If I were thinking about trying this, I wouldn't bother trying to appeal to top creators, especially not at first. No matter how much VC you throw at the proble

If I were thinking about trying this, I wouldn't bother trying to appeal to top creators, especially not at first. No matter how much VC you throw at the problem, you'll burn through all of it before you even begin to make a dent. It's also been tried before and failed. It's been discussed elsewhere in this thread that a lot of the appeal of YouTube is the small-to-mid-size creators. You may not even need to pay more than YouTube is paying in the general case to make it interesting - just offer better terms. Like a guaranteed rate per view and/or per view minute, along with a promise that all of your subscribers will actually be notified when you post new videos. You wouldn't require creators to stop cross-posting to YouTube as well, but you could pay a modest bonus for each platform-exclusive they post, or pay for timed exclusives with a call-out to your platform in the YouTube version. You would still need to pour billions into it to get anywhere though, and even then, it's not even clear if YouTube is actually profitable as an independent business currently.