Other factors increasing profits...
One thing they didn't mention has an upon profitability.
Youtube screwed content creators. Bigly (as an orange fucktard would say). Demonetized many existing videos from some creators. Which led to many creators I watch quickly putting up videos begging people to support them on patreon or the amount of content they could produce would go down. They weren't using it as an excuse to get extra money. Several of them had given up jobs to produce content full time, living on youtube advertising revenue. They were fucked.
One guy (you probably know who I mean whether you love him or hate him buys scientific kit in order to make educational (ish) videos. He's long been with patreon and is buying serious kit like extra high speed cameras to film stuff in extra slow-mo, but decreased youtube revenue still affected him. Why would his videos be demonetized? Well, he also criticises creationists and SJWs, so there are a lot of complaints.
I have yet to see any of them saying youtube has remonetized any of their videos. So youtube wins bigly. People are still creating content (if they can get enough support via patreon) and youtube aren't paying them as much for doing it.
Of course, most of the content I watch can be labelled contentious. It promotes atheism or promotes science (or both), either of which alone tends to upset the US Talebangelicals. I expect the oh-so-tedious "look at me teaching you how to apply make-up", "look at my inane life" and "look at my 'pranks' that are hilarious if you're on serious amounts of recreational pharmaceuticals but fucking twuntish if not" content producers haven't suffered to the same extent, so maybe youtube's savings by demonetizing videos aren't that great.
At least Google aren't as bad as Microsoft. Yet.