Not video hosting you don't. If you want to build a significant English speaking audience, your only real choice is YouTube, because that's where people search from. Seriously, who has a "Vimeo" app on their phone? On their set-top box?
Same thing if you want to watch interesting videos: most of the content is on YouTube.
And if you want videos, they're all on YouTube. You can search for them elsewhere but most of the content is on YouTube, and you won't avoid it even if your search started from a general purpose search engine like DuckDuckGo.
One notable exception of course is porn. But that's such a separated segment that it's pretty obvious I meant "non-porn videos" all along in this thread.
A random example but most stage hypnotists sell their shows via vimeo. If you ever go to a show and want to buy a copy they will send you there. The stuff they post on youtube is mostly highlights or lower quality video. It would take them 100,000 ad views (1,000,000 regular views) to equal one copy sold.
Youtube could get you some views but you need to make your money elsewhere. In the case above the additional revenues are from vimeo. Youtube's role is to hopefully get someone to book the event but you would be better off having good word of mouth than hoping someone sees your videos on youtube and lives in the same area and tries to book you for a corporate gig or faire.
Yes of course. But YouTube will still be responsible for most of that money: want a sponsor to pay you? You need to have enough viewers in the first place. Want donations? You need enough viewers for donations to flow in. Selling swag? You need enough viewers to know about your store.
Even your stage hypnotists: why people go see their shows in the first place? I bet many learned about those shows from YouTube. Also, stage performers are a bit different in that their main activity happens offline. If all your activity is online, you're back to YouTube being the only point of entry.
"If you want to make a living, you have to host on YouTube." If you want to short-circuit a lot of the work of audience development by having a recommendation algorithm point a firehose of eyeballs at your stuff, you have to host on YouTube or a comparable platform. However, that is a very different thing, and not a technicality at all! The business model of a YouTube creator is precarious and contingent, because their relationship with their audience is so thoroughly mediated by the platform that the platform's whims give and take away. ("Hit the bell so you don't miss a video") Essentially, there's a risk of taking the dependent-on-platform-aspect of this business model for granted in a way that obscures the alternatives people really do use these days. (E.g., I know we probably all hate those Wordpress sales funnel things, but from the perspective of "how do I make money from my content" they're genuinely an option we should be contrasting here)
Hence the solution being a break up; separate youtube-the-video-hosting-infra from youtube-the-recommendation-engine, allow market access to infra, allow competition on video discovery.