Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.

I'm a little surprised there isn't more of this. Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. a lot of the platforms lost money doing so and really only made it back when they merged into an umbrella of other services.

I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited.

I'm surprised a lot of things aren't more accessible.

So much content not making money / available ANYWHERE.

I assume, that maybe the amount of difficulty in terms of getting permission is too high to bother so nobody does?

I have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD.

The problem is once the rights for a title end up in a library, the accessibility considerations operate at the library level, not the title level. So if some company owns the rights to "n" titles en masse, they're negotiating for the distribution rights to that library.

You can't really pull a Taylor Swift or Def Leppard "re-record for rights" move with movies.

UPDATE: Happy to be wrong about my cited example.. Thanks @andsoitis !