It's much less direct than it used to be. The raw revenue from advertising sharply declined, any of your videos will be "demonitized" by an opaque black box "algorithm" that seems to have no actual rules, and the other half of your advertising money gets rerouted to nintendo because you showed mario for ten seconds or to some weird fly by night company that claims to be the rightful copyright owner of white noise and actual silence.
Oh, and if you don't keep up with stupid recommendation algorithm updates, which change how things work seemingly on a whim, youtube will decide you don't have a competitive click through rate for your spammy, clickbaity thumbnails, and just stop showing your videos to people so that your viewership and revenue hits the floor.
