I wonder if this will be the undoing of YT. If large content creators start inserting segments saying, "I can't show the clip here, but if you go to my vimeo channel <link at top>, you can see the full review." That will offer people a segue off of YT.
That doesn't surprise me at all. I was shocked when they allowed YouTube channels to promote their Twitch streams a few years back; that must have been to gauge interest in the YouTube streaming product they hadn't made yet.
But what I do know is that about half of the YouTube channels I follow have already started putting videos up on other services -- they're eager to get out of the YouTube ecosystem. And I'm eager to follow them.
Some of the video essay YTers have done this already with Nebula[1], some of the gaming YTers have done this with DLive[2]... So I think it's pretty fair to say people are on the same wavelength as you, whether or not it's economically viable for them to jump ship is still to be determined.
Just because they take a long time to fall down doesn't mean they won't, though. That and they aren't really offering anything that no one else can (besides unlimited capacity, maybe?)
If DuckDuckGo's any indication then I'm holding out hope for new challengers.
Youtube has had loads of issues these past few years. I've seen countless youtubers say this is the final straw, they're ready to leave, Youtube's days are numbered, etc.
They always come back within a few days.
So long as 99% of users stay there, creators will stay there. If creators leave, that leaves a gap that'll quickly be filled by another creator. Youtube needs to do something that makes the viewers absolutely give up, and that's when migration will happen. I can't really imagine anything that'd do that except requiring paid accounts to view any content.
Alternatively, if some competitor comes along, has all the same content Youtube has, and offers better payments for creators without caving in to every single copyright claim, that'd draw people in like nothing else. But that's seemingly impossible now that the web isn't a wild west anymore.
In general, this possibility has been back-stopped by lack of alternatives. The companies in question have enough money to throw around to buy up alternatives that threaten to become as big as YT without the technical clout to implement the same kind of fingerprinting YT did. Blip (my personal favorite that seemed to be attracting reviewers when ContentID went live) met this fate.
YT is about the only player in the market that the MPAA can't scrounge enough pocket change to meet the price of, but they don't have to because it plays ball with their demands.
I thought Vimeo was aimed more at artistic videos, not stuff like reviews/blogs, most of the stuff that gets dumped on YT wouldn't be allowed on Vimeo. I see more creators making free videos then asking for Patreon donations rather than fighting the awful YTDMCA
I really don't think Google even wants YouTube. I think they'd be more than happy to buy the personal data of customers from a competitor. I think their problem is that no one wants to compete because
it costs unreal amounts of money to store the amount of data that YouTube does, let alone the legal fees they must swallow each year. At this point, I imagine that they simply take the anti-consumer choice whenever a dilemma comes up in the hopes that it might finally be the bullet to put them out of their money-losing misery.
1. It's the second largest search engine in the world, and likely the GO TO search engine for any DIY / Howto type topic. Keeping control of this keeps them in control of search field.
2. It's a massive platform for adsense. Having a single stop for advertisers on both the web and on youtube helps keep google ahead of it's competitors in advertising
3. The unspoken advantage it gives google in the world of machine language and AI. Endless natural language data in every language you can imagine, facial recognition, etc etc.
Oh they do. What you're sensing is Google's lack of any kind of respect or care for their content creators or customers. You'll see this across every product they offer. Google develops systems that suits themselves, puts pressure on the rest of the internet so that nobody can compete, then they stagnate and sometimes fail leaving no real alternative.
Does Google care when their products fail? No, they just move on to the next data vacuum one of their developers designed or that they acquired.
