YouTubers provide everyone with hours and hours of free entertainment and the vast majority of followers will not contribute in direct earnings other then ads...but YouTubers make next to nothing from the ads.
Not all YouTubers and channels are of equal quality but I regularly watch people I love and I am very thankful for it.
Next time you watch your favorite channel remember that they are giving you this content for free and it's not easy to produce it, the vast majority of the reasons why good channels disappear is because the creator is simply cannot make enough money to live off what they are doing.
I think creators sometimes don't understand that audiences are actually pretty understanding of doing promotional stuff so they are scared to say so, my advice like others here would be to just be transparent with your audience.
The ones that actually care about your content will understand.