> Wow, thank god we had the geniuses at Google to give them their unique monetization model: ads!

I think you're forgetting the state of the web in 2005.

The tech to do on the fly pre-roll and mid-roll ads in an existing video didn't exist in 2005, there was no significant market for video advertising on the web in 2005, and web browsers could not play video at all. It was all plugin based. There was no streaming standard. There was no way to circumvent banner ad blocking, too. Sure, that new thing Web 2.0 might help, and XHTML 2 sounds promising, but it's not there yet. To top it off, the main way most users -- even Americans -- connected to the internet in 2005 was still dial-up! So you're a niche market, too.

If your model is "just use ads" then the 2005 response is "okay, but how do you sell dynamic ad views in videos with maybe a couple thousand views? And how do they work?"

YouTube was going to go bankrupt without a large reservoir of funds.

YouTube would have suffered a far worse fate in the hands of the extra special incompetent Yahoo organization.

While I might like to see YouTube spun out of Google, Google is the primary reason it survived. Along with bleeding to death financially as one likely outcome, YouTube was going to get sued into oblivion. Google shielded them in terms of liability because Google was fearsome enough to intimidate the overly lawsuit-happy savages in Hollywood and the music industry. That delayed the reckoning that was coming for YouTube in regards to the content on their platform that was under copyright by major media publishers (music in particular). There were dozens of prominent articles written about that specific context back in those years.

Another YouTube would have sprung up out of the ashes, the idea is just too good.

I'm not sure you can have another YouTube outside of an enormously profitable company like Google to bankroll it for years.