Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?

People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.

That's why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.

If you're fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I'm really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I'd rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I'm old fashioned.

This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I'll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.