>these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements

they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how much capital and human expertise is required to run that operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later

Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in large part through ads.

Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed to entertain the audience.

A peer comment said something similar to which I responded to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522719

However, you brought up the distinction between consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here [1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and authenticity.

You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators', is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his 'channel' would become?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2g1H5wPmUE

And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what products and services the world's resources are used for.