Hosting video content is not an unsolvable problem. YouTube's moat is economies of scale and user base. YouTube's draw is the "make money" button.
PeerTube is as close to nonexistent as a video platform can be.
From there, you also ensure that you have a backup of all your videos. I've talked to people that only had their stuff on YouTube/Facebook/whatever. It is super risky. If you have a backup, and YouTube bans you, you can rehost elsewhere, it won't be as big, but you might still have a business afterwards.
When you're making commerce in someone's fief, they will demand tribute as well. In the confines of your own kingdom, all the ad dollars are yours.
Which also means you don't need to chase the same amounts of people to make similar coin, especially if the deals you make with advertisers are between you and the advertiser (not you, the advertiser, and the king of some other fief).
For instance, https://vimeo.com/ott is an effective (albeit expensive) option, powering Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) and other brands and allowing them to focus on content. Dropout, in particular, has found an effective model of releasing short clips from their improv-heavy shows on social video platforms, gaining virality there while subtly reminding new and old fans that they can find full episodes, and support on-screen and off-screen talent, by subscribing to the brand directly. Their growth would be impacted by the loss of a marketing channel, but not their underlying subscription fundamentals.
(The entire Dropout business story is quite inspiring and worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRK_gNfFdP0 )
I laughed, told him I wasn't interested, and warned him that he didn't own his network: that the MLM could take it from him at any time, and it's why most of the experienced salesmen I knew lived well below their paychecks. He grew very upset, told me I didn't know what I was talking about, and basically behaved as if I had insulted his religion.
Well, half a year later I was laid off and found a new job with a marketing automation firm. On my second day, we had an all hands meeting where they were announcing that the MLM he worked for would be immediately breaking contract and leaving our platform because they reached a settlement with the DOJ over their methodology. Effective immediately, they were going to a distributor model and ceasing all payouts for network related sales.
I knew his world was going to collapse before he did. In the end, he had to sell his house and most of his possessions, his wife divorced him, and he tried to break back into the MLM world but could never get anything started. Nobody wanted to hire him for a traditional sales role because they regard MLMers as lazy and dumb. He's back at another chemical refinery, hoping to work there for another 20+ years to earn another pension.
They could use their popularity to promote and donate to alternatives.
Then probably dual stream for a while on your site with blended chat support before cutting the YouTube cord loudly and with warning.
The YouTube link at the end is ironic ;-)
If you want to be a Windows developer, then yes, you have to be a Windows developer in order to be a Windows developer.
But you don't have to want to be a Windows developer. You don't even have to want to be a developer.
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.
I think a better comparison would be iOS or Chrome, where you’ll realistically have to submit yourself to their stores if you want to reach most users. Which is sort of even more locked down than YouTube as some content creators on YouTube have managed to move their audience to other platforms, though sometimes by still posting teasers or at least some content on YouTube.
But I suspect that as they get bigger, they enter in exclusivity / no-compete contracts with Youtube, and if they detect the same video hosted elsewhere, they get taken down or something.
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.
It seems these days, most Youtube creators are at least somewhat aware of the problem and have websites, discord channels, patreons etc. While I still think many would struggle if they lost their youtube access suddenly, they do have additional channels to reach out to at least part of their audience.
You start needing alternatives when you're already established and have a following. With this comes large enoug influence and thus the ability / risk to step on some big toes, including Google's.
And unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere. You’d need to ask a LOT of people (= a large amount of $$$) and hope a few of them make it over a bit at a time
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.
But if you want to see people trying to make the conversion just scroll the front page of Rumble. Many of them are trying to get out form under youtube and many have YT channels too. But Rumble is just another YT waiting to happen and they know it.
I don't understand that... If he was two years from retiring, then he only needed two more years of salaried employment somewhere lese - didn't he ? What country did he live in ?
Your question seems to connect discovery of videos and distribution.
Video hosting is getting easier. There’s platforms like avideo that are relatively easy to host.
Many companies use alternatives already like or Vimeo.
Hosting your video permanently first from your own setup isn’t too far fetched.
YouTube can be secondary.
Many people use social media to build their own email lists and communities.
YouTube can achieve the same. At the same time I think YouTube is more going to eat cable tv up or at least offset it more first.
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.
The people there are both video creators and their own hosts, or so I read. Got together and built themselves a host because YT was not what they needed.
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.
That's not search engines discriminating against it in this case.
They only exist at taxpayer funded employers or legacy businesses like oil and gas, but most everyone else has switched to defined contribution pensions, but those are referred to as “401k” or “401b” or some other letter for the appropriate section of the law that specifies the tax benefit of saving for retirement.
The latter are better ever since low cost index funds came about, as you get to skip paying the DB pension administrators and remove agency risk.
In this case you’re already paying for storage so egress is free.
A 10 gig fibre connection is another way to start.
The internet always costs someone.
i saw they post pretty well produced videos on youtube -- for folks like me
but also promote a more elaborate/detailed video series on the same/related topics on a separate subscription based platform
Is your wife a representative sample of all Youtubers? If not, your datum is irrelevant.
> unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere.
Having now witnessed multiple creators hop from one platform to another and drag their audiences with them because they're JUST THAT ENTERTAINING... no, you're wrong. People will gladly follow artists to a better platform if it means they're able to make a living and/or not be censored.
It's here: https://podcastindex.org/
This, it's surprising and somewhat annoying, but people ~20ish and younger pretty much just don't use email.
This works well only if many of the watchers have significant upload bandwidth and aren't behind firewalls that prevent them from outputting blocks of video.
This is different from torrent-type systems or Usenet, which distribute persistent copies. With Peertube, only the original server permanently hosts the video. Everybody else is just caching. So the disk usage of watchers isn't that big.
It's all done in the browser.
My point is it’s better for the employee who is getting paid a lot (whether it be oil and gas or tech) to receive their compensation in fully liquid cash they can invest in a broad market index fund, rather than have it be held hostage (see agency risk). Plus the employee maintains more leverage to be able to sell their labor to other employers.