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Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that once you get to a certain volume of content it becomes eye wateringly expensive on Vimeo. Louis Rossmann explained this in a couple of his videos (I never bookmarked them). Even if he were to push just his repair videos (i.e. not including his opinion pieces) he'd fall into into a whole other universe of cost.

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Vimeo hosts the storage on google cloud. It pays 100x what youtube does for storage. The same for bandwidth, hosts on Fastly. Pays 100x+ there too for cdn compared to youtube.

Surely the issue is that Vimeo doesn't have Google's adtech behemoth behind it, so either the creator or the audience has to pay for hosting, rather than it being paid for by advertising.

Peertube seems perhaps a more credible competitor in that sense, by making hosting cheaper. As long as the creators can fund themselves with Patreon, merchandise or whatever else.

I think the key issue is being able to fail over to another video site if for some reason YouTube decides you're no longer the kind of creator they want. For Rossmann I think whatever ad-revenue he gets is pocket money (and I believe it's not a lot in the great scheme of things), he already has a functioning business that's revenue generating.

Also what guarantees are there when you come along and upload 10+ TB of archive footage to Peertube the network decides that's far too much? Their creator sign up page has an instance filter for "At Least 50GB" (which is quaint). And sure when you get the results back many instances say "Unlimited" storage, but there's "unlimited" and "get lost".

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