As a young film student my Prof asked me whether I wanted to go to a talk to which he was invited. It was on the genres shown in German public television.

There the summary of the discussion was: Our core demographic are 60 to 70 year olds which is why we only make shows that appeal to 60-70 year olds and our core audience watches TV while doing household chores, so it needs to be simple to follow, so they can do household chores while watching.

I told them that to me this sounds a lot like circular logic, where they justify the things they are doing with the outcomes that produced. It is obvious there are other markets targeting different audiences (e.g. the likes of Netflix have been explicitly mentioned) and these markets are growing based on the way demographics shift.

A bit like a drug dealer that says he can't do honest work since all his customers are drug addicts, they are using the status quo as an excuse to persist the status quo.

The real way to think about these things is to consider them feedback loops. If all your content targets a specific demographic of course you're gonna have more audience members of that demographic, which again leads you to make more content for said demographic, which leads to more audience members of that demographic which... Until you hit some systemic limit, e.g. you have saturated the market or it turns out your content isn't that appealing to begin with in comparison to other stuff.

That means if you want to be strategic about this you need to give incentives to creators to produce stuff for audiences you don't already have. Even better: you need to become a partner these creators can and want to trust in.

These are the levers YouTube needs to pull if they want to stay a relevant platform that people enjoy spending their time on.