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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.