YouTube has paid creators over $100 billion since 2021. Every challenger that tried to match that check is dead. Quibi raised $1.75 billion before launch, one of the biggest war chests in startup history, and folded in six months. YouTube pays out roughly that much to creators every single month. Vine is the cleanest autopsy. Back in 2016, about 20 of its biggest stars offered to keep posting in exchange for $1.2 million each. Vine said no. They took their audiences to YouTube and Instagram, and Vine shut down within the year. Here's why nobody breaks through. Video is the most expensive content on the internet to serve, so a challenger bleeds money on infrastructure for years before ads can work. YouTube itself didn't clearly make money for close to a decade after Google bought it for $1.65 billion in 2006, a deal people called the dumbest in tech. In 2025 it did over $60 billion. Only Google could afford that wait, because search profits covered the losses. And once YouTube could fund a 55% revenue share, creators became the defense budget. Beating YouTube was never a product problem. You'd have to outbid $22 billion a year in creator checks with no ad machine to pay for it. Twenty years in, nobody has even tried twice.