I've long said that YouTube is wasting a tremendous opportunity not offering its creators better opportunities to monetize content . Even Amazon/Twitch are doing better at this for gaming creators, because they can now monetize through affiliate links. YouTube should have long done a partnership with Steam (not Steem) for something like this.
As for the the recent censorship, guidelines, don't even get me started. Looking back a few years from now, it will probably be seen as the event that killed YouTube, because it also coincides with Google starting to ignore long tail creators to cater to big studios and such. In other words, YouTube is becoming TV.
YT has always dragged its feet compared to other products in Google/Alphabet. There's only so much money YT can make from showing ads, and apparently it isn't very impressive. Netflix has been a huge wakeup call for them.
Can you imagine crowd-funding a professionally produced TV series on Steemit? If the platform is a success, things like that are going to happen!