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Comment by phplovesong | Hacker News Reader

Youtube is the real monopoly. Creators are also slaves, as they cant monetize elsewhere, and also they cant let their users download their own content. And the icing on the cake is youtube is unbearable without an ad-blocker, and even with that youtube has started throttling ad-block users.

Its such a shithole, with no real replacement, sad state of affairs.

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why can't they monetize elsewhere?

Much, much, much smaller audience elsewhere.

And if the audiences got larger on a site, governments around the world would decide together to drag them into court and keep them there until they closed down or sold to Ellison's kid.

> Here's the problem (and it's not insurmountable): right now, there's no easy path towards sustainable content production when the audience for the content is 100x smaller, and the number of patrons/sponsors remains proportionally the same.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own...

So they're not paying YouTube but get free advertising for their product from it, which brings in 100x more users that elsewhere? Seems like an OK deal.

Some do, and those who are able to make the move to patronage or subscriber monetization seem much happier for it. But that's most viable for creators who have already built up a viable customer base, which usually started on YouTube. It's much harder if you start out somewhere else.

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