It’s when you click a Google ad that they get paid. Viewing an ad generates no revenue for them. Don’t click an ad, no money gets transferred.
Google put a mechanism in Youtube where people like us can ask them to take down offensive material (they didn’t have to do that), and the method described here does that and works without giving them a penny.
I distrust Google as you do and worry that they will get too much power. But, at least, there is a way to get bad stuff off Youtube. And I must emphasize, if you don’t click a Google ad they don’t get paid. They may use unique pageviews in their advertising to tell ad customers how effective their product is (advertising their services costs them money), but Google gets no money unless there is a clickthrough.
Google owns YouTube.
YouTube has ads on their pages.
Every time you open a YouTube page that contains an ad, YouTube/Google gets paid.