YouTube gets to continue to pretend they are the only game in town.