People have tons of alternatives. The problem is that ad subsidies pay more than most viewers are willing to pay after generations of internet users have been conditioned to think of content as free.
1.) The discovery associated with YouTube and
2.) In addition to being convenient, you don't need to pay to host on YouTube. It would be pretty trivial for people to host their own content--much of which is never going to pay anything to speak of in ads. But then they'd have to pay for the hosting.
I'm not sure what the best way to go about it is, but I know that advertiser and corporate pressure being the only thing that matters is not working (see: dislike count removal). I would not be surprised that if YouTube continues to be unable to regulate itself we'll see governments stepping in and regulating it for them.
Unfortunately that all seems to be proprietary money making territory right now.
The other is harder: some ISPs outright blocked or throttled P2P protocols entirely (much to the annoyance of, say, Linux users torrenting ISOs) and most others will have some mechanism to respond to copyright claims. The latter is really hard for a YouTube competitor if it allows anyone to upload content — if the network attempts to auto-mirror content, you are potentially at risk if someone uploads something illegal; if it doesn't, only the most popular public content will be well-replicated.
It's not the users' problem per se (unless they get aggressively pushed out but then they go to alternatives so that company still doesn't make profit out of them).
Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have.
They only have themselves to blame.
> Nobody has been "conditioned" to think anything. … > Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have.
That was in fact my point: since the mid-to-late 90s, Internet users have become accustomed to thinking that they pay for internet connectivity but that most of the content they view will be free either because it's been subsidized by investors or advertisers. There are exceptions but they generally tend to be either connected to the physical world or a handful of areas like commercial movies or gaming where the major rightsholders were largely successful at preventing people from getting used to free content.
That puts you in exactly the dynamic I described: very few people think that YouTube-level content is something they pay for but their expectations are set by the kind of resources that billions of ad profits can support.