YT is running the risk of its content creators organising themselves into an industry association with legal and financial teeth, and suing its profits into oblivion.

It was my understanding that YouTube isn't profitable; has there been any new data on this that I've missed? Lack of similar-sized competitors in the space would certainly indicate that the margins don't really stack up and you could make an argument that the aggressive foisting of their premium offering underscores that notion, but I don't know for sure. It'd be interesting to know more about operating a site of that nature at that scale but I don't suppose that sort of data will make it out any time soon!

There has been the ghost of this argument floating around for more than a decade at this point, based on the idea that Google pays for youtube bandwidth (due to peering, they don't).

If Google was losing money on youtube they wouldn't pay out billions a year to video creators in the face of zero competition.

If they aren't profitable now they can always become an increasingly large money sink.

On what grounds? I disagree with Youtube’s actions here, but no one is forcing them to publish on YT.

The competition to youtube is virtually nonexistent. If you're a medium or small content creator (which most youtube creators are), then instead of deciding to go to vimeo you might as well just file for unemployment benefits.

And the network effects of youtube will ensure that this continues to be the case. Content creators aren't organised, so a mass exodus won't happen.

So maybe the concept of a medium or small content creator isn't profitable in our current pop-capitalistic system; I guess you are suggesting changing this system, because at the moment this process repeats, what has happened to 1000s of businesses (most recently small farms) in the real world too. Still people elect the ones being paid for by the profiteers very reliably year after year

Youtube has a monopoly on the online video market. There are other ways to publish but not other ways to get viewers.

What will they sue YT for? The creators aren't employed by YT and therefore YT doesn't owe them a cent. Copyright law doesn't forbid over-blocking or demonetization and the new EU Copyright directive explicitly forbids under-blocking. The only thing those creators can do is leave YT and let it die from a lack of content. They don't have any legal or financial teeth at all.

How big a risk is that really? Exploiting the other side's inability to coordinate seems like a standard business trick these days. All they need to do is to pay attention and do some token changes to the product or ToS every now and then, disrupting any attempt of creators at organizing themselves. They can keep at it forever.

I have never found data on whether or not the YouTube legal entity is an independent thing while the add supplier is a separate entity they can happily say they make no money to take for their other legal exposures that YouTube generates. There's also the fun outcome that tomorrow YouTube is sunset the moment the creators start being properly organized because like you mention the jig would be up.

Definitely. One example is Twitch - It seems like Twitch is growing while YouTube Gaming is shrining [1].

The trick to find the niche and be 10x better than youtube for that niche and then expand from there.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/twitch-solidifies-its-lead...

What's the current consensus of LiveLeaks being the edgier alternative?

Recoding and hosting and transmitting video is so expensive that I can assure you no alternative will ever pop up.

>Recoding and hosting and transmitting video is so expensive that I can assure you Youtube does not exist

Many such platforms exist; starting a new one from scratch without monetization scale would be difficult, but certainly not impossible. The real expense when scaling would seem to me to be moderation of illegal content actually, since you have to pay people for that.

Hosting: I'm fairly sure many streaming solutions (HLS, MPEG-DASH?) work by having the client request chunks of content pre-rendered at specific bit rates. Ergo the actual chunks are static content.

IPFS does static content and Cloudflare does a free IPFS gateway.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/

https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/blob/master/examples/browser...

Recoding seems like a candidate for distributed computing, and a way for fans to support creators.

What about decentralized hosting by users on increasing fast fiber connections

BitChute?

Do you think that self hosting a video streaming server is going to be attainable for content creators? Simply setting up DNs is hard for the layman.

There's no technical reason someone couldn't put together a WordPress-for-Video system - or even add video to Wordpress. (Although that would almost certainly suck for performance reasons.)

The big problem is discovery. A lot of people are wondering about decentralised server networks with an open discovery/search system built on top.

That's a horrendously hard project for social as well as technical reasons. But it's badly needed to drag the web out of the corporate swamp it's currently drowning in.

I’d say the problem is less discovery as it is monetization.

The total bandwidth for one of these creators’ videos is not itself all that massive. Particularly if you are not live streaming, a few thousand dollars in hosting costs a year to get 100TB/mo dedicated servers in a couple datacenters.

But once you have the servers humming and serving a few million views a month, whose ads are you running alongside your content?

Patreon has proved people are willing to pay for content. We just need an easier way to do it.

Patron is fractions of a percent of the GDP of YouTube’s content creator payout, and patron works for only a fraction of creators. It’s not even a comparison.

I have worked on a video streaming service[1] and I also worked for a company that did sell ad space on their own and with this background I can tell you that I do believe that it should be possible for him to set up his own video distribution site. You are right that he probably does not have the technical expertise to build it himself, but he makes about 1 Million Euro a Year. He probably has enough cash on hand to hire a team that can.

[1] Although a kind of specialized one with a lot simpler scaling characteristics compared to a YouTube replacement.