If youtube pays people for their content based on a certain viewership/subscription base, what's to stop a large collective of people (like 100,000 redditors, for instance) from uploading 100 videos of whatever nonsense they feel like, subscribing to each other, putting everyone's playlists on autoplay and then just raking in the cash from 100,000 people "watching" everyone else's videos? It would be time consuming, but I see no reason why people couldn't exploit youtube's pay model in such a fashion.
If each video is ten seconds long and we assume that a 30 second ad would play before each video, you could finish an entire person's playlist in one hour and seven minutes, which would come out to finishing about 20 of your fellow youtube exploiters' channels a day. Therefore, if you leave youtube running 24 hours a day and only actually utilize it to switch between the channels that you (and everyone else) has subscribed to, all 100,000 people would be able to rake in the exploitation profits in a span of 14 years. Obviously that's quite a while, but checks would be rolling in for people incrementally over that time so you'd be earning a steady supplementary income in addition to your normal job the entire time. Is it simply too much of a logistic nightmare to overcome or is there a legal/practical hurdle in the way? Because that's basically free money for a lot of people for a very long time.
edit- for increased practicality, you could disable ads before the video and only take in profit from the pop-up banners that appear while the videos are playing. This would result in one-quarter of the time requirement, bringing the time from start to completion from 14 years down to three and a half years.
