Whilst on the one hand I wholly agree with your sentiment, on the other: define quality. Isn’t the number of people watching a video a definition of quality as far as those viewers are concerned?
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Yeah, you email George Soros, but it has to be a cat that promotes communism and the gay agenda or he won’t pay you… 
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A bit more varied than tool and gadget repairs, admittedly, but I give you
Honestly, no, you couldn’t. I’m an experienced full time YouTuber (who prefers to remain anonymous here on BB) and it takes many years to build the kind of audience and algorithm juice to get a 1M view video.
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Maybe I can contribute something here, as a full time and moderately successful YouTuber.
As others have said, almost nobody is actually making the living from the AdSense revenue. This business is all about multiple revenue streams. Sponsorships, Patreon, merchandise, amazon affiliate links, selling plans, driving blog traffic, etc. The main purpose of running ads on videos is that the more ads you serve, the more YouTube recommends your content to others. The vast majority of views do not come from subscribers. They come from the YouTube home page and the “related videos” recommender algorithm. Your subscriber base is again a cue to the algorithm more than a reliable source of views.
Overall, content creation is a complex business model, but a rewarding one.
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Well, first of all, I was just being snarky. And yes, it’s true that “quality” is obviously subjective and difficult to define. However, I do stand by what I said, despite the snark: I do not believe that view count is a good measurement of how much people like a video (which, as you say, is a proxy for quality “as far as those viewers are concerned”).
I have viewed tons of videos that I thought were crap. Most of the time (if not all of the time), I don’t know that a video will suck until after I’ve viewed it, when my view has already incremented the view count. Personally, I do not believe my views are indications that I like what I’m seeing. I assume this is the case for most people.
I believe that, at best, view counts measure how enticing/alluring/clickbaiting a video is, not whether it’s enjoyable or meritorious.
In the end, though, I don’t think there ever could be a quantitative measure of quality that compensation can be tied to. And if the compensation continues to come from advertising revenue, than the platform has no incentive to compensate based on quality, because an advertiser’s primary concern is how many people see their ads, not the quality of the content they’re sponsoring.
Yeah, you are probably right - especially after what @VeronicaConnor said about the recommendation algorithm - as I was using ‘number of people watching’ as a definition of followers/subscribers, but obviously many more people watch than subscribe. Which makes me wonder does YT count a ‘view’ as ‘anyone who started a video’ or those who watched to the end’? I bet they have an algorithm for the percentage of video watched.
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You have to have watched a certain percentage of the video, but YouTube is pretty tight-lipped about that sort of metric. They provide us with very detailed analytics though, including retention. The retention chart shows on which second each person in the video stopped watching. ~50% retention to the end is good, and you can tell if your pacing is poor or if your cliff-hangers are working based on the shape of the retention curve. It also trains you to have very short intros and outros because the biggest drop-offs are right at the start and right at the end. People are verrrrry good at sensing when you’re “wrapping up” and very impatient with you blathering on at the front.
YouTube actually cares much more about engagement than views these days. Views are a shallow and easily corrupted metric. They want your videos to have high retention, and to keep viewers “in your loop” as long as possible. They promote channels that lead people from video to video within your playlists, for example. It’s about keeping people within the YouTube sphere as long as possible, and not clicking away to do other things. They give us gigabytes of Big Data™ to help with that.
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The Repair Shop sounds wonderful - I’ll see if there’s a way I can watch that. I did also really enjoy James May’s Reassembler videos. I think what got me on the path of watching so many was Top Gear > Reassembler > Hand Tool Rescue > way too many repair videos 
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Don’t forget to shout out to the ad agencies. You know they’re getting theirs, too.
Videos of cats purring – just that – would also work. You can loop them; even if everybody caught on, they wouldn’t care, because… “cats purring”. I know I wouldn’t. 
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Given the lack of the constraints that apply to television shows, Youtube videos should be wildly diverse, with everything from long-form programs to shorter form, highly specific interest things like that. But what you end up with is only things that can feasibly be done as hobby projects, or are economical because it only involves one person going straight to shooting and then editing.
It’s nice that those new forms of content can exist, but there should be a lot more variety.
YouTube is unwatchable without an ad filter, or a good generic adblock. Sure, go pony up the bucks for red tube, or just run Firefox with lots of add-ons. Yes, actually added to my host file just for YouTube.
Some you-tubers actually just started running ads as part of their videos. No way around that but include a start time in the comments for other people, if the ads are annoying.
As for Roadkill, when they went behind their paywall, I did not follow them there.
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Excellent point. My business plan for “quit my job and write indie games” was basically making the same assumptions. That old stuff I make would still make me some money even if it perhaps fell off after some time.
Here’s the follow up : how much she made from the video embedded in the post!
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10 minute videos… Good grief, is this why I keep getting recommended the 10-minute Extended mixes of Running up that Hill and Love is a Stranger? Promoted in the algorithm, but I have ad blocker until they somehow pry it from my cold dead hands?
What a wonderful unintended consequence
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