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> However, this is the sort of foundational service change that you simply don't do ten years into a lucrative partner program without a good reason. YouTube i

> However, this is the sort of foundational service change that you simply don't do ten years into a lucrative partner program without a good reason. YouTube is a monopoly. This is exactly the type of things monopolies do. Yes, there are other places to upload videos to watch on demand, but they’re much smaller, less well known, and just more niche. > "Changing the deal" in a very big way like this makes your customers - the people giving you video content with no up-front expectation of payment - very, very mad. As the saying goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” The creator is not a customer. The viewer is not a customer. The advertiser is the customer. Yes, you can poison the well and lose users, and thus alienate your customers, but again, YouTube is a monopoly. There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos.

tombert 6y ago
> There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos. There are plenty of alternatives in some sense; stuff like Bitchute exists and allows you to post whatever you want and it works well enough, but the reason I don't go on there is that it seems like a lot of the content is basically just neo-Nazi crap, which of course I don't really want to watch. And I suppose that's kind of the issues; YouTube has become so normalized that it's sort of impossible for alternative video sites to reach a similar scale, and the ones that do pop up inherently start appealing mostly to the fringe groups that aren't safe for YouTube.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  I think you’re analysis is basically correct. The only creators attracted to YouTube alternatives are those that have been forced off YouTube. You see the same thing with 8chan, Gab, and now Parler. Now niche doesn’t necessarily mean “cesspool of hate”, but that is a niche. For a while Vimeo seemed to be the place where I found embeds of art videos, so I attributed that niche to it, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Vimeo embed. YouTube has sucked all the air out of the room. To underline this point, I hadn’t even heard of Bitchute until now.
  - chii 6y ago
    Vimeo has sold itself as a video host, rather than a platform for attracting viewers. There are plenty of vimeo videos that are private and password protected.

tombert 6y ago

> There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos. There are plenty of alternatives in some sense; stuff like Bitchute exists and allows you to post whatever you want and it works well enough, but the reason I don't go on there is that it seems like a lot of the content is basically just neo-Nazi crap, which of course I don't really want to watch. And I suppose that's kind of the issues; YouTube has become so normalized that it's sort of impossible for alternative video sites to reach a similar scale, and the ones that do pop up inherently start appealing mostly to the fringe groups that aren't safe for YouTube.

jonathankoren 6y ago
I think you’re analysis is basically correct. The only creators attracted to YouTube alternatives are those that have been forced off YouTube. You see the same thing with 8chan, Gab, and now Parler. Now niche doesn’t necessarily mean “cesspool of hate”, but that is a niche. For a while Vimeo seemed to be the place where I found embeds of art videos, so I attributed that niche to it, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Vimeo embed. YouTube has sucked all the air out of the room. To underline this point, I hadn’t even heard of Bitchute until now.
- chii 6y ago
  Vimeo has sold itself as a video host, rather than a platform for attracting viewers. There are plenty of vimeo videos that are private and password protected.