Are they including all those 10-hour long loop videos I uploaded?

I've never been one to really get into the loop of watching YouTube endlessly. It's felt like my use has been more like a search engine.

For me it's not really been a great source of entertainment. At best background noise. Quantity of hours is a useless metric for me when most of it is stuff that feels like unnecessary content. I think it's most telling that what makes YouTube watchable for me is sponsorblock with one of my most used functions skip to highlight, and blocktube to block the popular channels that dominate search results. And lately youtubetranscript to just save myself time watching and overly long 10+ minute long segment in favor of quickly skimming over the words.

I feel the algorithm promoting long videos has ruined the quality with now more videos trying to fit that minimum length.

I sleep to lectures on youtube so I probably clock up a lot of hours a day and ads would ruin that forever - so I pay

but i do enjoy a lot of creator channels too, so it's worth it for that as well. plus i really fucking hate ads.

part of me also thinks - it must cost a bomb to deliver that much data and storage, plus the bandwidth for 4k video at any time, plus paying the people who make content. some of them are millionaires, youtuber is kind of a career and it's not all in-video endorsements.

at some point, someone has to pay, and it's the advertisers paying to access me, or it's me paying. i'd rather pay. i'd prefer it if it was free but i kind of get that it's not. I couldn't pay to host youtube and develop the platform and have everyone watch free.

How much of those channels are actually quality content let alone manage to keep the attention of viewers to watch an entire video? It's like a cable services advertising that it has thousands of channels. Videos that manage to hold my attention even for 10 minutes on YouTube has been rare, and mostly aided by 2x speeds to shorten it down by half.