zlacker

>>lopesp+(OP)
Easier said than done… if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there? This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn’t really actionable for other content.

>>echoan+dv
If you are a "YouTube creator", you have already firmly planted your castle on Google's land. The positioning of onself as bound to a particular website run by someone else is needless loss of independence.

Position yourself as a video creator and post your videos also to Instagram (when possible) and to Vimeo. Seed free / back catalog episodes via a torrent. Run a mailing list announcing and discussing your videos, with some premium content for paying subscribers only. Maybe have an X / SkyBlue / mastodon feed with more compact announces, comments, and high-virality short clips from your longer videos.

Cross-link and cross-reference all the channels of your presence. Make your brand recognizable across the publishing methods. Gently prod people to touch more than one channel of your video distribution, just to get the most avid viewers acquainted with several.

Yes, this is significantly more work. It also may bring significantly more results if your videos are good. This gives you a much stronger assurance that your brand and your following will not be lost, should you lose access to YouTube / Instagram / Vimeo / X / whatever other platform. Commoditize your complement, as they say.

>>nine_k+281
Nice summary. There are tools out there that can help with chunks of this, but understanding the pieces as you’re laid out is critical.

Since a lot of creators today were consumers first of content, they miss the side when there was little social or video to consume online, and in turn creating was the default.