Also see: The Da Nang, Vietnam Robbery: A Case Study in Digital-Nomad Illusion and Influencer Deception

YouTube’s incentive structure is fundamentally broken. The platform optimizes for watch time and engagement, not truth, quality, or ethics, and that system inevitably rewards garbage. It selects for fake gurus, sensationalism, half understood ideas packaged as certainty, reheated self help clichés sold as courses, and an endless stream of outright scams or barely legal grifts.

Every monetized creator who enables mid roll ads, sponsorships, or affiliate links becomes part of this ad distribution machine. And because the majority of ads that run on YouTube are either scammy or pure scams, this makes everyone who monetizes on the platform "partners in crime" with YouTube and the advertisers. Most channel owners do not vet advertisers because they don't care about ethics. They'll take the money at any cost to their audience. Others knowingly promote junk because it pays. That is not an exception. That is how the model works.  

The result is predictable. Scam ads run nonstop. Fake experts flourish. E-begging is normalized. Content is churned out like factory sludge. The loudest and most manipulative voices rise to the top, while YouTube does just enough moderation to shield itself from liability, not to protect users.

The platform is saturated with bogus material from fake gurus, liars, and useful idiots who launder credibility for scam artists while selling their own garbage to naive and cognitively vulnerable audiences. In that sense, YouTube functions as a massive scam ecosystem. It is effectively the world’s largest scam platform, hosting the highest concentration of scammers, both advertisers and content creators, precisely because its audience is disproportionately stupid, greedy, and desperate, making them easy targets for exploitation.

Also see: The Da Nang, Vietnam Robbery: A Case Study in Digital-Nomad Illusion and Influencer Deception