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
Vimeo only gives you 2 TB bandwidth/month without negotiating an Enterprise plan. If your video goes viral, you're going to be out thousands to host it for everyone. How are you going to pay for that? You could put it on credit and then show these numbers when manually negotiating the payout from your next sponsor and pay it back with the proceeds from the next video, but there's no guarantee your next video will be also a hit.

>>kalleb+Wd1
> If your video goes viral

That's what PeerTube is supposed to be for. You can set up a PeerTube host yourself. Or there are some public PeerTube hosts that accept uploads. When people are watching your videos, the ones with good bandwidth are also hosting them for other users. The hosting site is just handling the original copy and coordinating the peers. (This isn't like Bittorrent; hosting is centralized but playout is distributed. When no one is watching, the only copy is on the original server.)

PeerTube really should be popular like WordPress, for self-hosted content. But it's not. Neither Google nor Bing indexes PeerTube sites, so there's no discovery. Few PeerTube videos have more than a handful of viewers. I use PeerTube for technical videos, to keep them ad-free, and it works fine for that low-volume application.

Here's the Blender 4.2 showcase reel on PeerTube.[1] It's a good demo. Will it overload if watched by many HN users? Please try.

[1] https://share.tube/w/uYK7X52m2Y7RyahL4wjKaM

>>Animat+LI1
PeerTube is just a self-hosted video platform. Video bandwidth is legitimately expensive. You'll still be out a bunch of money if your video goes viral.

>>immibi+yM1
There are cdns that can help..

>>j45+uS1
The core issue is that someone has to pay a lot for a lot of bandwidth, or a lot of someone’s paying a bit each.

>>Michae+s32
I've been connecting the dots in video/bandwidth delivery.

While I was digging up an additional link, it appears Cloudflare R2 allows no egress fees.

https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/

10GB free to host, no egress fees.

Combined with a cloudflare worker, it seems reasonable that the object storage could be managed.

>>j45+kj2
Now your castle is in someone else's kingdom. And in Cloudflare's kingdom, always be ready to get an email: "pay us $150,000 in 24 hours or we cancel your service"