Is nobody else surprised the amount is so low? If you look at his video catalogue, basically every video is a "hit" even if upload frequency is relatively low. Youtubers making 20 videos a month with <1M views/video make considerably more money, i.e., is better to upload less quality videos and have "moderate" views that to make high quality infrequent videos with a lot of views. You'd think advertisers should pay more per ad on a high quality video than on a trash one. The extreme example of this is Mr. Beast, who makes "high" quality videos (at least in the sense of production) but uploads pretty frequently (specially considering he has multiple channels).
You're guaranteed to make little money, yes. The big publishers make most of their revenue from a small number of titles that make publishing any other title viable.
"The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler's game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year."
Isn't it an issue of the entire model though. The Web is free, as in you pay with your data. The Web can be completely free for you and a number of others as long as enough people are actually paying with their data (to offset you et al.,).
Can your online identity (data) be completely decoupled from your physical identity?
Meaning you will be willing to sell some of your data as long as it didn't tie you to the "real" world. But isn't the entire world being turned into a computer anyways? Comes to mind "as software eats the world" [0].
If computers "eat" the physical world, there can't be no you online and you offline.