that's a funny example, because something like Cobra Kai literally began on YouTube, there are others like Hazbin Hotel.

anyway, as for the statistics, for the case of YouTube since there are is no forced directive to which all videos must follow (creatively), you can treat all videos as random attempts. then it's just stats to show that such a distribution will have outliers that match or exceed in subjective quality the gate kept works (traditional tvs or literature).

Well, you’ll never see an erotic film on YouTube, or a war documentary using real combat footage for example, so there are many categories where it’s simply not capable of competing. And even without straight-up banned content, ‘advertiser-unfriendly’ content is aggressively buried by the algorithm, which discourages people from making it, so the ‘quantity’ part might not be true. Some content might be so heavily punished by the algorithm that almost nobody thinks to make it. This is a problem for your position, as it’s not enough for YouTube to win in some categories; it has to win in every category.

That logic only works if you take a “1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters” approach to thinking about creativity.

If you want to argue that art is created by pure randomness that’s fine, but I don’t think we’re going to come to an agreement.