In high school physics I procrastinated until the night before our egg drop competition to finally address what I was going to do. I got a medium/large size plastic tupperware container (rigid plastic body with a rigid lid). I took a bag of cotton balls, stuffed them in there as tight as I could, put an empty cardboard toilet paper roll vertically in the center, with more cotton balls designed to go in said cardboard below and above the egg. Taped the lid shut. People laughed at my concoction, especially those that went to great efforts to design theirs. I even tossed mine in the air beforehand to test it, which gave me extreme confidence going into the 30 ft drop that I'd be fine. I was. I do not recall what side it landed on but obviously it bounced several hard times after hitting the ground.
Yeah, tight packing is simple and very effective. I had a successful drop with nothing but corn starch packing peanuts shoved into a cardboard box.
This is the main reason I think alternative sites have a hard time competing. Play anything on YouTube from anywhere and if it's buffering/slow then it's probably your internet connection that's the problem. By contrast do the same on competing streaming sites and it's, more or less, expected especially if you aren't in certain geographic areas.
Monetization on YouTube is mostly just a carrot on a stick. The overwhelming majority of content creators will never make anything more than pocket change off of it. That carrot might still work as an incentivization system, but I don't think it's necessarily the driving force.
[1] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en