What's the audience like on those? I assume pretty small compared to YouTube.
There are great ways to host video for free on the internet these days so if you want to preserve some video or link it in somewhere (I've seen vimeo used as a hosting platform for tutorial videos on sites) then you have much better option than YouTube - but if your business is the videos then you either need to survive on YT or else get big enough to splinter. Given how Dlive (pwediepie) and Nebula (technical vlog folks) haven't taken off that well I'm guessing you'll need a lot more behind you to go indy - those subscriptions (hit the bell icon!) and the feed are the feature YT sells.
For professional videos, until there is a law that specifies that a monopoly (currently Google YouTube does seem like the only place where money making is possible) has to follow certain rules, they can throw you out for virtually any reason and it's not a secure way of making a living. So maybe it should be, but it currently isn't, and we can't currently force them to be.
Other platforms may not significantly help one to pay bills, I'm just wondering if that might not be okay given the sheer number of people who seem to have fun doing this. If not, we should make new laws.
Sure! We can definitely have charity content. Most of the content out there is.
Somebody's paying for most of the content most people want to watch, though.
A reasonable-quality single-camera A/V rig that a video producer would actually want to work with is comfortably in the middle four digits. Three cameras, low five. That money must come from somewhere, as must the rationalization for the time in a world as productized and generally fucked as ours, and "that's OK, art and media can just be done by wildly wealthy dilettantes in their spare time" is a shitty world.
I think it was prompted by seeing the name "Hodler" once and thinking it sounded like the cryptocurrency equivalent of Wainwright or Cooper.
Still, we need people to start contributing to alternative platforms. The YouTube monopoly only benefits Google.
So, bigger than that.
YouTube, like it or not, is the engine that drives many people's content business (the creators), and if the engine is denied to them, there really isn't a realistic alternative.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're Google."
It's like the alternative really is "depend on his largesse and submit to his whims beacuse you can't overthrow the king because he is too powerful".
Like it or not YouTube is in an extremely solid position that is unlikely to be shifted by anyone at this point.
I often hear the “host your own content” but I don’t feel like there is an equally vocal “make it discoverable, too” crowd. That is until I discovered the indieweb.
The indieweb’s usage of microformats and features like “webmentions” that can be crawled ad hoc, enabling decentralized, federated discovery (example: http://indieweb.xyz) is the web that-IMO-we should have gotten. Not one dominated by corporatized, professionalized platforms
Twitch somehow seems to do a pretty good job of competing with YouTube.
If you move and only get a handful of views, do you really have a channel? If you can't take your viewers somewhere else, do you actually have viewers or are you simply one of the interchangeable nobodies that YouTube uses to keep YouTube viewers engaged?
I'm reminded of the "influencer" who couldn't sell 10 t-shirts to her "thousands" of viewers.