Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.
If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.
Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.
The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
I’m talking about those who have already gotten big, like PewDiePie. Not the dude who just started a channel last week and has nothing to do shit with.
non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The lift of running your own platform is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to creating your own video hosting platform.
rebelrbl@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
It’s not that challenging with a partner to help manage infrastructure which even at his scale is not going to cost an obscene amount of money.
meyotch@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Websites work very well and are scalable af. A plugged in person with a track record like that could go Web 2.0 and probably net more.
non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You are correct. Websites, the stack to supply video encoding, even scalability is a solved problem.
The hard work isn’t technical, it’s getting people onto your platform in the first place (marketing), getting people to continue using your platform (retention) and the perennial problems of SaaS evolving with other SaaS platforms (how many dev hours are you willing to eat trying to keep up with the Joneses?).
SaaS, and in this case, SaaS offering content, is a losing game. You will either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break. How much of any of those you are willing to take a firehose of is the question.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
YouTube still offers them a service in directing them new viewers. The big creators all lose viewers but YouTube funnels replacement views faster than they lose. They could host their own videos but they are gonna see very little growth without Google either in search or with YouTube as they start to lose the base that followed them.
They also won’t be able to negotiate as good as rates for pre-rolls or in video sponsorships as if they were on YouTube.
The only real alternative would be to band together like the creators that are a part of nebula are doing. Hosting on peertube really isn’t an option unless you are independently supported and you are doing it as a passion project and don’t care about audience growth or retention.
dmtalon@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
Still think building their own site with apps I can throw on my devices is pretty involved.