The Youtube-Based Economy (Hidden in Plain Sight)

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Like most people I know, I was raised with the belief that all money comes from 'going out and doing your job' (preferably after you graduate from school, though you most-likely start on your job while you're in your last years at the school). Even though 'everybody knows' that employment-money is largely just 'loans' that the employers take out from the bank (and that the banks basically 'write the loan-money into existence'), that 'money comes from getting a job'-myth hangs on in the back of my head. Another thing that makes it hard to believe that I somehow think 'employment brings money': I've been trying to 'make money online' for nearly 18 years! 'Making money online' is almost the opposite of 'employment,' as employment typically requires that one is "at the office during a certain time-period" while 'online' typically means "you're there whenever you feel like it!" Obviously, 'online' is not my "full time income," or else I would've realized how wrong I am years ago. Youtube shows how I've had it wrong all this time ... I used to think that YouTube was something people did 'for fun'---people had fun recording their thoughts & songs & performances, and they uploaded that to YouTube for free, and YouTube earned some advertising-revenue from ads they attached to the videos they hosted without charging the content-providers (revenue they'd sometimes share with the content-providers.) But This video https://youtu.be/gl2AiXhqjfQ (and lots of other ones that talk about 'Youtube demonetizing accounts and paying or not-paying') shows me that the content-providers aren't 'the generous givers I took them for.' Maybe they got into it "for fun," but they're as 'greedy' as any other wage-worker once that ad-revenue starts flowing in But I'm not sure what YouTube's (or other online hosts') "Quid pro Quo" is ... brick-&-mortar employment has the Quid pro Quo of '"dollars earned"-per-"hour worked"'; online hosts give content-providers both/either 'dollars-per-"hosted content"' and/or 'dollars (more like "fractions of a cent")-per-"counted visitor." (And 'what makes a visit "count as a visit"' varies from host to host.)