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
Dave Jones from the EEVBlog does this - he cross posts to his own site and to many smaller video hosting sites. But if I remember correctly he has said in the past that almost all his viewership comes from YouTube. Unfortunately for long-form videos in English YouTube seems to be the only game in town in terms of discoverability.

>>tdeck+kg1
While you're tiny, you need discoverability a lot. But even if YouTube bans you and deletes all your videos, you lose relatively little.

The bigger you are, the more well-known, the larger is your following, and the more the whole enterprise is the source of your livelihood, the more you may need to hedge your bets.

>>nine_k+oq1
It always makes sense to have a backup, but the issue is that video creators are always naturally losing viewers and need to replace them by new viewers who discover their channel(s). It seems like the new viewer discovery is all happening on a very short list of giant platforms which is a bit worrying. Personally I like the way podcasts have managed to be more decentralized but I also fear podcasting is slowly becoming YouTube centric.