You spend too much time in tech and you get blinders and literally start to think that nothing else exists. Most people still get their information from television and, believe it or not, radio.
YouTube just makes video hosting easy. You have a freedom of speech, not a freedom to a guaranteed audience.
Have you ever actually seen someone in a public square going on a rant? They are often lucky if they reach a few people.
As far as I'm aware, I can't upload videos to CNN. I'm certainly aware that other sources of video exist; I don't even use YouTube much myself.
I'm actually sympathetic to your overall argument especially when complaints focus on the difficulty of monetizing video outside of YouTube. But it's at least worth discussing what it means when a private company has outsized control over certain types of information sharing.
When YouTube started you could at least make the argument that uploading video was difficult, because in order for people to watch you had to convert it to VP6 and play it within Flash, but today everything supports MPEG4.
Monetizing video outside of YouTube also isn’t difficult. Sponsors are easy to get if you have high quality content. If you have trash content then yeah, it is hard to monetize. Which lets be real here—that’s what we are talking about.
People think they have a right to a free audience and a (cost free) revenue stream for uploading garbage content that is just marginally better than literally nothing at all. People seem to believe they have a right to an income for creating what is really just spam in video form. Honestly, I wish YouTube would just terminate the revenue sharing option entirely for non-partners. Let someone else deal with the garbage content and its associated drama.
Lets see who funds PragerU. From the Wiki:
>Much of the early funding for PragerU came from hydraulic fracturing billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.[2][4] Two members of the Wilks family are on PragerU's board.[2] The next-largest donor is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.[7][23] Other donors include the Morgan Family Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Donors Trust, and the Minnesota-based Sid and Carol Verdoorn Foundation, led by former C.H. Robinson CEO Sid Verdoorn.[23]
>As of 2018, the organization reportedly had a $10 million annual budget, of which it spent more than 40% on marketing.[2] In 2019, PragerU raised $22 million and expects to receive $25 million in 2020.[4][24] PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups.[25] It ranks among the 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.[25]
The lawsuit also talks about being demonetized because of advertiser preferences.
You can literally start with uploading .mp4 files on your site immediately. How many tens of billions have been spent on campaigns? There's so much money sloshing about just in the immediate vicinity of the political agenda driven folks complaining but somehow no one can throw source code on GitHub of Reddit and clones onto a server and buy a domain for a few bucks, or set up a video sharing site with all the commercial tools available, and advertise them.
There's at least some merit in an argument that YouTube is so dominant in user-uploaded video that, absent a big budget and/or notability to drive viewers elsewhere, if your video is not on YouTube it might as well not exist as far as the broader world is concerned.