Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

As I just explained to my 16 year old daughter about YouTube policies. YouTube is a business. Businesses will do whatever they need to do to get customers and make money. If anyone was under some strange illusion that YouTube was a public and free platform to make money and/or create any content they wanted was naive at best.

If you want to create a channel for users to view your content, purchase a domain, buy a VM on some cloud service, and set up your own video streaming service for your own channel.

It would be interesting to see how much it cost one person versus the income generated. I'm pretty sure that anyone with millions of subscribers would be bankrupt instantly.

I think the one reasonable avenue would be to unionize all of the major content creators and invite any creator to be a part of the union. Then threaten a strike. But the content creators are probably like a herd of cats. It's unlikely any coalition is remotely possible.

> I'm pretty sure that anyone with millions of subscribers would be bankrupt instantly.

It would be interesting to see a napkin calculation on this, because I highly doubt this is true. Bandwidth cost and video compression are both a lot better these days than people think, and if you could cut the middle man out of advertising (which you might could if you have millions of viewers) I think the benefit would be significant.

Of course, YouTube does not only provide bandwidth and servers. They provide a "platform", not in the technical sense but in the broader sense. They have well working apps on all mobile platforms, they have a social network, they have editing tools and redundancy, they have so many benefits that you'd really have to think twice before taking them on.

Your idea of a strike is interesting, while I doubt it would happen I would love for content creators to team up and make common demands.

Why would million of subscribers bankrupt someone? I work in the industry building video software that would allow anyone to create their own personalozed video on demand or live streaming service. I havent ran the numbers myself, but the cost to provide a youtube like experience is not that expensive. I would be happy to run the numbers if we could determine how many minutes a single subsriber would watch in a month.

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