Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.
Third option: I don't pay for it, I don't load the ads, and the trillion dollar company figures out a way to live with the economic consequences of their own decisions.
The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.
They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.
Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
