As someone with a small, yet significant amount of YouTube subscribers (~83,000 as of now), this is very true. My channel would cost me money if I decided to se

As someone with a small, yet significant amount of YouTube subscribers (~83,000 as of now), this is very true. My channel would cost me money if I decided to self publish. My videos average roughly 1-2gb at full viewing quality, excluding outliers,and right now my view count is a number higher than I'd be able to pay for. Even if we assumed I had a server with unlimited SSD and connection capacity, egress would be a problem for me. Instead, YouTube pays a small but significant portion of my earnings to me every month and they handle all of the infrastructure for me, which they do a fantastic job of. I've never had a video become unavailable due to downtime or unintentional social media denial of service, after ~4 years of using the service. Granted, I do get strikes fairly often which does complicate things, and some videos do get demonetized with little to no recourse, but the convenience and reach outweigh that frustration for me.